Kafka and Russian Experimental Fiction in the Thaw, 1956-1965 Author(s): Edith W.

Clowes Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 149-165 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3733158 Accessed: 11/04/2010 11:49
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KAFKA AND RUSSIAN EXPERIMENTAL FICTION IN

THE THAW,
I956-1965

... in the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up. (Kafka, TheTrial) of since about Russian the writers and critics have I987, glasnost', During period in a survival of discussion about the Russian literature, engaged wide-ranging long petrified by the topical and stylistic demands of socialist realism. Fresh departures, it is hoped, will come from other non-realist and non-socialist orientations to art: for example, twentieth-century 'modernist' experimental fiction, much of which is only now being published for the first time in Russia.1 There is a strange blindness about current historical perspectives, especially for a time that has allegedly been devoted to the honest, full retelling of Soviet history. Russian critics of the late 98os display a remarkable ignorance about the literary process during last burst of creative innovation a quarter of a century ago, during the Thaw years from 1956 to I965. Somewhat disingenuously, they pass over in silence the very real and vital experimental literary practice that emerged in the underground and its strong affinity for Western modernist precedent.2 On the other hand, newly published works by Zamiatin, Kafka, or Joyce, for example, are often perceived as old, canonized 'classics' of modernism, if such an oxymoron is permissible. At the same time, they are stylistically so remote from customary literary practice that many readers find it hard to imagine a creative and original aesthetic response to them. Given the creative anxiety of recent years and the seeming ignorance about countercultural trends in the previous generation, an account of the reception and appropriation of Western modernism in the post-Stalin decades is a timely corrective.3 This essay treats one aspect of this creative reception, the impact of Kafka's euvre, and particularly The Trial, on three works that expose what I shall call the 'psychosis of guilt' at the heart of Stalinist totalitarianism. I have in mind Andrei Siniavskii's Tyiia ('Thou and I', I959, first published in the USSR in 1989), Iulii Daniel"s Iskuplenie ('Redemption', 1964, first published in the USSR in 1988), and Boris Iampol'skii's Moskovskaiaulitsa ('Moscow Street', mid- 1960s, first published in

to the longoverdue collection of worksby AndreiSiniavskii and Iulii writtentheforeword mostrecently i Danielia, i nakazanie ed. by L. S. Eremina(Moscow: ili prestuplenie Daniel', Tsena metafory Siniavskogo Kniga, 1989). 3 Current her workincludesEmilyTall'sstudiesof theRussian ofJames Joyce,in particular reception Helena articlein Slavic Review, Johnson'sworkon Nabokovand SashaSokolov; 49 (I990); D. Barton workon Tat'ianaTolstaia. Goscilo's

obozrenie (I989:3), 24-27 (p. 25); Viktor nekotorykh sochinenii pisatelia A. G. Bitova', Literaturnoe Erofeev, 'Pominki po sovetskoi literature', Literaturnaia gazeta,4July I990, p. 8. 2 One exception is GalinaBelaia,who has worked to revivethe legacyof the I920S and has tirelessly

1 V. 0. Ksepma, "'Po tu storonulobnoi stenki":Konspektneproiznesennogo dialogapo povodu

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KafkaandRussian'Thaw'Fiction

1988).4 In addressing itself to the psychological patterns informing Stalinist ideology, this art also explodes the authoritarian 'command' relationships central to socialist realism, that is, between censor and author, between author/narrator and protagonist, and between work and reader, and reasserts a long-lost aesthetic practice of literature as playful subversion.5 It can be argued that there is a longstanding pattern of suspicion and curiosity in the Russian reception of Western literary movements involving aesthetic experimentation and ideological scepticism. Thus, the reception of Western modernist trends in the Soviet Union of the late I95os bears a distant resemblance to the response to Western 'decadent' and early modernist works in late nineteenthcentury Russia. In both periods the literary world was dominated by ideologues bent on forcing art to serve narrowly defined social and political goals. In the late I88os, as in the I950s, it was not acceptable to renounce one's social duty as 'engaged' writer and to turn one's attention to other aesthetic or philosophical matters. It took courageous young literary critics working independently to initiate change: in I892, for example, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii paid out of his own pocket for the publication of his landmark essay attacking the non-aesthetic standards of civic art, 'On the Reasons for Decadence and on New Departures in Contemporary Russian Literature', and was made to suffer the rage of populist critics. Andrei Siniavskii, much more courageously, risked a prestigious career in literary criticism at the Institute of World Literature and sent his essay, 'Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm'? ('What is Socialist Realism?'), abroad in I959, only eventually to be dismissed, tried, and imprisoned for his efforts. In both periods, although official anti-Western feeling ran quite high and the censorship treated innovative 'Western' trends harshly, the tide was slowly turning in favour of greater experimentation in the arts. What seems less clear in the Thaw period is the continuation of what is by now a pattern of truly original, peculiarly 'Russian' appropriations of Western literary movements, so original as to produce a strong counter-influence on Western literature. While this pattern undoubtedly holds for Russian 'realism' of the I86os and I87os as well as modernist literature of the I9Ios and I920s, it remains to be seen what impact post-Stalinist experimental prose can have either on current Russian fiction or on the Western literary process. What does give some grounds for hope is the discovery during the last two or three years of very fine writing 'from the drawer' dating from the I96os, such as Iampol'skii's novel. Another promising
4 In the following discussion I have opted to use Daniel's real name throughout rather than his pseudonym 'Nikolai Arzhak', but to use Siniavskii's pseudonym, Abram Terts, when I am discussing Siniavskii's fiction. The reason is that Terts is more than a disguise meant to protect the real author from persecution. It carries with it a genuine literary persona, more ideologically irreverent and stylistically radical than the personality of the literary critic, Andrei Siniavskii. Terts is an integral part of the writer's self-concept as an experimentalist. For more on the significance of the pseudonym, Terts, see Donald andHistory:Theoretical Fanger, 'Conflicting Imperatives in the Model of the Russian Writer', in Literature andRussianCaseStudies,ed. by G. S. Morson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), Problems
pp. I I -24.

5 Other important creative appropriations of Kafka's art include Andrei Bitov's diary-confession, Zapiskiiz-za ugla ('Notes from around the Corner'), written about 1963, published I989; the Strugatskii brothers' science fantasy, Ulitkanasklone ('The ('The Snail on the Slope'), 1968;Boris Vakhtin's Dublenka Sheepskin Coat'), I979. For two discussions of Kafka's critical reception during the Soviet Thaw, see 35 (1976), Emily Tall, 'Who's Afraid of Franz Kafka?Kafka Criticism in the Soviet Union', SlavicReview, 484-503, and my own 'Kafka and the Modernism-Realism Debate in Literary Criticism of the Thaw', in ed. by P. I. Barta and U. Goebel, Studies in Russian and Foundations TheEuropean of RussianModernism, German, 4 (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ont., and Lampeter: Mellen Press, 199I), pp. 295-325.

EDITH W. CLOWES

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development is the recent publication of some ideologically subversive writing formerly relegated to the semi-oblivion of samizdat(underground publishing) or tamizdat (publishing abroad), such as Terts's and Daniel"s absurdist utopian and Govorit Moskva ('Moscow Speaking'). It is worth parodies, respectively, Liubimov gazetaSiniavskii offered the opinion noting that in a recent interview in Literaturnaia that literary experimentation of the last few years (for example, stories by Tolstaia, Narbikova, Popov) is a great deal more promising than that of his own day.6 It is difficult to show a history of reception in a 'closed' cultural context where the works being read and assimilated are 'dangerous': that is, where they represent a serious challenge to aesthetic views and social values so predominant that they tolerate no opposition whatsoever. So it was, for example, for Nietzsche's reception in the early I89os and for Kafka's reception in the I950S. To complicate matters, in both situations the reception of foreign writers was overshadowed by a very powerful Russian presence, that of Dostoevskii, whose art had such a vital impact on Western pre-modernist and modernist writing. A third problem in analysing Kafka's reception in post-Stalinist literary culture is social and ideological in nature and involves differentiating characteristics of Kafka's phantasmagoric world from the equally fantastic world of Stalinism and the Stalinist state with its tactics of spying, duplicity, and terror. All three texts examined here show more thanjust an affinityfor Kafka. Character types, psychological conditions, human relationships, and narrative logic in these works suggest a concrete modelling of the Stalinist experience on Kafka's art, and particularly on The Trial, which was well known among Moscow intellectuals. Iampol'skii's protagonist is given a very reductive name, K., clearly borrowed from Joseph K., the name of Kafka's protagonist in his two main anti-novels, The Trial and The Castle. But beyond the textual evidence, there is scant biographical information about these three authors' personal responses to Kafka. Much more has been written about Siniavskii than about the other two writers taken together, and there exists a certain amount of evidence about his reading habits. The first open suggestion of a link between Siniavskii and Kafka came during his and Daniel"s trial in I966. In a ludicrous attack on Siniavskii, entitled 'The Descendants of Smerdiakov', the so-called critic, Z. Kedrina, accused the writer of treacherous, anti-Soviet writing and thinking; as evidence she pointed out that Siniavskii 'stole' elements of Kafka's phantasmagoric art for his own stories.7 The prosecution used this sort of 'literary critical' discussion as evidence on its behalf. Another point of view on Siniavskii's relationship to Kafka came from Helene Zamojska, Siniavskii's long-time friend from his student days, who denied that Siniavskii knew or read Kafka.8 Precisely during which years is not indicated, but it is possible that Zamojska could have had in mind his years at Moscow University in the late 1940s. Siniavskii may well have first heard of and read Kafka during the mid- I950S when he became a senior researcherat the Institute of World Literature,which at the time was headed by Boris Suchkov, a Germanist and one of the first Soviet Kafka critics.9
6

7 Belaia
p. 112.

T. Putrenko, 'Pushkin- nash smeiushchiisia genii', Literaturnaia gazeta,8 August 1990, p. 7. i Iu. Danielia, ed. by Aleksandr Ginzburg (Frankfurt:Posev, I967), knigapo deluA. Siniavskogo

8 Richard Lourie, Lettersto theFuture:An Approach to Siniavsky-Tertz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 9 Kenneth Hughes, 'Introduction', in FranzKafka:An Anthology ed. by K. Hughes of MarxistCriticism,
98 ), pp. xiii-xxvlii.

Press, 1975), p. 19.

(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England,

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Here he enjoyed contact with French students and had relatively easy access to all sorts of forbidden materials (Lourie, p. I6). In addition, in 1956 he became acquainted with Boris Pasternak, who, although he had no interest at all in Kafka, did own some of his works. Still stronger evidence of Siniavskii's familiarity with Kafka's art came in a letter in defence of Siniavskii from February 1966, written by the art historian, Il'ia Golomshtok, to the Supreme Court of the Russian Republic. Golomshtok and Siniavskii had previously collaborated on a book on Pablo Picasso, which suggests that Siniavskii must have had considerable knowledge of European modernism, not only in literature but in other media as well. In his letter Golomshtok characterized Siniavskii as a 'mature author' for whom it would be patently ridiculous to do what Kedrina suggested: to 'steal' pieces of another writer's work (Ginzburg, p. I58). Golomshtok went on to say that Siniavskii did share with Kafka an interest in similar issues concerning contemporary culture. Insisting that Siniavskii's work grapples with real moral, social, and political issues, in the truest spirit of Marxism, Golomshtok did acknowledge some influence of the 'tragic world of Kafka' in his friend's art (Ginzburg, p. I60). Thus, it seems quite likely indeed that the Kafkaesque quality of some of Siniavskii's early works could well be grounded in an appropriation of Kafka's works. Information on the reading habits of Daniel' and Iampol'skii is all but nonexistent. Daniel"s interest in Kafka may have originated in his close friendship with Siniavskii. Otherwise, no more can be said than that the two writers' creative and appropriations of Kafka are entirely plausible, since their two works, Iskuplenie Moskovskaia ulitsa,were both written in the ambience of the mid- 96os, when quite a lot was appearing in the press about Kafka and modernism in general.10At the heart of the Moscow literary intelligentsia, both writers certainly read and discussed works, both official and underground, of current interest. It is unthinkable that they would not have read the Kafka stories, 'In the Penal Colony' and 'The Metain 1964, and the volume of Kafka literatura morphosis', that appeared in Inostrannaia in The works, featuring Trial,published I965. ulitsa are part of a much larger Although Tyi ia, Iskuplenie,and Moskovskaia 'literature of guilt' that has appeared in the post-Stalinist period, they clearly stand apart from the mass of post-Stalinist literature in their sophistication, their lively spirit of experimentation, their boldness of irony, as well as their determination to probe the psychological and epistemological grounds of Stalinist myth. When compared to popular 'critical realist' works that deal with the problem of guilt, such as Lidiia Chukovskaia's SofiiaPetrovna or Anatolii Rybakov's Deti Arbata('Children of the Arbat'), it becomes starkly apparent that they belong to a different literary heritage. Characters in these realist works are simple and unreflective, often very similar to positive heroes of socialist realism. Their attitudes toward guilt mirror assumptions operative in the Stalinist terror that 'everyone is guilty but me', and 'if someone is arrested, then he must be guilty'. The approach to the problem of guilt in the three works treated here focuses more on the gap between accusation and guilty act, the psychology of paranoia and persecution, and finally, the fictionalization of guilt: that is, the transposition of the historical, social phenomenon of accusation, trial, and punishment to the realm of fictional 'script' conceived by an author (Stalin) who is wholly implicated in his protagonist's guilt. Such issues, as they are
10 A.

Latynina, 'Preodolenie strakha', Literaturnaia gazeta, i April 988, p. 4.

EDITH W. CLOWES

I53

handled in these works, differ also from Dostoevskii's treatment of them in Crime and Punishment and TheBrothers Dostoevskii is chiefly concernedwith the moral Karamazov. relationship between idea and action. In this 'Kafkaesque'fiction, not only is there no idea, but there is no known act. What remains is only a life under persistent but vague accusation, a consciousness of being irredeemably guilty: in short, a psychological condition of living 'after the Fall'.11 In general terms there is a great deal that brings Terts's, Daniel"s, and Iampol'skii's works close to Kafka's both in style and in spirit. The protagonists all lack identifying psychological traits. They all adhere in some measure to the apt description of Kafka's characters given by the Soviet Germanist, Lev Kopelev: they are 'without biographies, without individual traits, they have no past and indeed have nothing at all beyond the limits of the fantastic plot structureerected around them'.12 All experience a severe disjunction of moral sense, reason, and emotional impulse. The plots of these works consist of a series of events tied by the broken logic of a nightmare and leading to some anti-climax.13 Narrative consciousness is exceedingly close, and sometimes crosses over, to that of the protagonist. Perception of both time and space is compressed in the extreme. All three worksare set in the narrowconfines of city streets and small, darkrooms. If there is ever a view out to another time or place, it is either in a dream or in some memory, the ontological status of which is as suspect as that of the main narrative. In Terts's story, Ty i ia, guilt is put in terms of a struggle between an omniscient
author/narrator, 'I', and his protagonist, known variably as 'you', 'he', and more rarely as 'Nikolai Vasil'evich'. The protagonist's enduring but unfocused sense of persecution and guilt is brought about, as it happens, by a literary game foisted by the author on his character. This rather voyeuristic author derives enjoyment from scrutinizing the internal life of his protagonist, and the protagonist, in turn, suffers from the uneasy feeling that someone unseen is watching and judging him. Caught within the bounds of the fictive world, the protagonist can rationalize his sense of persecution only by suspecting his boss, Graube, of trying to make him feel guilty and to catch him at being 'disloyal' to the state. Joseph K.'s metaphysical/bureaucratic struggle for justice is implicitly supplanted by a highly unsettling cat-and-mouse game situated in an absurd world, devoid ofjustice and manipulated by an author/ narrator wholly lacking in moral principle.14 This story is full of literary allusions, all of which have their place and help to define the otherwise confusing movement of the story. The critic Mikhailo Mikhailov has
11Ronald Gray draws a similar parallel between Kafka's treatment of the psychology of guilt and Kierkegaard's notion of'infinite guilt' (FranzKajka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I973), p. I05). 12 Lev Kopelev, 'U propasti odinochestva. F. Kafka i osobennosti sovremennogo sub"ektivizma',Serdtse sleva(Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1960), pp. I68-89 (p. 173). vsegda 13 This Literature ofArt: KajkaandModern (New point is well developed in Martin Greenberg, TheTerror York: Basic Books, I963). 14 Idris Parry makes the point that Kafka interpretations in Eastern Europe and Russia differ substantially from Western approaches to Kafka. While Eastern readers focus on the social and political implications of his work and tend to identify the inscrutable other with bureaucratic authority, Western readers concentrate on its metaphysical and psychological aspects. See Idris Parry, 'Kafka, Gogol and Nathanael West', in Kajka,ed. by R. Gray (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 85-90. The point is certainly well supported in such excellent Soviet discussions of Kafka as V. Dneprov's 'Metaforicheskii roman Frantsa Kafki', in Ideivremeni iformyvremeni (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', I980), pp.432-86.

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pointed to a possible affinity between Tyi ia and Buber's 'I and Thou'.15 This view seems too simple. The relationship between the two consciousnesses represented by the shifting pronouns, 'I', 'you', and 'he', is much more confused and hostile than Buber's. Terts does begin his story with a quotation from Genesis 32.24 which refers toJacob's nocturnal struggle with an unseen force, God. At dawn God calls a truce and appoints Jacob to lead the nation of Israel. This reference to God can only be seen as ironic: there is no such heroic outcome in Tyi ia. The opponents eventually collapse into much the same identity. At the end the author 'becomes' his protagonist, when the librarian Lida (who in this world without real relationships is the only person to try to develop ties to the protagonist) mistakes him for the protagonist, calling him by the same name she uses for the protagonist, Nikolai Vasil'evich. Rather than compare this author/narrator to Buber's metaphysical, relatively unalienated relationship of self with other, it is more appropriate to relate him to the fraudulent narrators of the French anti-novel of Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet, where the notion of narrative 'omniscience' is called into question as voyeurism. Through his author/narrator Terts also certainly alludes to Stalin who perpetrated the fraud of omniscience, of claiming to see everyone and know everything in order ultimately to gain omnipotence. This allusion is reinforcedwhen Lida points out to the author that he has red hair (as Stalin did), a fact which the narrator self-consciously denies: 'I did not consider it necessary to expand upon this theme, dangerous for all of us, but said directly that I could not endure red-haired In his treatment of the protagonist in his relationships with his boss (in the world created in the narrative) and with the author/narrator (in the metafictional sphere of aesthetic play) Terts would appear to respond to Joseph K.'s search for selfjustification and justice in TheTrial.The parallels are concrete and significant from the very start and are upheld throughout the story. Tyi ia opens at a dinner arranged by the protagonist's boss, Graube, allegedly to celebrate Graube's wedding anniversary. Prominent among the guests are a pair of spies, Lobzikov and Polianskii, who, as the protagonist believes, are out to arrest him. In several ways, they parallel Franz and Willem, the two agents in TheTrial.Both pairs are disguised, Franz and Willem as travellers and Lobzikov and Polianskii as guests at a dinner. Both pairs behave like pigs, Franz and Willem gobbling upJoseph K.'s breakfastand Lobzikov and Polianskii grabbing the greasy duck dinner with their hands and wolfing it down. The character with whom the protagonist becomes most intimate, the librarian Lida, and the only character he believes is not a spy, bears a strong resemblance to Kafkaesque female characters, for example, the nameless woman in the courtroom in Chapter 5 of The Trialor the nurse Leni who cares for the lawyer Huld, who are typically seductive, promiscuous, and subservient, but somehow knowing and helpful (Terts, p. 48). Lida similarly seems trustworthy to the protagonist, and likewise she becomes the protagonist's shield against the attacks of his tormentors. He thinks of her as being seductive. She is strongly inclined towards sexual encounters and not very discriminating (Terts, p. 59).
15 Mikhailo Mikhailov, AbramTertsili begstvo o tvorchestve iz retorty: (Frankfurt:Posev, 1969), Siniavskogo p. I8. 16 Abram Tertsa York: Fantasticheskii mirAbrama Terts, (New Inter-Language LiteraryAssociates, 1967), p. 59 (my emphasis).

people.'16

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The protagonist himself is reminiscent of Joseph K. Like his literary predecessor, he is a bachelor, living alone in a single room, fastidious in his dress, and interested in women as protection from the powers that be, although typically only at a safe distance. And like Joseph K., he is suspicious, unsure of his alleged crime, but sure of his innocence. Both characters try to outwit and to manipulate those around them, and ultimately try to influence the outcome of their fate. This protagonist shares another important trait with Joseph K.: an incommensurability of conscious, controlled, rational self-knowledge and subconscious, violent impulse. Both characters engage in sudden and brutal assault, whether on women (Joseph K. attacks Fraulein Biirstner and becomes unreasonably angry at Frau Grubach) or on a superior (Terts's protagonist attacks his boss Graube). Occasionally, in both cases, such assaults are in self-defence, but more often they are an attempt to assert a fragile sense of authority. In addition, both characters end their lives equally violently, Joseph K. with a knife in his heart and Terts's protagonist as a suicide, slitting his throat with a razor. If Joseph K. is confounded by an inscrutable, metaphysical/bureaucratic other that he can never see or confront, and that, as he learns at the end of The Trial, is entirely indifferent to the outcome of his 'case', then the protagonist of Tyi ia must also deal with an other who, though invisible to him, is visible to the reader and thus of more doubtful authenticity. The protagonist is continually made to feel guilty and persecuted by a force unknown to him, which is revealed to the reader as an unscrupulous, ill-willed author caught in a power struggle with his protagonist and seeking total domination over him (Terts, p. 47). With this tactic Terts leaves in place the illogicality and malaise of Kafka's world of accusation and guilt but replaces metaphysical anxiety with ironic humour. While Kafka refuses to define the contours of the 'judge', the accuser, but suggests at the end its metaphysical character, Terts clearly defines his 'judge' as a kind of Stalinist, omniscient fraud of an author who tries to trap his characters in provocations. Early in the story Terts uses an extended pun with the word 'utka'or 'duck' to give a witty clue that his whole narrative construct is a fraud perpetrated by an irresponsible author on his characters. A 'duck' in Russian is the same as 'red herring' in English. Ducks are served at Graube's gala anniversary dinner, implying that the hosts 'pustiatutku'or are throwing out a red herring. Indeed, in addition to suspecting Lobzikov and Polianskii of being spies, the narrator is sure that Graube's 'wife' is not even a woman but a male boxer hired for the occasion to collar him when his disloyalty is revealed. When those assembled test the protagonist by talking about the scarcity of good food, the duck motif resurfaces. The protagonist is invited to agree (and thus show his disloyalty) that it is impossible to find ducks in any government stores, to which he replies, now alluding ironically to the second level of meaning of duck as 'red herring', that indeed ducks, or any fowl, can be found in any quantity in all stores. When he leaves, after reaffirming his loyalty and telling Graube that he sees through his trick, he again raises the subject of ducks, and red herrings, mentioning to Lida that 'they will find it more convenient to "ohh" and "ahh" over government ducks without me' (Terts, p. 51). The theme of provocation continues throughout on the level of the author's consciousness. The narrative world is revealed as completely artificial and 'inauthentic', to use Sarraute's term. For the protagonist, as for Joseph K., 'out of

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nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt [is] conjured up'.17 Terts's protagonist ends by paying with his 'sanity', whatever that may be in this deranged world of provocation and counter-provocation, and, like Joseph K., he finally pays with his life. Meanwhile, the author goes beyond voyeurism: he tries first to save his protagonist from suicide but then, seeing that he is powerless, denies all responsibility for him. He attempts then to return to his voyeurist pastime, thus revealing the poverty of his moral character as well as his creative skill. The landscape he re-creates at the end is precisely the absurdist one at the beginning, with the one difference that it is marred by a dead body.
Everything was the same. Snow was falling, and it was the very same part of the day. Two engineers - his former colleagues, Lobzikov and Polianskii - were playing Chopin on the piano. As before, four hundred women were giving birth to four hundred children at the same moment. Vera Ivanovna was putting a compress to Genrikh Ivanovich's black eye. A chestnut-haired woman was pulling her trousers on. Bending over a basin, a brunette was preparing for her meeting with Nikolai Vasil'evich who, as usual, was running tipsily through the cold. Nikolai Vasil'evich's corpse was lying in a locked room. Lida, like a night watchman, was pacing under his windows. (Terts, p. 63)

At the very end the author remarks, 'I am not sorry for your death, I am sorry that I can't forget you' (Terts, p. 63). This admission rings hollow, less a revelation of moral conscience than the regret of a child whose play has been spoiled. With the uncleansing laughter of Terts's wit, farce, and virtuoso aesthetic play, this story unmasks the emptiness of the fabricated (Stalinist) world of guilt and paranoia. As Terts challenged others to do in his essay, 'What is Socialist Realism?',
so he did here: he succeeded in 'being truthful with the help of absurd fantasy [nelepoi fantazii]' (Terts, p. 446). If Terts deals with Kafka's metaphysical question of guilt, reducing it to a kind of aesthetic sham perpetrated by an author on his characters, Daniel' in Iskuplenieuses some of the same metafictional devices to probe the social and psychological aspects of guilty conscience. His story stands out as a sharp critique of the intelligentsia during the Thaw years. In the heady atmosphere of amnesty for Stalin's prisoners and of cultural renewal, the intelligentsia, long the voice of moral conscience in Russian society, in particular, are forced to confront the question of their own culpability, and the extent to which they still harbour a Stalinist mentality. Now Feliks Chernov, a prisoner returning from years of hard labour, accuses the protagonist (and chief narrator), Viktor Volskii, of informing on him and thus causing his arrest and imprisonment. Viktor, who has always believed himself to have a clear conscience, searches his memory but can remember no such act. Meanwhile, Feliks uses his newly assumed status as high moral judge over Stalinist society to condemn Viktor to lifelong solitude, excommunicating him from society by informing all Viktor's friends and colleagues of his crime. One by one they abandon him. Viktor, in turn, tries out the various moral options open to him: silent dismissal of the allegations, confrontation with Feliks, and finally submission to Feliks's 'sentence' of isolation. Crazy from his overwhelming sense of guilt, the lack of tangible proof of his act, and his growing sense of isolation, Viktor makes a Raskol'nikov-like confession in the midst of a crowded concert hall. He rejects his appointed role as scapegoat for the
17 This translation is taken from Franz Kafka, TheTrial,trans. by W. and E. Muir (New York: Vintage, 1969), p. 186.

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rest of society and charges people with the idea that 'there is no differencewhether we are in prison or the prison is within us'. He concludes with the exhortation:'Do not run away from yourselves' (Daniel', p. 2 ). For these activities Viktor is arrested,and put into a mental hospital. Sedated with tranquilizers,he can hardly rememberwho he is or who it is who comes to visit him. His one goal becomes escape from the insane asylum to some distant place where he can regatherhis shattered sense of self. In this wish he ironically exchanges places with Feliks, who hasjust returnedfromthe remote reaches of the gulag system with a newly constructed sense of self and of moral purpose. Viktor finds a key suggestively like those for the locks on railroad cars, presumably used to transport prisoners eastward. The story that started with amnesty ends, thus, with a new form of imprisonment. Daniel"s story is really about a kind of guilt that has saturated all of educated society and which finds release and, he implies, a very poor resolution in punishing scapegoats such as Viktor. Viktor is no better and no worse than the rest of the intelligentsia, all of whom live life on the surface,askingno questions other than where the next intellectual fashion is to come from. The terrible moral dilemmas that resurfaceafter the amnesty are firmlyignored. In his introduction to the story Daniel' remarksthat the intelligentsia absorbed the songs, sayings, and traditionsoflife in the concentration camp only as a momentary distraction:'There was a special poignancy in the fact that a cosy chat about the Comedie Francaise was interrupted by the melancholy curses ofa camp survivor' (Daniel', p. 8). Its morallessons ignored, camp culture is quickly converted to grist for the belletristic mill: 'The crazy wolf howl, the lice-ridden prison undershirts, the sores - all were turned into literature' (Daniel', p.8). Viktor just happens to be the first one accused of deceiving a friend. Any of the others might have been similarly accused and possibly wrongly punished, for it becomes clear that there is no defence against such accusations. In the post-Stalinist era the Stalinist mentality persists. No one demands hard proof of guilt: just as in Stalinist times, if someone is accused, especially by someone with status and authority, then he must be guilty. The writer Igol'nikov mentions that all intellectuals feel the guilt of inaction, flippantly referring to the sense of social ineffectuality of populists in the late nineteenth century. What he and others fail to do, and what Daniel' tries to bring out, is to define the nature of guilt eating away at the contemporary intelligentsia. To achieve his goal, Daniel' draws on a variety of experimental techniques. At the outset his story seems to be written in a standardrealistvein. Its plot is historicallyand socially situated. Although the narrative is told in the first person, the narrator's version of things at the outset appears to reflectsocial events accurately. However, the story is told in an aesthetically much more self-conscious way than most Soviet 'realism' is. It is narrated by Viktor, whose point of view varies between being quite reliable and being wholly unreliable. Likewise, other short narratives interpolated into Viktor's story, such as Feliks's accusation, areof questionable reliability.Despite the purported realism of the narrative, it is always difficultto evaluate charactersand their utterances. Most important, throughout the text, 'realist' narrationis interrupted by shorter inserted sections that recast the events of the story in a variety of contexts. Here differentvoices speak, and social actuality, the superficial work-andplay world of the Moscow intelligentsia in Viktor's narrative,is called into question. It is through these sections that Daniel' reveals 'reality' as mere masquerade.

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The first insert is a dream inserted into the text in such a way that the reader at first mistakes it for first-level 'reality'. Viktor dreams that he is on an excursion boat with lots of other people. Everyone is talking at once and listening to no one. Unable even to hear the sound of his own voice, Viktor panics, thinking, 'We shall turn over if we can't hear each other' (Daniel', p. 9). He is obviously worried about the isolation of each person and especially his own isolation within the crowd, unable to make himself understood or to understand anyone else in this mass hysteria. Despite his dream's potential significance in illuminating the moral condition of his society, Viktor wakes up eager to forget his anxiety, welcoming the return to surface existence as a 'slow resurrectionfrom the dead' (Daniel', p. 9). The second insert is an allegory in which Good and Evil are playing chess. Good is in a hurry to win and claim its victory, and in its haste concedes to Evil many more games than it needs to. Playing easily and unhurriedly, Evil accepts the victories. The moral implication is that ill-considered, hasty decisions in the name of the good can often amount to doing evil. The mass ostracism of Viktor, it is implied, isjust one more proof that the Stalinist guilty conscience, the destructive need for victims in order to assert one's own goodness and rectitude, are alive and well in a traumatized society trying its hardest to ignore the effects of an evil past. In the third and fourth inserts the 'author', who is sometimes reminiscent of Terts's author/narrator, speaks up to ask the reader how he should save his protagonist. He reveals a certain overlapping of his consciousness with Viktor's. Denying that Viktor is really himself, he disowns him and condemns him as guilty (Daniel', p. I8). In the fourth inserted passage this authorial voice assumes a 'proper' position, traditional for the socialist realist author. In a monologue that sounds very much like one side of a cryptic telephone conversation without names and full of innuendo (perhaps with his censor?) he insists that hisjob is not to mix in the affairs of his characters but to evaluate them. Now he sounds more like a procurator who refuses to reconsider a guilty sentence. Having hastily condemned Viktor and thus shown himself to be no better than his other characters, he assumes a flippant tone much like that of the writer Igol'nikov. He answers the question as to who is guilty with the general, and irresponsible, truism operational in Stalinist times that everyone is guilty of something. This moralistic but deeply amoral 'author' then suggests that maybe Feliks should also be made to pay since, 'as everyone knows', there are plenty of provocateurs among the prisoners (Daniel', p. 20). Then, once again, he reaffirmshis condemnation of Viktor with the thought that 'if it turns out that he really is not guilty of this, then he is [certainly guilty] of Thus, as with Terts's story, the construct of guilt has an air ofinauthenticity about it. Just as the story is a literary construct, so the assignment of guilt is based on a fiction created by a fraudulent author who is neither disinterested in the best sense of the term nor concerned with the fate of his characters. At best he is indifferentin the way that people are who claim 'just to be doing their job' and thus disclaim all responsibility for their actions. By analogy, Stalinism, the system that played on this sense of guilt on a monumental scale, is also exposed as a fiction perpetrated by a fraud. Daniel"s story interplays subtly with two Kafka works, The Trial and The The similarity comes mainly in the protagonist, Viktor. As he develops, Judgement. Viktor corresponds closely to Kopelev's description of Kafka charactersas 'the most
something else' (Daniel', p. 20).

EDITH W. CLOWES

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isolated - hopelessly isolated - people', 'deprived of biographies, deprived of individual traits', without past and with 'nothing beyond the bounds of the fantastic plot structures that have been erected around them'. To begin with, Viktor, like everyone else, inhabits the surface of social life. Alone and a bachelor by choice, he holds his friends, and especially women, at arm's length. He believes he knows himself and his past, but as the story progresses, he is caught in the force field of unsubstantiated accusation and finds he has no biography and no reliable past. He cannot remember the events to which Feliks alludes. Since he lacks the determination to make Feliks prove his allegations with hard fact, he loses the battle of wills with his formerfriend. What is more, he comes to believe that the past, as he believed it to exist, has been an illusion seen through rose-coloured glasses. For example, he remembers the show trials and demonstrations of I937 and I938 as bright, gay events held in the best of bright, golden weather. Gradually what he has always believed to be his artistic 'talent' (he designs advertisements), he now realizes to be nothing. He has wasted his life illustrating misleading slogans. In the end as he sinks into drugged oblivion in the mental hospital, he has nothing, he even has to keep reminding himself that his name is Viktor Volskii. All he knows is that he wants to escape into isolation. Feliks has won. Margaret Dalton characterizes Viktor as a moral type very similar to Joseph K.: both 'had led a completely self-centered, unthinking existence, and [are] therefore brought to trial'.18 This evaluation, although largely accurate, does not address the moral problem of mass social trauma outlined above and assumes that it is only because Viktor and JosephK. are self-centred that they are tried. Indeed, all members of the Moscow intelligentsia, like most characters in The Trial, are self-centred, but very few are tried. The issue with Viktor seems rather to be some level of moral vulnerability and a willingness to be punished and, indeed, to 'punish' himself. These qualities make Viktor akin to Georg Bendemann in Kafka's The Here Georg's father, with whom he has lived and worked for years, Judgement. suddenly and violently breaks through surface familiarity to accuse him of egotism, falseness, and ingratitude. He goes on to condemn his son to death by drowning. Implausible and ridiculous as this sudden flare-up may seem, accusation is heaped on accusation, gaining weight and authority, with the result that Georg eventually loses all self-confidence, succumbs to terrible doubt, and ultimately is convinced of his own guilt. Similarly the authority of Feliks's convictions compels Viktor to believe in his own guilt, even if there is no concrete proofof a guilty act. Viktor loses the basis for a life on the surface of things, the belief that he is 'clean'. He loses confidence in his memory. His 'friends' help the process along. Although they profess to want to believe Viktor, it is left unsaid that they are unsure, and they soon drift away. Viktor, who is a far weaker personality than Feliks, is thus overcome by the power of suggestion that he should isolate himself. Like Georg who, at his father's command, runs out of the house and throws himself into the river, Viktor by the end wants only what Feliks has commanded: to be alone, far away from human society. Ultimately (and this question is intimated in Kafka's work) Daniel' asks about the source ofjustice and moral right. While Kafka questions the moral authority of bureaucratic/theocratic hierarchies, Daniel' probes the assumed moral superiority
18 Margaret Dalton, Andrei Siniavskii Writers andJuliiDaniel': TwoSoviet'Heretical' (Wurzburg:Jal-Verlag, I973), p. I65.

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of the victims of such systems. Do victims make able judges? Are people like Feliks justified in assigning guilt without firm proof,just because they have been to hell and back? It is certainly true that the moral authority of sufferersis considerable, at least in the context of this story, and they are perceived by the charactersas being the true judges of the Stalinist age. Certainly it seems clear that the artistic intelligentsia, themselves also survivors of Stalinism but also in part products of Stalinist thinking, have no moral stature. The worst of the lot, of course, is the 'author' who purports to sit in judgement over his characters. These people, like Viktor himself, ignore the moral issues and thus help to perpetuate the great 'fabricof guilt' that is eating away the community. Terts and Daniel' both consider the ways in which life after the Fall, the Stalinist age, has destroyed the moral integrity of the human psyche. The cloud of guilt, whether from Stalinist accusations of 'disloyalty' or post-Stalinist revelations of deceit, eats at everyone, destroying the possibility of new social health and, indeed, of constructive human relationships. Iampol'skii's novel, Moskovskaia ulitsa, considers survival during the Fall: that is, how one man, K., a literary scholar with a background as a war veteran, retains something like sanity, a sense of selfhood, a sense of the past, despite the spies that crowd him and the absurdities that deny meaning to his life. Despite its dark humour and cloying atmosphere, it is in a way the most hopeful of the three works. Everything about this novel is slow-moving, yet deliberate and intense. Although ulitsabears a close relationship to TheTrial in this and many other ways, Moskovskaia and a number of other works of modernist prose, it stands very much on its own as an original work, certainly among the best works of experimental prose of the postStalin era. The protagonist and narrator of the tale is K., an obvious allusion to Joseph K. Both characters are aware of some judgement hanging over them and wait from minute to minute for the end. By using first-personnarrative exclusively, Iampol'skii takes away all pretense to objectivity that Kafka may have had. While Kafka narrates TheTrialin the third person, his narratoris clearly insideJoseph K.'s consciousness. Although other people are permitted to tell their stories, no other narrative point of view is ever given. In Moskovskaia ulitsa, no one else is even his K. as he tell own tale: records to everything perceives it. Even less than permitted in TheTrialis another point of view allowed to intrude. Both K. and Joseph K. seem to be the victims of systematic persecution. Suchkov's comment on the ubiquity of evil in Kafka's world applies well here: The shadowy, sideof humannatureinevitably burstopen,in spiteof all wicked,andhorrible efforts andpretenses to concealits cold,corroding, insensible force.In Kafka it arouses hatred - this powerlying in wait untilit is time to ambushits victimin the darknighttime streets in people'shomes [... ] this forcefillinglife, and alleys of big cities, at crowdedcrossings, whereevil may hide itself,graduallyentwiningthe humansoul, [.. ] lurkingeverywhere man.19 strivingto captureand strangle K. imagines the file that is kept on him at the appropriate office, and awaits the moment when its contents will be used to ruin him. He is always aware of spies, their eyes watching his every movement, even through walls. He is sure that it is they who call his number on the telephone, only to hang up after a moment of silence when he picks up the receiver. The concierge of the communal apartment in which he lives,
19 Boris Suchkov, 'Franz Kafka', in An
New England, I98I),

(Hanover, NH: University Press of of MarxistCriticism Anthology

pp. 125-85 (p. I42).

EDITH W. CLOWES

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Svizliak, is continually bombarding him with questions about his private life and the nature of his work. The fact, for example, that K. has a private telephone makes Svizliak suspect that he may be part of some spy network. BothJoseph K. and K., the victims, also victimize other people. At the beginning of The Trial, Joseph K. torments a neighbour, Fraulein Burstner, invading her privacy and assaulting her. Likewise, K. makes his contribution to the Stalinist network of anxiety and terror. He plays as much as possible on Svizliak's suspicions and fears. Though he never informs on people, he too is a voyeur: he notices people's comings and goings, their views, their associates.20At night, he calls people on the phone, only to hang up when they answer (Iampol'skii, pp. I44-45). The narrowness of time and place adds to the atmosphere of anxiety. Using a K. tells about one tactic similar to that of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, twenty-four-hour period in his life, starting with the morning and continuing until the early hours of the next morning. His time is divided between going for walks around the Arbat section of Moscow where he lives, sleeping, ruminating about his past, and going out to shop for food. Much as in The Trial,events seem unrelated, linked only by the main character. Dream time, a kind of floating present, takes over. Past and present merge one into the other. There is no real chronology, no normality, no schedule. Day does give way to night but the settings, largely inside, are so dark and the atmosphere of suspicion and suspense so thick that daylight is hardly noticeable. K. exists, concentrating all his forces merely to survive. As in The Trial (and, it should be said, Crimeand Punishment), the spaces of ulitsaare small and dark, with eyes watching at all times from behind Moskovskaia curtains, from the opposite street corner, from behind a wall or a door. The setting, however, is distinctly Soviet. K. lives in a communal apartment, coexisting in these crowded quarters with the most incongruous group of things and people. Quite unlike Kafka, Iampol'skii leavens his difficult, dense story with a dose of black humour. He animates the dour surroundings: for example, comparing a lighted window with a 'bruised eye' (Iampol'skii, p. 162) or an official's office with a crematorium (Iampol'skii, p. 46). Using an absurdist technique, akin to Ionesco's, he describes in a list the delirium of objects that block the front hall to his apartment building: a broad,darkcorridor, crowded smellingof mothballs, buttsof candles,mousedroppings, with old, crumbling full of uselessbooks,trunksboundwith ironbands,against cupboards, whichyoualwaysbangyourknees,somesortof balesandbaskets stuffed withallkindsofrags and nonsense,and maybeevenrocks, to fill the space,just to get in people's just something way. Here also are zinc washtubs,like casketsfor children,enormous orangeand sky-blue samovarglints, a lady's bottles, which hold the devil knowswhat, an old hunched-over bicyclewith sharpspokesstickingout fromthe wheel,a driedfig plant,and thereis even a stuffed bear,takenfromGodknowswhere,longsinceconsumed bymoths,thattouches youin withalarm- it's as if it had beenwaiting a fatherly way andyou shudder just foryou in this communal forest.(Iampol'skii, p. 49) As in Kafka's novel, the denizens of this world are generally out to achieve two things: to take gross advantage of each other and eventually to ruin each other before they themselves are ruined. But Iampol'skii's characters are more colourful and absurdly humorous than Kafka's, who lack personal traits almost entirely. The officious petty dictator of a concierge, Svizliak, is reminiscent of an Ionesco fascist.
20 Boris Iampol'skii,

Moskovskaia ulitsa.Roman, Znamia (1988:2),

46-I

4; (I988:3),

I21-74

(p. I34).

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Like the characters who gradually turn into rhinos in Rhinoceros,Svizliak has an enormous skull which, as K. remarks, nature must have meant to put on a rhino. (He also owns a smelly dog-hair coat: K. imagines that he will relish the time when Svizliak dies, if only because there will be no more coat.) Svizliak is also endowed with what K. calls rhinoceros-like ambition, envy, and selfishness (Iampol'skii, p. 51). K. notes that his neighbour would have made his way in any kind of society. Having started life as a kulak, he spent the NEP period of the I 92os, the one period in Soviet history when small private enterprise was permitted, managing his own business for repairing safes. Under Stalin he acquired the knack of unmasking 'enemies of the people' and soon was given the administration of this apartment house, which he runs mercilessly as a petty fiefdom. He transfers his experience as a locksmith to this job, locking up every square metre of extra space, claiming it for himself. He forces the residents of the communal apartment to listen to the blaring radio and do the exercises that are broadcast every day, take number chits for their place in line to use the apartment's one bathroom, self-righteously writing reports on all of them. The reports he writes are stupid but none the less harmful. For example, he accuses one neighbour of housing people without a Moscow residence permit. As it turns out, the names he has heard through the wall, Vasilii, Taras, and Valentin, refer to the woman's pet fish! It is from this absurd prison, its prisoners, and its cloying atmosphere of ubiquitous suspicion that K. must preserve himself. He deals with his neighbours' imprecations in part by disappearing into the world of fiction that he has made his profession. But fiction cannot save K.'s sanity indefinitely. He spends hours meditating on himself and his past, searching for some bad deed, and, like Joseph K., finds ways to assure himself that he is indeed guilty of nothing. And likeJoseph K., he finds very real reasons to be anxious and suspicious. Kafka's protagonist feels that everybody in power, judges, magistrates, lawyers, and artists, are in a cabal. They seem to know a secret truth that will save them but that is withheld from others and for which others must pay. What is an abstract, ahistorical condition in Kafka's novel is here placed in a concrete, historical context. Iampol'skii's protagonist realizes that, for whatever reasons, his historical time, the early I950s under the aging Stalin, on the eve of a new purge, is one that demands victims. Guilty or not, everyone pays in some way. Things will be calm for a short time, and suddenly 'the atmosphere becomes close and terrifying, and victims were required, the constant offerings, the unquenchable offering of victims' (Iampol'skii, p. 67). K. imagines all too well the stages of persecution: the phone call, the report, the arrest, the interrogation, and, finally, the end. He remembers how in 1937 he skittishly boarded a train and headed southward without looking back, now wondering if this could be grounds for arrest. He also remembers the interrogations during the war, after his escape from a German POW camp, by some officious personage who acted as if he already knew the answers to the questions he was asking, accusing K. of treachery for 'allowing' himself to be caught by the Germans and then spying for the Germans in return for his release (Iampol'skii, p. 92). He wonders if he might be considered guilty also for not handing in his pistol immediately after the war. His sixth sense for danger does not deceive him now. The one visit he makes is to a lawyer, an old friend from schooldays who is being commandeered as a prosecutor for the planned arrests. Like Joseph K., he tries his best to believe in his innocence. He finally permits himself to ask whether he might not be guilty at all (Iampol'skii, p. io8). Towards night he feels bolder and heads out to pace the streets. Like the animal in Kafka's The

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Burrow, he feels safer and more powerful when he leaves his domain and spies on it from the outside. It is in this condition that K. summons the courage to confront the inscrutable power that torments him. Somewhat like Joseph K., who goes to the cathedral to try to find the key to the riddle of his fate, K. goes to the seat of all power, Nogin Square, which houses the offices of party and government. Here he watches the tormented life that is forced to continue all night, the time when the 'generalissimus' is most wide awake. No one in the state hierarchy may sleep. Here again he makes up his own absurd vision of Soviet hierarchy, the humour of which helps K. to calm himself somewhat: Stalin was not asleep, nor were the ministers, nor their deputies, aides, assessors, nor the secretaries, the stenographers, the chief accountants, and chief geologists, nor the chief steel founders, nor the chief rolling-mill operatives, nor the chief engineers, nor the couriers, nor the buffet attendants, the delivery boys, the medical technicians, [... ] nor the police agents, and out there across the whole Great country, the secretaries of regional committees, the commanding officers of military districts, the directors of factories, the managers of mines the whole country was reconstructing itself, recutting its day, its life for the convenience of the of the insomniac generalissimus. (Iampol'skii, pp. 154-55) physical system [organizm] K. then heads to the railway station, where he finds a statue of Stalin himself. As the parable 'Before the Law' conveys a sense of metaphysical indifference, so K. sees in Stalin a terrible indifference to human fate: There stood the five-yard-high marble leader in a full-length great coat and semi-military cap, with his hand in his lapel, and around the pedestal seethed, swarmed, bustled, buzzed, peeled its hard-boiled eggs and oranges [... ] the crowd of passengers, and with an arrogant stone face [... ] he looked over their heads into the distance, only into the distance [and] saw what no one saw or could see. (Iampol'skii, p. 56) Having thus admitted to himself the truth about Stalin's colossal egotism and arrogance, and its effect on the whole country and its citizens, K. feels somewhat better. He takes courage in the small scenes of station life. For example, one person resists a police officer who demands to see his papers, and another insists that she is not afraid when people stare at her. The sense of nausea and exhaustion close in again as K. returns home. He is no longer skittish, but he is fully aware of the emptiness and senselessness of his existence. As with Terts's and Daniel"s stories, this narrative ends with a metafictional perspective on its own nature and, by implication, on the historical scenario perpetrated by Stalin. An authorial voice intrudes, not (as with Terts and Daniel') to expose its own dubious status but to 'bare the device' of the monological Stalinist script. Reminding the reader of the everlasting 'file' that accumulates information on each citizen, he points out the metafictional dominant, the monological, authoritarian engine that drives the narrative of Stalinist life, determining character, consciousness, and plot. In the notion of a file kept in some impersonal government office is the modernist replacement for the religious notion of predestination. Existence, it is reasserted, is nothing but the ubiquitous feeling of guilt: And this guilt, unacknowledged and fantastic, as his own shadow, followed him everywhere, and, never growing old, it accompanied him through his youth to maturity and on to his later years, and probably will see him into his deep old age, probably will follow his casket, a dress uniform in the crowd, in the winter crowd midst dark overcoats and lambskin hats, and it will stop at the edge of his grave, and will not rest until it hears the sound of frozen clumps of earth rattling on the lid of the casket, only then breathing a sigh of relief, will it leave and go to sleep in the demonically grey, steel file labelled 'Keep forever' with a photograph of its owner, youthful, jovial, full of youth's faith and dreams. (Iampol'skii, p. I74)

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andRussian'Thaw'Fiction KaJka

What, then, did Kafka's modernist art help to bring alive in these post-Stalin writers?How did it compare to other Western late modernist art?And, finally, how did it challenge and discredit the politically controlled aesthetic of socialist realism? If officially Kafka the modernist was perceived as the figurehead of a threatening aesthetic opponent, modernism, then unofficiallyand much more powerfullyhe was welcomed as a voice with a great deal to contribute about the real spiritual condition of Soviet society of the Stalin years. To the writers, as well as to the critics, especially Dneprov and Kopelev, he pointed the way beyond the whitewash of Stalinist ideology and towards the moral and psychological truths concealed there. There can be no social and psychological 'health' without acknowledgement of the pathologies engendered by prevalent socio-cultural myth. Terts and Iampol'skii both allude to Kafka, as well as more recent Western experimentalists, in their effortto expose the 'metaphysical' conceit of Stalin. Playing on aesthetic notions of objectivity and omniscience inherent in realist, and particularly socialist realist, art, this fiction by implication calls into question claims to total political control and moral authority made by Stalin. Stalin's claims to omnipresence and omniscience are treated by Terts as a fraud. Iampol'skii stresses the demonic ways in which this claim preys on the human psyche. Omnipresence and omniscience are made palpable, exposed as amoral qualities in the various statues of Stalin on the Moscow landscape and the files held in grey bureaucratic 'crematoria'. It is in his ability sometimes to resist Stalin's authoritarian script and to imagine humorous alternatives that K. may be able to survive. By implication this fiction denies another assumption at the heart of socialist realism, that art should at once document social actuality and codify politically desirable patterns of thought and behaviour. All three authors question the existence of boundaries between 'fantasy' and 'reality', and suggest instead that the social realm, social consciousness and behaviour, is also a fiction consciously to be deconstructed and reconstructed, particularlywhen it has become the field of play of a paranoid, tyrannical imagination. As an instructive counterexample, Daniel' shows a post-Stalinist intelligentsia trying to ignore the deep psychological trauma of the preceding age, doing its best to repress all links to the past, and, in a way, to transform the Dionysian insanity of Stalinist life into an Apollonian screen of cultural artefacts, to make life 'safe' and superficially 'sane'. In so doing, they do nothing but recodify the deep authority that the Stalinist myth holds over their lives: they re-enforce the psychosis of guilt. Modernist self-irony and the modernist subversion of totalizing dogma and myth have become in the post-Stalin era powerful (but risky for their creators and consumers) tools for the unhinging of Stalinism. The fact that many of these writers ended up silenced, in prison or in some form of exile for their efforts, suggests that they were addressing a readership still too thoroughly 'Stalinist' to face the self-scrutiny which their works compelled. However, it appears also to be true that their voices did reach a younger generation that in the late 198os finally came closer to power, aware of the destruction done in the past, and determined to undo the Stalinist system. Once again, as in the I96os, Kafka's work is being welcomed as a needed anti-authoritarian cultural force. The secret Soviet life of Kafka in the I96os suggests the complexity of Russian attitudes towards the West. While it is obvious that censors and ideologues did their utmost to foster an adversarial relationship to European 'modernism', it has never

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been clear what was transpiring beneath the surface. In the I96os, people were surprised at the riches that emerged from the I92os and I930s. Now we are delighted to discover unknown works from the I96os. The art of Terts and Daniel' has been known for some time as rare examples of late modernist fiction. But previously unsuspected treasures, such as Moskovskaia ulitsa, divulge strong ties to Western modernism. These pieces of evidence lead one to ask what other manuscripts are still lying about in some desk drawer.
PURDUE UNIVERSITY EDITH W. CLOWES