kafka and russian experimental fiction in the thaw, 1956-1965

7/29/2019 Kafka and Russian Experimental Fiction in the Thaw, 1956-1965

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Kafka and Russian Experimental Fiction in the Thaw, 1956-1965Author(s): Edith W. ClowesSource: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 149-165Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3733158

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KAFKA AND RUSSIAN EXPERIMENTAL FICTION INTHE THAW, I956-1965

... in the end, out of nothing at all, an enor-mous fabricof guilt will be conjuredup.(Kafka, TheTrial)During the period of glasnost', since about I987, Russian writers and critics haveengaged in a wide-ranging discussion about the survival of Russian literature, longpetrified 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: forexample, twentieth-century 'modernist' experimental fiction, much of which is onlynow being published for the first time in Russia.1 There is a strange blindness aboutcurrent historical perspectives, especially for a time that has allegedly been devotedto the honest, full retelling of Soviet history. Russian critics of the late 98os display aremarkable ignorance about the literary process during last burst of creativeinnovation a quarter of a century ago, during the Thaw years from 1956 toI965. Somewhat disingenuously, they pass over in silence the very real and vitalexperimental literary practice that emerged in the underground and its strongaffinity for Western modernist precedent.2 On the other hand, newly publishedworks by Zamiatin, Kafka, or Joyce, for example, are often perceived asold, canonized 'classics' of modernism, if such an oxymoron is permissible.At the same time, they are stylistically so remote from customary literary practicethat many readers find it hard to imagine a creative and original aesthetic responseto them.

Given the creative anxiety of recent years and the seeming ignorance aboutcountercultural trends in the previous generation, an account of the reception andappropriation of Western modernism in the post-Stalin decades is a timely correc-tive.3 This essay treats one aspect of this creative reception, the impact of Kafka'seuvre,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 AndreiSiniavskii's Tyiia ('Thou and I', I959, first published in the USSR in 1989), IuliiDaniel"s Iskuplenie('Redemption', 1964, first published in the USSR in 1988), andBoris Iampol'skii's Moskovskaiaulitsa ('Moscow Street', mid- 1960s, first published in

1V. 0. Ksepma,"'Po tu storonu obnoistenki":Konspektneproiznesennogoialogapo povodunekotorykh sochinenii pisatelia A. G. Bitova', LiteraturnoebozrenieI989:3), 24-27 (p. 25); ViktorErofeev, 'Pominkipo sovetskoi literature',Literaturnaiaazeta,4July I990, p. 8.2 Oneexceptions GalinaBelaia,who has worked irelesslyo revive helegacyof the I920Sand hasmostrecentlywritten he forewordo thelongoverdue ollection f worksbyAndreiSiniavskii nd IuliiDaniel', Tsenametaforyli prestuplenienakazanieiniavskogoDanielia,d. by L. S. Eremina Moscow:Kniga, 1989).3Currentwork ncludesEmilyTall'sstudiesof the Russian eceptionfJames oyce, nparticularerarticle n SlavicReview,9 (I990); D. Barton ohnson'sworkon Nabokovand SashaSokolov;HelenaGoscilo'sworkon Tat'ianaTolstaia.


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I50 KafkaandRussian Thaw'Fiction1988).4 In addressing itself to the psychological patterns informing Stalinist ideo-logy, this art also explodes the authoritarian 'command' relationships central tosocialist realism, that is, between censor and author, between author/narrator andprotagonist, and between work and reader, and reasserts a long-lost aestheticpractice of literature as playful subversion.5It can be argued that there is a longstanding pattern of suspicion and curiosity inthe Russian reception of Western literary movements involving aesthetic experi-mentation and ideological scepticism. Thus, the reception of Western modernisttrends in the Soviet Union of the late I95os bears a distant resemblance to theresponse to Western 'decadent' and early modernist works in late nineteenth-century Russia. In both periods the literary world was dominated by ideologuesbent on forcing art to serve narrowly defined social and political goals. In the lateI88os, 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 philosophicalmatters. It took courageous young literary critics working independently to initiatechange: in I892, for example, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii paid out of his own pocket forthe publication of his landmark essay attacking the non-aesthetic standards of civicart, 'On the Reasons for Decadence and on New Departures in ContemporaryRussian Literature', and was made to suffer the rage of populist critics. AndreiSiniavskii, much more courageously, risked a prestigious career in literary criticismat the Institute of World Literature and sent his essay, 'Chto takoe sotsialisticheskiirealizm'? ('What is Socialist Realism?'), abroad in I959, only eventually to bedismissed, tried, and imprisoned for his efforts. In both periods, although officialanti-Western feeling ran quite high and the censorship treated innovative 'Western'trends harshly, the tide was slowly turning in favour of greater experimentation inthe arts.

What seems less clear in the Thaw period is the continuation of what is by now apattern of truly original, peculiarly 'Russian' appropriations of Western literarymovements, so original as to produce a strong counter-influence on Westernliterature. While this pattern undoubtedly holds for Russian 'realism' of the I86osand I87os as well as modernist literature of the I9Ios and I920s, it remains to beseen what impact post-Stalinist experimental prose can have either on currentRussian fiction or on the Western literary process. What does give some grounds forhope is the discovery during the last two or three years

of very fine writing 'from thedrawer' dating from the I96os, such as Iampol'skii's novel. Another promising4 In the following discussion I have opted to use Daniel's real name throughout rather than hispseudonym 'Nikolai Arzhak', but to use Siniavskii's pseudonym, Abram Terts, when I am discussingSiniavskii's fiction. The reason is that Terts is more than a disguise meant to protect the real authorfrompersecution. It carrieswith it a genuine literary persona, more ideologically irreverentand stylisticallyradical than the personalityof the literarycritic,Andrei Siniavskii. Terts is an integral partof the writer'sself-concept as an experimentalist. For more on the significance of the pseudonym, Terts, see DonaldFanger, 'Conflicting Imperatives in the Model of the Russian Writer', in LiteraturendHistory:TheoreticalProblems nd RussianCaseStudies, d. by G. S. Morson (Stanford,CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 1986),

pp. I I -24.5 Other important creative appropriations of Kafka's art include Andrei Bitov's diary-confession,Zapiski z-za ugla('Notes from around the Corner'), written about 1963,published I989; the Strugatskiibrothers'science fantasy, Ulitkanasklone'The Snail on the Slope'), 1968;Boris Vakhtin's Dublenka'TheSheepskin Coat'), I979. For two discussions of Kafka's critical receptionduring the Soviet Thaw, seeEmily Tall, 'Who'sAfraid of Franz Kafka? Kafka Criticismin the Soviet Union', SlavicReview, 5 (1976),484-503, and my own 'Kafka and the Modernism-Realism Debate in LiteraryCriticism of the Thaw', inTheEuropean oundationsf RussianModernism,d. by P. I. Barta and U. Goebel, Studies in Russian andGerman, 4 (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ont., and Lampeter:Mellen Press, 199I), pp. 295-325.


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EDITH W. CLOWESdevelopment is the recent publication of some ideologically subversive writingformerly relegated to the semi-oblivion of samizdat underground publishing) ortamizdat(publishing abroad), such as Terts's and Daniel"s absurdist utopianparodies,respectively,Liubimovnd GovoritMoskva'Moscow Speaking'). It is worthnoting that in a recent interview in LiteraturnaiaazetaSiniavskii offeredthe opinionthat literary experimentation of the last few years (forexample, stories by Tolstaia,Narbikova, Popov) is a great deal more promising than that of his own day.6It is difficultto show a historyof receptionin a 'closed' culturalcontext where theworks being read and assimilated are 'dangerous': that is, where they represent aserious challenge to aesthetic views and social values so predominant that theytolerate no opposition whatsoever. So it was, forexample, for Nietzsche's receptionin the early I89os and for Kafka's receptionin the I950S. To complicate matters, inboth situations the receptionofforeignwriterswas overshadowedby a very powerfulRussian presence, that of Dostoevskii, whose art had such a vital impact on Westernpre-modernistand modernist writing. A thirdproblem in analysing Kafka's recep-tion in post-Stalinist literaryculture is social and ideological in nature and involvesdifferentiating characteristics of Kafka's phantasmagoric world from the equallyfantastic world of Stalinism and the Stalinist state with its tactics of spying,duplicity, and terror.All threetexts examined hereshow morethanjust anaffinityfor Kafka. Charactertypes, psychological conditions, human relationships, and narrativelogic in theseworks suggest a concrete modelling of the Stalinist experience on Kafka's art, andparticularly on The Trial, which was well known among Moscow intellectuals.Iampol'skii's protagonistis given a very reductivename, K., clearlyborrowedfromJoseph K., the name of Kafka's protagonist in his two main anti-novels, TheTrialand The Castle. But beyond the textual evidence, there is scant biographicalinformationabout these threeauthors'personalresponsesto Kafka. Much morehasbeen written about Siniavskii than about the other two writers takentogether, andthere exists a certain amount of evidence about his reading habits. The first opensuggestion of a link between Siniavskii and Kafka came during his and Daniel"strial in I966. In a ludicrous attack on Siniavskii, entitled 'The Descendants ofSmerdiakov', 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 prosecutionusedthis sort of 'literary critical' discussion as evidence on its behalf. Another point ofview on Siniavskii's relationshipto Kafka came from Helene Zamojska,Siniavskii'slong-time friend from his student days, who denied that Siniavskii knew or readKafka.8 Precisely during which years is not indicated, but it is possible thatZamojskacould 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-I950Swhenhe became a seniorresearcherat the Institute ofWorldLiterature,which at the timewas headed by BorisSuchkov, a Germanist and one of the first Soviet Kafka critics.9

6 T. Putrenko, 'Pushkin- nash smeiushchiisia genii', Literaturnaiaazeta,8 August 1990, p. 7.7 Belaiaknigapo deluA. SiniavskogoIu. Danielia,ed. by AleksandrGinzburg (Frankfurt:Posev, I967),p. 112.8 Richard Lourie, Letters o theFuture:AnApproachoSiniavsky-TertzIthaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1975), p. 19.9 Kenneth Hughes, 'Introduction', in FranzKafka:AnAnthologyf MarxistCriticism, d. by K. Hughes(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 98 ), pp. xiii-xxvlii.

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Kafka and Russian 'Thaw'FictionHere he enjoyed contact with French students and had relatively easy access to allsorts of forbidden materials (Lourie, p. I6). In addition, in 1956 he becameacquainted 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 familiaritywithKafka's art came in a letter in defence of Siniavskii fromFebruary 1966,written bythe art historian, Il'ia Golomshtok, to the Supreme Court of the Russian Republic.Golomshtok and Siniavskiihad previously collaborated on a book on Pablo Picasso,which suggests that Siniavskii must have had considerableknowledge of Europeanmodernism, not only in literature but in other media as well. In his letterGolomshtok characterized Siniavskii as a 'mature author' for whom it would bepatently ridiculous to do what Kedrina suggested: to 'steal' pieces of anotherwriter's work (Ginzburg, p. I58). Golomshtok went on to say that Siniavskii didshare with Kafka an interest in similar issues concerning contemporary culture.Insisting that Siniavskii's workgrapples with realmoral, social, andpolitical issues,in the truest spirit of Marxism, Golomshtok did acknowledge some influenceof the'tragic world of Kafka' in his friend's art (Ginzburg, p. I60). Thus, it seems quitelikely indeed that the Kafkaesque quality of some of Siniavskii's early works couldwell be grounded in an appropriationof Kafka's works.Information on the reading habits of Daniel' and Iampol'skii is all but non-existent. Daniel"s interest in Kafkamay have originatedin his close friendshipwithSiniavskii. Otherwise, no more can be said than that the two writers' creativeappropriations of Kafka are entirely plausible, since their two works, IskupleniendMoskovskaialitsa,were both written in the ambience of the mid- 96os, when quite alot was appearing in the pressabout Kafkaand modernism in general.10At the heartof the Moscow literary intelligentsia, both writers certainly read and discussedworks, both officialand underground,of current interest. It is unthinkable that theywould not have read the Kafka stories, 'In the Penal Colony' and 'The Meta-morphosis', that appearedin Inostrannaiaiteraturan 1964,and the volume of Kafkaworks, featuring TheTrial,published in I965.Although Tyi ia, Iskuplenie,and Moskovskaia litsa are part of a much larger'literature of guilt' that has appeared in the post-Stalinist period, they clearly standapart from the mass of post-Stalinist literature in their sophistication, their livelyspirit of experimentation, their boldness of irony, as well as their determination toprobe the psychological and epistemological grounds of Stalinist myth. Whencomparedto popular 'criticalrealist' works that deal with the problemofguilt, suchas Lidiia Chukovskaia'sSofiiaPetrovna r Anatolii Rybakov's DetiArbata 'Childrenof the Arbat'), it becomes starkly apparent that they belong to a differentliteraryheritage. Characters in these realist works are simple and unreflective,often verysimilar to positive heroes of socialist realism. Their attitudes toward guilt mirrorassumptions operative in the Stalinist terror that 'everyoneis guilty but me', and 'ifsomeone is arrested,then he must be guilty'. The approachto the problemofguilt inthe three works treated here focuses moreon the gap between accusation and guiltyact, the psychology of paranoia and persecution, and finally, the fictionalizationofguilt: that is, the transpositionof 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'sguilt. Such issues, as they are10A. Latynina, 'Preodoleniestrakha',Literaturnaiaazeta, April 988, p. 4.

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EDITH W. CLOWEShandled in these works, differalso fromDostoevskii's treatmentof them in Crime ndPunishmentnd TheBrothers aramazov.ostoevskii ischieflyconcerned with themoralrelationshipbetween idea and action. In this 'Kafkaesque'fiction,notonly is there noidea, but thereis no knownact. What remains is only alifeunderpersistentbutvagueaccusation, a consciousness of being irredeemablyguilty: in short, a psychologicalcondition of living 'after the Fall'.11In general terms there is a great deal that brings Terts's, Daniel"s, and Iam-pol'skii's worksclose to Kafka's both in style and in spirit.The protagonistsall lackidentifying psychological traits.They all adherein some measure to the apt descrip-tion of Kafka's characters given by the Soviet Germanist, Lev Kopelev: they are'without biographies, without individual traits, they have no past and indeed havenothing at allbeyond the limits of thefantasticplot structureerectedaround them'.12All experiencea severe disjunctionof moral sense, reason, and emotional impulse.

The plots of these works consist of a series of events tied by the broken logic of anightmareandleading to someanti-climax.13 Narrativeconsciousness is exceedinglyclose, and sometimes crossesover, to that of the protagonist. Perceptionof both timeand space is compressedin the extreme.All three works areset in the narrowconfinesofcitystreetsandsmall, darkrooms.Ifthere isever aview out to anothertime orplace,it is eitherin a dreamor in some memory,theontologicalstatus of which is as suspectas that of the main narrative.In Terts's story, Tyi ia, guilt is put in terms of a struggle between an omniscientauthor/narrator, 'I', and his protagonist, known variably as 'you', 'he', and morerarely as 'Nikolai Vasil'evich'. The protagonist's enduring but unfocused sense ofpersecution and guilt is brought about, as it happens, by a literary game foisted by theauthor on his character. This rather voyeuristic author derives enjoyment fromscrutinizing the internal life of his protagonist, and the protagonist, in turn, suffersfrom the uneasy feeling that someone unseen is watching and judging him. Caughtwithin the bounds of the fictive world, the protagonist can rationalize his sense ofpersecution only by suspecting his boss, Graube, of trying to make him feel guilty andto catch him at being 'disloyal' to the state. Joseph K.'s metaphysical/bureaucraticstruggle for justice is implicitly supplanted by a highly unsettling cat-and-mousegame 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 definethe 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 andKierkegaard's notion of'infinite guilt' (FranzKajka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I973),p. I05).12 Lev Kopelev, 'U propastiodinochestva. F. Kafkai osobennosti sovremennogo sub"ektivizma',Serdtsevsegdaleva(Moscow: Sovetskiipisatel', 1960), pp. I68-89 (p. 173).13This point is well developed in Martin Greenberg, The TerrorfArt: KajkaandModern iteratureNewYork: Basic Books, I963).14 Idris Parry makes the point that Kafka interpretations in Eastern Europe and Russia differsubstantially from Western approachesto Kafka. While Eastern readers focus on the social and politicalimplications of his work and tend to identify the inscrutable other with bureaucraticauthority,Westernreaders concentrate on its metaphysical and psychological aspects. See Idris Parry, 'Kafka, Gogol andNathanael West', in Kajka,ed. by R. Gray (Englewood Cliffs,NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 85-90. Thepoint is certainly well supported in such excellent Soviet discussions of Kafka as V. Dneprov's'Metaforicheskii roman Frantsa Kafki', in IdeivremeniformyvremeniLeningrad:Sovetskiipisatel', I980),pp.432-86.

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I54 KafkaandRussian Thaw'Fictionpointed to a possible affinitybetween Ty ia and Buber's 'I and Thou'.15 This viewseems too simple. The relationship between the two consciousnessesrepresentedbythe shifting pronouns, 'I', 'you', and 'he', is much more confused and hostile thanBuber's. Terts does begin his storywith a quotationfromGenesis32.24 which referstoJacob's nocturnal struggle with an unseen force, God. At dawn God calls a truceand appoints Jacob to lead the nation of Israel. This reference to God can only beseen as ironic: there is no such heroic outcome in Ty ia. The opponents eventuallycollapse into much the same identity. At the end the author 'becomes' his protagon-ist, when the librarianLida (who in this world without realrelationshipsis the onlyperson 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, relativelyunalienated relationshipof self with other, it is more appropriateto relate him to thefraudulent narrators of the French anti-novel of Nathalie Sarraute and AlainRobbe-Grillet,where the notion of narrative'omniscience' is called into question asvoyeurism. Through his author/narratorTerts also certainlyalludes to Stalin whoperpetrated the fraud of omniscience, of claiming to see everyone and knoweverythingin orderultimately to gain omnipotence. This allusion is reinforcedwhenLida points out to the author that he has red hair (as Stalin did), a fact which thenarratorself-consciouslydenies: 'I did not consider it necessaryto expand upon thistheme, dangerousor all of us, but said directly that I could not endure red-hairedpeople.'16In his treatment of the protagonistin his relationshipswith his boss (in the worldcreated in the narrative) and with the author/narrator(in the metafictional sphereof aesthetic play) Terts would appear to respond to Joseph K.'s search for self-justification andjustice in TheTrial.The parallelsare concrete and significantfromthe very start and areupheld throughout the story. Ty iaopens at a dinner arrangedby the protagonist'sboss, Graube,allegedly to celebrate Graube'swedding anniver-sary. 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 parallelFranz and Willem, the two agents in TheTrial.Both pairs are disguised, Franz andWillem as travellers and Lobzikov and Polianskii as guests at a dinner. Both pairsbehave like pigs, Franz and Willem gobbling upJoseph K.'s breakfastand Lobzikovand Polianskii grabbing the greasy duck dinner with their hands and wolfing itdown.The character with whom the protagonistbecomes most intimate, the librarianLida, and the only character he believes is not a spy, bears a strong resemblance toKafkaesque female characters,for example, the nameless woman in the courtroomin Chapter 5 of The Trialor the nurse Leni who cares for the lawyer Huld, who aretypically seductive, promiscuous, and subservient, but somehow knowing andhelpful (Terts, p. 48). Lida similarly seems trustworthy to the protagonist, andlikewise she becomes the protagonist'sshield against the attacks of his tormentors.He thinks of her as being seductive. She is strongly inclined towards sexualencounters and not very discriminating (Terts, p. 59).15 Mikhailo Mikhailov, AbramTerts li begstvoz retorty: tvorchestveiniavskogoFrankfurt:Posev, 1969),p. I8.16 AbramTerts, Fantasticheskii irAbrama ertsaNew York:Inter-LanguageLiteraryAssociates, 1967),p. 59 (my emphasis).


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EDITH W. CLOWESThe protagonist himself is reminiscent ofJoseph K. Like his literary predeces-sor, he is a bachelor, living alone in a single room, fastidious in his dress, andinterested in women as protection from the powers that be, although typically only

at a safe distance. And likeJoseph K., he is suspicious, unsure of his alleged crime,but sure of his innocence. Both characters try to outwit and to manipulate thosearound them, and ultimately try to influence the outcome of their fate. Thisprotagonist shares another important trait withJoseph K.: an incommensurabilityof conscious, controlled, rational self-knowledge and subconscious, violentimpulse. Both characters engage in sudden and brutal assault, whether on women(Joseph K. attacks Fraulein Biirstner and becomes unreasonably angry at FrauGrubach) or on a superior (Terts's protagonist attacks his boss Graube).Occasionally, in both cases, such assaults are in self-defence,but more often theyare an attempt to assert a fragile sense of authority. In addition, both charactersend their lives equally violently, Joseph K. with a knife in his heart and Terts'sprotagonist as a suicide, slitting his throat with a razor.If Joseph K. is confounded by an inscrutable, metaphysical/bureaucraticotherthat he can never see or confront, and that, as he learns at the end of TheTrial,isentirely indifferentto the outcome of his 'case', then the protagonist of Ty ia mustalso deal with an other who, though invisible to him, is visible to the reader andthus of more doubtful authenticity. The protagonist is continually made to feelguilty and persecuted by a force unknown to him, which is revealed to the readeras an unscrupulous, ill-willed author caught in a power struggle with hisprotagonist and seeking total domination over him (Terts, p. 47). With this tacticTerts leaves in place the illogicality and malaise of Kafka'sworld of accusationandguilt but replaces metaphysical anxiety with ironic humour. While Kafka refusesto define the contours of the 'judge', the accuser, but suggests at the end itsmetaphysical character, Terts clearly defines his 'judge' as a kind of Stalinist,omniscient fraudof an author who tries to traphis charactersin provocations.Early in the story Terts uses an extended pun with the word 'utka'or 'duck' togive a witty clue that his whole narrative construct is a fraud perpetrated by anirresponsible author on his characters. A 'duck' in Russian is the same as 'redherring' in English. Ducks are served at Graube's gala anniversary dinner,implying that the hosts 'pustiatutku'or are throwing out a red herring. Indeed, inaddition to suspecting Lobzikov and Polianskii of being spies, the narratoris surethat Graube's 'wife'is not even a woman but a male boxer hired for the occasion tocollar him when his disloyalty is revealed. When those assembled test theprotagonist 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 isimpossible to find ducks in any government stores, to which he replies, nowalluding ironically to the second level of meaning of duck as 'red herring', thatindeed ducks, or any fowl, can be found in any quantity in all stores. When heleaves, after reaffirminghis loyalty and telling Graube that he sees through histrick, he again raises the subject of ducks, and red herrings, mentioning to Lidathat 'they will find it more convenient to "ohh" and "ahh" over government duckswithout me' (Terts, p. 51).The theme of provocation continues throughout on the level of the author'sconsciousness. The narrative world is revealed as completely artificial and'inauthentic', to use Sarraute's term. For the protagonist, as forJoseph K., 'out of

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I56 KafkaandRussian Thaw'Fictionnothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt [is] conjuredup'.17 Terts's protagonistends by paying with his 'sanity', whatever that may be in this deranged world ofprovocation and counter-provocation,and, likeJoseph K., he finally pays with hislife. Meanwhile, the author goes beyond voyeurism: he tries first to save hisprotagonist from suicide but then, seeing that he is powerless, denies all responsi-bility forhim. He attempts then to return to his voyeuristpastime, thusrevealingthepoverty of his moral character as well as his creative skill. The landscape here-creates at the end is precisely the absurdist one at the beginning, with the onedifference that it is marredby a dead body.Everythingwas the same. Snow was falling, and it was the very same part of the day. Twoengineers- his formercolleagues, Lobzikov and Polianskii- were playing Chopin on thepiano. As before,four hundred women weregiving birth to fourhundred children at the samemoment. Vera Ivanovna was putting a compress to Genrikh Ivanovich's black eye. Achestnut-haired woman was pulling her trousers on. Bending over a basin, a brunette waspreparingforhermeetingwith Nikolai Vasil'evich who, as usual, was runningtipsily throughthecold. Nikolai Vasil'evich's corpsewas lying in a locked room. Lida, like a nightwatchman,was pacing under his windows. (Terts, p. 63)At the very end the author remarks,'I am not sorryforyour death, I am sorrythat Ican't forget you' (Terts, p. 63). This admission rings hollow, less a revelation ofmoral conscience than the regretof 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 andparanoia. As Terts challengedothersto do in his essay, 'What is Socialist Realism?',so he did here: he succeeded in 'being truthful with the help of absurd fantasy [nelepoifantazii]' (Terts, p. 446).If Terts deals with Kafka's metaphysical question of guilt, reducing it to a kind ofaesthetic sham perpetrated by an author on his characters, Daniel' in Iskuplenieusessome of the same metafictional devices to probe the social and psychological aspectsof guilty conscience. His story stands out as a sharp critique of the intelligentsiaduring the Thaw years. In the heady atmosphere of amnesty for Stalin's prisonersand of cultural renewal, the intelligentsia, long the voice of moral conscience inRussian society, in particular, are forced to confront the question of their ownculpability, and the extent to which they still harbour a Stalinist mentality. NowFeliks Chernov, a prisoner returning from years of hard labour, accuses theprotagonist (and chief narrator), Viktor Volskii, of informing on him and thuscausing his arrest and imprisonment. Viktor, who has always believed himself tohave a clear conscience, searches his memory but can remember no such act.Meanwhile, Feliks uses his newly assumed status as high moral judge over Stalinistsociety to condemn Viktor to lifelong solitude, excommunicating him from societyby informing all Viktor's friends and colleagues of his crime. One by one theyabandon him. Viktor, in turn, tries out the various moral options open to him: silentdismissal of the allegations, confrontation with Feliks, and finally submission toFeliks'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 inthe 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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EDITH W. CLOWES I57rest of society and chargespeople with theidea that 'there is nodifferencewhether weare inprisonor theprisonis within us'. He concludes with theexhortation: Donot runaway fromyourselves' (Daniel', p. 2 ). FortheseactivitiesViktoris arrested,andputinto a mental hospital. Sedatedwith tranquilizers,he can hardlyremember who he isor who it is who comes to visit him. His one goal becomes escape from the insaneasylum to some distant place wherehe can regatherhis shattered sense ofself. In thiswishheironically exchangesplaceswith Feliks,whohasjust returned romtheremotereaches of the gulag system with a newly constructed sense of self and of moralpurpose. Viktor finds a key suggestively like those for the locks on railroad cars,presumably used to transport prisoners eastward. The story that started withamnesty ends, thus, with a new form of imprisonment.Daniel"s story is really about a kind of guilt that has saturated all of educatedsociety and which finds release and, he implies, a very poor resolutionin punishingscapegoats such as Viktor. Viktor is no better and no worse than the rest of theintelligentsia,allof whom live life on thesurface,askingnoquestionsotherthan wherethe next intellectual fashion is to come from. The terrible moral dilemmas thatresurfaceafter theamnestyarefirmly gnored.In his introductionto thestoryDaniel'remarksthat theintelligentsiaabsorbedthesongs, sayings, and traditionsoflife in theconcentrationcamponly as amomentarydistraction: Therewas aspecialpoignancyin the fact that a cosy chat about the Comedie Francaise was interrupted by themelancholy curses ofa campsurvivor'(Daniel', p. 8). Its moral essonsignored,campcultureis quickly convertedto gristfor the belletristicmill: 'The crazywolfhowl, thelice-riddenprison 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 theothers might have been similarly accused and possibly wrongly punished, for itbecomes clear that there is no defence against such accusations. In the post-Stalinistera the Stalinist mentality persists. No one demands hard proof of guilt: just as inStalinist times, if someone is accused, especially by someone with status andauthority, thenhemustbeguilty. The writerIgol'nikovmentions that all intellectualsfeel the guilt of inaction, flippantly referringto the sense of social ineffectualityofpopulists in the late nineteenth century. What he and others fail to do, and whatDaniel' tries to bring out, is to define the nature of guilt eating away at thecontemporaryintelligentsia.To achieve his goal, Daniel' drawson a varietyofexperimentaltechniques.At theoutset his storyseems to be writtenina standardrealist vein. Its plotishistoricallyandsocially situated. Although the narrative is told in the first person, the narrator'sversion of thingsat theoutsetappearstoreflectsocial eventsaccurately.However,thestory is told in an aesthetically much more self-conscious way than most Soviet'realism' is. It is narratedby Viktor, whose point of view varies between being quitereliable and being wholly unreliable. Likewise, other short narrativesinterpolatedinto Viktor'sstory,such asFeliks'saccusation,areofquestionable reliability.Despitethe purportedrealism of the narrative,it isalways difficult to evaluatecharactersandtheirutterances. Most important, throughout the text, 'realist'narration s interrup-ted by shorter inserted sections that recast the events of the story in a variety ofcontexts. Here differentvoices speak, and social actuality, the superficialwork-and-playworldof the Moscow intelligentsiainViktor'snarrative, scalled intoquestion. Itis through these sections that Daniel' reveals 'reality'as mere masquerade.


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I58 KafkaandRussian Thaw'FictionThe first insert is a dream inserted into the text in such a way that the reader atfirst mistakes it for first-level 'reality'.Viktordreams that he is on an excursionboatwith lots of otherpeople. Everyone is talkingat once and listening to no one. Unableeven to hear the sound of his own voice, Viktorpanics, thinking, 'We shall turnoverif we can't hear each other' (Daniel', p. 9). He is obviously worried about theisolation of each personand especially his own isolation within the crowd,unable tomake himself understoodor to understandanyone else in this mass hysteria.Despitehis dream's potential significancein illuminating the moral condition of his society,Viktor wakes up eager to forget his anxiety, welcoming the return to surfaceexistence as a 'slow resurrection from the dead' (Daniel', p. 9).The second insert is an allegoryin which Good and Evil areplaying chess. Good isin a hurry to win and claim its victory, and in its haste concedes to Evil many moregames 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 goodcanoften amount to doing evil. The mass ostracism ofViktor,it is implied, isjust onemore proof that the Stalinist guilty conscience, the destructive need for victims inorderto assert one's own goodness and rectitude,are alive and well in a traumatizedsociety tryingits hardest to ignore the effectsof an evil past.In the third and fourth inserts the 'author', who is sometimes reminiscent ofTerts's author/narrator, speaks up to ask the reader how he should save hisprotagonist. 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 thatsounds very much like one side of a cryptic telephone conversationwithout namesand full of innuendo (perhapswith his censor?)he insists that hisjob is not to mix inthe affairs of his characters but to evaluate them. Now he sounds more like aprocuratorwho refuses to reconsider a guilty sentence. Having hastily condemnedViktor and thus shown himself to be no better than his other characters,he assumesa flippant tone much like that of the writerIgol'nikov. He answers the question as towho is guilty with the general, and irresponsible, truism operational in Stalinisttimes that everyone is guilty of something. This moralistic but deeply amoral'author' then suggests that maybe Feliks should also be made to pay since, 'aseveryone knows', there are plenty of provocateurs among the prisoners (Daniel',p. 20). Then, once again, he reaffirmshis condemnation of Viktor with the thoughtthat 'if it turns out that he really is not guilty of this, then he is [certainlyguilty] ofsomething else' (Daniel', p. 20).Thus, as with Terts's story, the constructofguilthas an airofinauthenticity aboutit. Just as the story is a literary construct, so the assignment of guilt is based on afictioncreatedby a fraudulentauthor who is neitherdisinterestedin the best sense ofthe term nor concernedwith the fate of his characters.At best he is indifferent n theway that people are who claim 'just to be doing theirjob' and thus disclaim allresponsibility for their actions. By analogy, Stalinism, the systemthatplayedon thissense of guilt on a monumental scale, is also exposed as a fiction perpetratedby afraud.Daniel"s story interplays subtly with two Kafka works, The Trial and TheJudgement. he similarity comes mainly in the protagonist,Viktor. As he develops,Viktor correspondsclosely to Kopelev's descriptionof Kafkacharacters as 'the most


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EDITH W. CLOWESisolated - hopelessly isolated - people', 'deprived of biographies, deprived ofindividual traits',without past and with 'nothing beyond the bounds of the fantasticplot structures that have been erected around them'. To begin with, Viktor, likeeveryone else, inhabits the surfaceof social life. Alone and a bachelor by choice, heholds his friends, and especially women, at arm's length. He believes he knowshimself and his past, but as the story progresses, he is caught in the force field ofunsubstantiated accusation and finds he has no biography and no reliablepast. Hecannot remember the events to which Feliks alludes. Since he lacks the determina-tion to make Feliks prove his allegations with hard fact, he loses the battle of willswith his formerfriend. What is more,he comes to believe that thepast, as he believedit to exist, has been an illusion seen throughrose-colouredglasses. For example, heremembers the show trials and demonstrations of I937 and I938 as bright, gayevents held in the best of bright, golden weather. Gradually what he has alwaysbelieved to be his artistic 'talent' (he designs advertisements),he now realizes to benothing. He has wasted his lifeillustrating misleading slogans. In theend as he sinksinto drugged oblivion in the mental hospital, he has nothing, he even has to keepreminding himself that his name is Viktor Volskii. All he knows is that he wants toescape into isolation. Feliks has won.Margaret Dalton characterizes Viktor as a moral type very similar toJoseph K.:both 'had led a completely self-centered,unthinking existence, and [are] thereforebrought to trial'.18 This evaluation, although largelyaccurate,does not address themoral problem of mass social trauma outlined above and assumes that it is onlybecause Viktor and JosephK. are self-centred that they are tried. Indeed, allmembers of the Moscow intelligentsia, like most characters in The Trial, areself-centred, but very few are tried. The issue with Viktor seems rather to be somelevel of moralvulnerabilityand a willingnessto be punished and, indeed, to 'punish'himself. These qualities make Viktor akin to Georg Bendemann in Kafka's TheJudgement.Here Georg's father, with whom he has lived and worked for years,suddenly and violently breaks throughsurfacefamiliarityto 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-upmay seem, accusation is heapedon accusation, gaining weight and authority, with the result that Georg eventuallyloses all self-confidence,succumbs to terribledoubt, and ultimately is convinced ofhis own guilt. Similarly the authority of Feliks's convictions compels Viktor tobelieve in his own guilt, even if there is no concreteproofof a guilty act. Viktor losesthe basis for a life on the surface of things, the belief that he is 'clean'. He losesconfidence in his memory. His 'friends' help the process along. Although theyprofessto want to believe Viktor, it is left unsaid that they are unsure, and they soondrift away. Viktor, who is a far weakerpersonalitythan Feliks, is thus overcome bythe power of suggestion that he should isolate himself. Like Georg who, at hisfather'scommand, runs out of the house and throws himself into the river,Viktor bythe end wants only what Feliks has commanded: to be alone, far away fromhumansociety.Ultimately (and this question is intimated in Kafka's work) Daniel' asks aboutthe source ofjustice and moral right. While Kafka questions the moral authorityofbureaucratic/theocratichierarchies,Daniel' probes the assumed moral superiority18 MargaretDalton, Andrei iniavskii ndJuliiDaniel':TwoSoviet Heretical'WritersWurzburg:Jal-Verlag,I973), p. I65.

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I6o KafkaandRussian Thaw'Fictionof the victims of such systems. Do victims make ablejudges?Are people like Feliksjustified in assigning guilt without firmproof,just becausethey have been tohell andback?It is certainlytruethat the moralauthorityofsufferers s considerable,at leastin the context of this story, and they areperceivedby the characters as being the truejudges of the Stalinist age. Certainly it seems clear that the artistic intelligentsia,themselves also survivorsof Stalinism but also in partproductsof Stalinist thinking,have no moral stature. The worstof the lot, ofcourse, is the 'author' who purportstosit in judgement over his characters. These people, like Viktor himself, ignore themoral issues and thus help to perpetuatethe great 'fabricofguilt' that is eating awaythe community.Terts and Daniel' both consider the ways in which life after the Fall, the Stalinistage, has destroyed the moral integrity of the human psyche. The cloud of guilt,whether from Stalinist accusations of 'disloyalty' or post-Stalinist revelations ofdeceit, eats at everyone, destroying the possibility of new social health and, indeed,of constructive human relationships. Iampol'skii's novel, Moskovskaia litsa,con-siders survival during the Fall: that is, how one man, K., a literaryscholar with abackground as a war veteran, retains something like sanity, a sense of selfhood, asense of the past, despite the spies that crowd him and the absurdities that denymeaning to his life. Despite its dark humour and cloying atmosphere, it is in a waythe most hopeful of the three works.Everything about this novel is slow-moving, yet deliberate and intense. Althoughin this and many other ways, Moskovskaialitsabearsa close relationshipto TheTrialand a numberofotherworks of modernistprose, it standsverymuch on its own as anoriginal work, certainly among the best works of experimental prose of the post-Stalin era. The protagonist and narrator of the tale is K., an obvious allusion toJoseph K. Both characters are aware of some judgement hanging over them andwait from minute to minute for the end. By using first-personnarrativeexclusively,Iampol'skii takes away all pretense to objectivity that Kafkamay have had. WhileKafka narratesTheTrial n the thirdperson,his narrator s clearlyinsideJoseph K.'sconsciousness. Although other people are permitted to tell their stories, no othernarrative point of view is ever given. In Moskovskaia litsa, no one else is evenpermitted to tell his own tale:K. recordseverythingas he perceivesit. Even less thanin TheTrial s 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:Theshadowy,wicked,andhorrible ideofhumannaturenevitably urstopen, nspiteofallefforts ndpretenseso conceal tscold,corroding,nsensible orce. n Kafkat arouses atred- thispower yinginwait until t is timetoambush ts victim n the darknighttime treetsandalleysof bigcities,at crowded rossings,n people'shomes[... ] thisforce illing ife,lurkingeverywherewhereevil mayhideitself,gradually ntwining he humansoul, [.. ]striving ocaptureandstrangleman.19K. imagines the file that is kept on him at the appropriate office, and awaits themoment when its contents will be used to ruinhim. He is always awareof spies, theireyes watching his everymovement, even throughwalls. He is sure that it is theywhocall his number on the telephone, only to hang up aftera moment ofsilence when hepicks up the receiver. The concierge of the communal apartmentin which he lives,19Boris Suchkov, 'Franz Kafka', in AnAnthologyf MarxistCriticismHanover, NH: University Press ofNew England, I98I), pp. 125-85 (p. I42).


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EDITH W. CLOWES I6iSvizliak, is continually bombardinghim with questions about his privatelife and thenature of his work. The fact, for example, that K. has a private telephone makesSvizliak suspect that he may be part of some spy network.BothJoseph K. and K., the victims, also victimize other people. At the beginningof The Trial,Joseph K. torments a neighbour, Fraulein Burstner, invading herprivacy and assaulting her. Likewise, K. makes his contribution to the Stalinistnetworkof anxiety and terror. He plays as much as possible on Svizliak'ssuspicionsand fears.Though he never informs on people, he too is a voyeur:he noticespeople'scomings and goings, their views, their associates.20At night, he calls people on thephone, 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 atactic similar to that of OneDay in theLife of IvanDenisovich,K. tells about onetwenty-four-hour period in his life, starting with the morning and continuing untilthe early hours of the next morning. His time is divided between going for walksaround the Arbat section of Moscow where he lives, sleeping, ruminatingabout hispast, and going out to shop for food. Much as in TheTrial,events seem unrelated,linkedonly by the main character. Dream time, a kind of floatingpresent,takes over.Past and present merge one into the other. There is no real chronology, nonormality, 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 ishardly noticeable. K. exists, concentratingall his forcesmerely to survive.As in The Trial (and, it should be said, CrimeandPunishment),he spaces ofMoskovskaia litsa are small and dark, with eyes watching at all times from behindcurtains, 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 thesecrowded quarters with the most incongruous group of things and people. Quiteunlike Kafka, Iampol'skii leavens his difficult, dense story with a dose of blackhumour. He animates the dour surroundings: for example, comparing a lightedwindow with a 'bruised eye' (Iampol'skii, p. 162) or an official's office with acrematorium (Iampol'skii, p. 46). Using an absurdist technique, akin to Ionesco's,he describes in a list the deliriumofobjects that block the front hall to his apartmentbuilding:a broad,darkcorridor,mellingof mothballs,buttsofcandles,mousedroppings, rowdedwithold, crumbling upboards,ullofuselessbooks, runksboundwithironbands,againstwhichyou alwaysbangyourknees, omesortof balesandbaskets tuffedwithallkindsofragsandnonsense,andmaybeevenrocks,ust somethingofillthespace, ust to getin people'sway.Here also arezincwashtubs, ike caskets orchildren, normous rangeandsky-bluebottles,which hold the devil knowswhat, an old hunched-overamovarglints,a lady'sbicyclewithsharpspokesstickingout from hewheel,a dried igplant,andthere s evenastuffedbear, aken romGodknowswhere,ongsinceconsumed ymoths, hat ouches ou nafatherlywayandyoushudderwith alarm it's asif ithad beenwaiting ustforyouinthiscommunal orest. Iampol'skii, .49)

As in Kafka's novel, the denizens of this world are generally out to achieve twothings: to takegrossadvantageofeach other and eventuallyto ruin each other beforethey themselves are ruined. But Iampol'skii's characters are more colourful andabsurdly humorous than Kafka's, who lack personal traits almost entirely. Theofficiouspetty dictator of a concierge, Svizliak, is reminiscent of an Ionesco fascist.20 Boris Iampol'skii, Moskovskaiaulitsa.Roman, Znamia (1988:2), 46-I 4; (I988:3), I21-74 (p. I34).


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i62 KafkaandRussian Thaw'FictionLike the characters who gradually turn into rhinos in Rhinoceros,Svizliak has anenormous skull which, as K. remarks, nature must have meant to put on a rhino. (Healso owns a smelly dog-hair coat: K. imagines that he will relish the time when Svizliakdies, 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. notesthat his neighbour would have made his way in any kind of society. Having started lifeas a kulak, he spent the NEP period of the I 92os, the one period in Soviet history whensmall private enterprise was permitted, managing his own business for repairingsafes. Under Stalin he acquired the knack of unmasking 'enemies of the people' andsoon was given the administration of this apartment house, which he runs mercilesslyas a petty fiefdom. He transfers his experience as a locksmith to this job, locking upevery square metre of extra space, claiming it for himself. He forces the residents of thecommunal apartment to listen to the blaring radio and do the exercises that arebroadcast every day, take number chits for their place in line to use the apartment'sone bathroom, self-righteously writing reports on all of them. The reports he writesare stupid but none the less harmful. For example, he accuses one neighbour ofhousing people without a Moscow residence permit. As it turns out, the names he hasheard 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 ubiquitoussuspicion that K. must preserve himself. He deals with his neighbours' imprecationsin part by disappearing into the world of fiction that he has made his profession. Butfiction cannot save K.'s sanity indefinitely. He spends hours meditating on himselfand his past, searching for some bad deed, and, like Joseph K., finds ways to assurehimself that he is indeed guilty of nothing. And likeJoseph K., he finds very realreasons to be anxious and suspicious. Kafka's protagonist feels that everybody inpower, judges, magistrates, lawyers, and artists, are in a cabal. They seem to know asecret truth that will save them but that is withheld from others and for which othersmust pay. What is an abstract, ahistorical condition in Kafka's novel is here placed ina concrete, historical context. Iampol'skii's protagonist realizes that, for whateverreasons, his historical time, the early I950s under the aging Stalin, on the eve of a newpurge, is one that demands victims. Guilty or not, everyone pays in some way. Thingswill be calm for a short time, and suddenly 'the atmosphere becomes close andterrifying, and victims were required, the constant offerings, the unquenchableoffering of victims' (Iampol'skii, p. 67). K. imagines all too well the stages ofpersecution: the phone call, the report, the arrest, the interrogation, and, finally, theend. He remembers how in 1937 he skittishly boarded a train and headed southwardwithout looking back, now wondering if this could be grounds for arrest. He alsoremembers the interrogations during the war, after his escape from a German POWcamp, by some officious personage who acted as if he already knew the answers to thequestions he was asking, accusing K. of treachery for 'allowing' himself to be caughtby the Germans and then spying for the Germans in return for his release (Iam-pol'skii, p. 92). He wonders if he might be considered guilty also for not handing in hispistol 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 beingcommandeered as a prosecutor for the planned arrests.Like Joseph K., he tries his best to believe in his innocence. He finally permitshimself to ask whether he might not be guilty at all (Iampol'skii, p. io8). Towardsnight 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 itfrom the outside. It is in this condition that K. summons the courage to confront theinscrutable power that torments him. Somewhat like Joseph K., who goes to thecathedral 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 watchesthe tormented life that is forced to continue all night, the time when the 'generalissi-mus' is most wide awake. No one in the state hierarchy may sleep. Here again hemakes up his own absurd vision of Soviet hierarchy, the humour of which helps K. tocalm himself somewhat:Stalin was not asleep, nor were the ministers, nor their deputies, aides, assessors, nor thesecretaries, the stenographers, the chief accountants, and chiefgeologists, nor the chief steelfounders, nor the chief rolling-mill operatives, nor the chief engineers, nor the couriers,northe buffetattendants, the delivery boys, the medical technicians, [... ] nor the police agents,and out there across the whole Great country, the secretaries of regional committees, thecommanding officers of militarydistricts, the directorsof factories,the managersof minesthe whole countrywas reconstructingitself, recuttingits day, its life forthe convenience of thephysical system [organizm] f the insomniac generalissimus. (Iampol'skii, pp. 154-55)K. then heads to the railway station, where he finds a statue of Stalin himself. As theparable 'Before the Law' conveys a sense of metaphysical indifference, so K. sees inStalin a terrible indifference to human fate:There stood the five-yard-highmarble leaderin a full-lengthgreatcoat and semi-militarycap,with his hand in his lapel, and around the pedestalseethed, swarmed,bustled, buzzed, peeledits hard-boiled eggs and oranges [... ] the crowd of passengers, and with an arrogantstoneface [... ] he looked over their heads into the distance, only into the distance [and] saw whatno one saw or could see. (Iampol'skii, p. 56)Having thus admitted to himself the truth about Stalin's colossal egotism andarrogance, and its effect on the whole country and its citizens, K. feels somewhatbetter. He takes courage in the small scenes of station life. For example, one personresists a police officer who demands to see his papers, and another insists that she isnot afraid when people stare at her. The sense of nausea and exhaustion close inagain as K. returns home. He is no longer skittish, but he is fully aware of theemptiness and senselessness of his existence.As with Terts's and Daniel"s stories, this narrative ends with a metafictionalperspective on its own nature and, by implication, on the historical scenarioperpetrated 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 Stalinistscript. Reminding the reader of the everlasting 'file' that accumulates informationon each citizen, he points out the metafictional dominant, the monological, authori-tarian engine that drives the narrative of Stalinist life, determining character,consciousness, and plot. In the notion of a file kept in some impersonal governmentoffice 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, followedhim everywhere,and, nevergrowingold, it accompanied him throughhis youth to maturityand on to his lateryears, and probablywill see him into his deep old age, probablywill follow his casket, a dressuniformin the crowd, in the winter crowd midst dark overcoatsand lambskinhats, and it willstop at the edge of his grave, and will not rest until it hears the sound offrozenclumpsof earthrattlingon the lid of the casket,only then breathinga sigh ofrelief,will it leave and go to sleepin 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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I64 KaJka ndRussian Thaw'FictionWhat, then, did Kafka's modernist art help to bring alive in these post-Stalinwriters? How did it compareto other Western late modernist art?And, finally, how

did it challenge and discredit the politicallycontrolled aesthetic of socialist realism?If officially Kafka the modernist was perceived as the figureheadof a threateningaesthetic opponent, modernism, then unofficiallyand much morepowerfullyhe waswelcomed as a voice with a greatdeal to contribute about the realspiritualconditionof Soviet society of the Stalinyears. To the writers,as well as to the critics,especiallyDneprov and Kopelev, he pointed the way beyond the whitewash of Stalinistideology and towards the moral and psychological truthsconcealed there. There canbe no social and psychological 'health' without acknowledgementof the pathologiesengendered by prevalent socio-culturalmyth. Terts and Iampol'skii both allude toKafka, as well as more recent Westernexperimentalists,in their effort to expose the'metaphysical' conceit of Stalin. Playing on aesthetic notions of objectivity andomniscience inherent in realist, and particularlysocialist realist, art, this fiction byimplication calls into question claims to total political control and moral authoritymade by Stalin. Stalin's claims to omnipresence and omniscience are treated byTerts as a fraud. Iampol'skii stresses the demonic ways in which this claim preysonthe human psyche. Omnipresence and omniscience are made palpable, exposed asamoral qualities in the various statues of Stalin on the Moscow landscape and thefiles held in grey bureaucratic 'crematoria'. It is in his ability sometimes to resistStalin's authoritarianscript and to imagine humorous alternatives that K. may beable to survive.

By implication this fiction denies another assumption at the heart of socialistrealism, that art should at once document social actuality and codify politicallydesirable patterns of thought and behaviour. All three authors question the exist-ence of boundaries between 'fantasy' and 'reality', and suggest instead that thesocial realm, social consciousness and behaviour, is also a fiction consciously to bedeconstructedand reconstructed,particularlywhen it has become thefieldofplay ofa paranoid, tyrannical imagination. As an instructive counterexample, Daniel'shows a post-Stalinist intelligentsia trying to ignore the deep psychological traumaof the preceding age, doing its best to repressall links to the past, and, in a way, totransform the Dionysian insanity of Stalinist life into an Apollonian screen ofcultural artefacts, to make life 'safe' and superficially 'sane'. In so doing, they donothing but recodifythe deep authoritythat the Stalinistmyth holds over theirlives:they re-enforcethe psychosis of guilt.Modernist self-ironyand the modernistsubversionof totalizing dogma and mythhave become in the post-Stalin era powerful (but risky for their creators andconsumers) tools for the unhinging of Stalinism. The fact that many of these writersended up silenced, in prison or in some form of exile for their efforts,suggests thatthey were addressing a readership still too thoroughly 'Stalinist' to face theself-scrutinywhich their works compelled. However, it appears also to be true thattheir voices did reach a younger generation that in the late 198osfinallycame closerto power, aware of the destruction done in the past, and determined to undo theStalinist system. Once again, as in the I96os, Kafka's workis being welcomed as aneeded anti-authoritarianculturalforce.The secret Soviet life of Kafka in the I96os suggests the complexity of Russianattitudes towards the West. While it is obvious that censorsand ideologues did theirutmost to foster an adversarialrelationship to European 'modernism', it has never


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EDITH W. CLOWES 165been clear what was transpiring beneath the surface. In the I96os, people weresurprised at the riches that emerged from the I92os and I930s. Now we are delightedto discover unknown works from the I96os. The art of Terts and Daniel' has beenknown for some time as rare examples of late modernist fiction. But previouslyunsuspected treasures, such as Moskovskaia ulitsa, divulge strong ties to Westernmodernism. These pieces of evidence lead one to ask what other manuscripts are stilllying about in some desk drawer.PURDUE UNIVERSITY EDITH W. CLOWES

kafka and russian experimental fiction in the thaw, 1956-1965

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