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The Great Russian Literature of 1900 to 1933, Unknown in the West Lev Navrozov Marx believed that the Western culture of his time was bourgeois, and in his ideal world to replace the bourgeois West, culture would be initially proletarian, and ultimately communist. Trotsky explained that what was considered genius in the bourgeois society would be the "norm" in communism, while outstanding people would rise higher and higher above genius. Meanwhile, founded in the Soviet dictatorship was the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, which Stalin shut down in 1932. Why? A dictator's "ideology" aims at the most reliable preservation of his dictatorship. At first, the major threat to the Soviet dictatorship was the restoration of "pre-revolutionary" Russia. So the "futurists," "revolutionaries" "proletarians," and other such were encouraged. But soon they began to threaten Stalin's absolute power, since it was beginning to resemble more and more the absolute power of Tsar Ivan the Terrible and Tsar Peter the Great, who was even more terrible than Ivan the Terrible, both later cited by Stalin and his propaganda as his predecessors. When the new producer of the world-famous Moscow Art Theater (after the death of Konstantin Stanislavski in 1938) came over to see us (my father was a playwright), he recalled how he sat as assistant producer with Stalin in the "government box" of the Moscow Art Theatre when the play "The Rails Are Humming" by the "proletarian writer" Kirshon was on the stage. Stalin did not like the play (no one did except Kirshon himself and some of his "proletarian" pals) and said so during the intermission. The assistant producer (alas, I was a child and do not remember his name) decided to amuse Stalin. "Should we stage Bulgakov's ‘White Guard'?" he joked. Bulgakov had not been arrested and shot for his "White Guard." After all, Count Tolstoy described aristocrats in his "War and Peace" as "beautiful people," and in 1928 the centenary of Count Tolstoy's birth was celebrated with terrific éclat. Why couldn't Bulgakov (also an aristocrat) describe aristocrats in the same spirit? Still, the very title "White Guard" was as monstrous as "Fascists" or "Nazis" would have been later as the title of a play showing them as "beautiful people." So the assistant producer expected Stalin's appreciative guffaw. Instead, he could hardly trust his ears. "Why not?" Stalin said. "A ve-r-r-ry good novel and a ve-r-r-ry good play." Story Continues Below
The assistant producer rushed to telephone Stanislavski. "Kostya!" he shouted into the receiver. "I am not drunk, nor am I off my rocker! Stalin wants us to stage ‘The White Guard'!" It was staged. True, not under this scandalously counter-revolutionary title, but under the title "Days of the Turbins." In charge of Russian culture was Nikolai Bukharin, a cultural sophisticate, who was to Russia what Medici had been to the Florence of the Renaissance. Russian literature combined the recognized greatness of Russian 19th-century literature with the genius of new creativity. Bukharin could tell the genius of new creativity from pseudo-scientific or pseudo-technological "experimentation" in Western pseudo-art. However, a writer's world fame came to depend in the West on sensations in the Western mainstream media. Pasternak and Mandelstam were, in Bukharin's (and my) opinion, the two greatest poets of the 20th century. Pasternak published his first poem of genius in 1912. It was only in 1990 that my son published in England the first translation of Pasternak's poetry, while before, "professors of poetry" had been publishing just substitutions of English for Russian words. However, his novel "Doctor Zhivago" (which I consider inferior to what Pasternak wrote from 1912 to 1933) Pasternak could publish only abroad in 1957, three years before his death. A Soviet writer's publication of his book abroad was a scandal at the top of the Soviet dictatorship, and hence a Western sensation, followed by a Nobel Prize, which Pasternak was forbidden to receive. Hence, for several years, every educated Westerner knew the name of Pasternak and the title of his novel, though many were surprised when I told them that Pasternak "also wrote poetry." Since 1912! On the other hand, Mandelstam wrote a poem attacking Stalin and died in a labor camp. No Western sensation, so few Westerners have ever heard even his name, though he was only one year younger than Pasternak. No Western sensation for Bulgakov either. Owing to Stalin, he was not even arrested for his novel (bearing a title that made those who heard it gasp). In 1929 Bulgakov began working on his novel "The Master and Margarita." In 1930 he complained to the authorities that he had no money to live on and requested permission to emigrate. In the case of Evgeniy Zamyatin, the author of "We," which anticipated Orwell's "1984" by 25 years, such a request was wisely granted, after which Zamyatin was quickly forgotten in the West. In the case of Bulgakov, Stalin telephoned him and arranged for his post at the Moscow Art Theater. I believe that the great Russian literature, which existed owing to the accidents of history like Bukharin, ended in 1933. It began to be replaced by propaganda, and Bukharin was shot in 1938. But Bulgakov could work on his novel, invisibly and inaudibly, until his death in 1940. The novel was published, after censorship, in 1966-67 in a Moscow magazine. No Western sensation, and hence few Westerners have heard even the name of Bulgakov. Yet a 24-year-old Russian immigrant in Canada has decided to bring at least two of Bulgakov's novels to the notice of the English-speaking world. He is Michael Karpelson, who was born in Moscow and whose parents brought him to Canada at the age of 10. I studied English in Soviet Russia because of my obsession with the constitutionalism of the English-speaking world, in contrast to the Soviet dictatorship. But how to make a living? I went to the Publishing House of Literature in Foreign Languages and told the chief of the English department that I could translate Russian classical writers, such as Dostoyevsky, into English better than they had been translated ever before. All translators into English at the Publishing House were former or current citizens of the English-speaking countries. Some of them cited the neurological conclusion that only the brain cells of a child before two years of age can assimilate a language as his or her mother tongue. Well, I had never lived in an English-speaking country. So I told the chief to invite his 20 or so (mother-tongue) translators into English to a kind of conference and give each of them an anonymous copy of my translation of a piece of Russian classical literature into English. No conferee guessed that I was a native Russian who had never lived a day in any English-speaking country. Michael has translated "The Master and Margarita" and published his translation at Lulu Press. Though I am not a conference of 20 native-tongue translators, I can vouch—on the basis not only of my own translations reviewed in the English-speaking countries, but also of my writings in English since my arrival in New York in 1972—that Michael's translation is both true to Russian and alive in English. Michael broke the 2-year-old mother-tongue barrier! What is his future? Michael is an engineer (connected with nanotechnology). So starvation does not threaten him. But what about his future as a translator of Russian literature? I was engaged in translation only in Soviet Russia and did financially very well. The Soviet Publishing House sold my translations to the English-speaking world. But as soon as I was out of Soviet Russia I began writing (in English and, in the 1990s, also in Russian, for Yeltsin's Russia). As a translator into English, Michael faces enormous Western difficulties of sales in the sphere of great literature, and not of sensations, caused in the Western mainstream media by reprisals of the Soviet dictatorship or of Putin's possible dictatorship under a new name unless he restores the word "Soviet" as well. But an auspicious beginning has been made: Michael Karpelson's translation of "The Master and Margarita." You can email me at navlev@cloud9.net
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