Abstract
There is a great deal going for this book. The author is a long-established authority on modern Russian social history, particularly known for When Russia Learned to Read (1985). It is remarkably well supported: there are over 50 pages of footnotes, above all citing recent commentators, while by his own account he gave major parts, or all, of the text to be read by some 30 friends or colleagues. Rebelliously, one might consider this in (in Soviet parlance) ‘over-fulfilling the norm’; there were occasions when I wanted to demand of the author ‘Well, what do YOU think?’, as opposed to all his cited authorities. But it also means that one can hardly open the book at random without the eye lighting on some worthwhile piece of information or opinion.
What’s it all about? Brooks identifies the years from the death of Nicholas I, 1855, to that of Stalin, 1953, as constituting an ‘extraordinary period of creativity in Russian literature, art, music, dance and other media’, and sets out to explain its intensity and the shape it took. He also tries to ‘develop the metaphor of a cultural ecosystem’ in which multiple forces interact. This turns out to be an immensely bold agenda, within which the author (as he is aware) is very selective; more on this point later. As for the period studied, its beginning – during the so-called Crimean War – makes sense, so long as it is remembered that culture and the arts never come out of nowhere, however original their developments may look. The end date, significant as it may be in the history of the USSR, is more problematic; the historical scaffolding that supports the cultural observations in most of the book fades from view around the time of the War, and the approach to history is anyhow devoid of the kind of nuances that, for example, inform the end of Doctor Zhivago: ‘Although the enlightenment and liberation which had been expected to come after the war had not come with victory, a presage of freedom was in the air throughout those post-war years, and it was their only historical meaning.’ A more nuanced approach might also have provided a counter-view to one that perceives the mid-1930s for intellectuals, and indeed the public, as ‘dark hours when pens were downed’, recoiling from ‘the cruelty and cynicism of Socialist Realism’ – it could seem like a time of growing prosperity and normalization of life after the turmoil and vicious in-fighting that characterized what went before. But Socialist Realism, often here mentioned, is taken for granted, its genesis and principles left undescribed.
There are a few other oddities that need comment. The Orthodox Church, wellspring of Russian culture, is discussed only in the limited (and, I would say, overused) context of ‘Holy Fools’ and also a page on iconic conventions; while ecology in the sense of the natural world, hugely important not only to the modernist guru Khlebnikov but to the growth of the whole Russian self-image in the modern period, is absent. A mistake is the location of Chekhov’s estate Melikhovo as in Ukraine (it is a stone’s throw from Moscow), while the writer V. Bianki did not live to be 105. Strangest is a linguistic assertion: that ‘lisa’, ‘fox’, a feminine noun, is ‘exceptional in that most Russian animal names are only feminine in the diminutive’. Off the top of my head I thought of the standard Russian names for dog, pig, cow, horse, sheep, squirrel, lynx, monkey, rat, mouse, duck, chicken, bird (and firebird!), fish (and various fishes), shark, snake, toad, frog, lizard, snail, fly, butterfly, louse, flea, wasp, bee – all feminine in gender, none diminutives.
Brooks divides the near-century he studies into three chunks, with the breaks at 1890 and 1917. Within these there are thematic chapters, often with binary titles (Freedom and the Fool; Desire and Rebellion; Art and Authority; Irony and Power, etc.). These can work well as individual studies, but scarcely further any agenda of ‘cultural ecosystem’ – save (as I see it) in one case, right in the middle of the book, where Diaghilev’s great productions Petrushka and Firebird are discussed, and the whole scene comes to life; I get the impression that this is the period in which Brooks feels most at home. Otherwise the discussions can seem frustratingly incomplete. Chekhov is clearly a favourite subject of the author’s – with far more index entries than any other topic – and there’s even a chapter ‘Chekhov in his Time’, going into considerable detail about his early work and milieu. But the reader may be disconcerted not to find a single reference anywhere to Uncle Vanya or Three Sisters; while an even more striking lacuna is the lack of any mention here, or where landscape art is discussed, of Chekhov’s great friend (if occasional enemy) Isaak Levitan. Opportunities for ‘cultural ecology’ are equally missed when Dostoevskii is not discussed in relation to the contemporaries with whom he tangled, from Turgenev down to the immensely prolific, if now ludicrous-seeming, Boborykin. Equally, Dostoevskii’s hilariously comic verses of Captain Lebiadkin – together with those of A. K. Tolstoi and ‘Prutkov’ – were to have a direct relationship with the 1920s–30s world of Shostakovich, Kharms, Zabolotskii and above all Oleinikov (which gets no mention, despite a chapter on ‘Celebrity, Humour and the Avant-Garde’). Brooks has plenty of references to humour and irony, but never to wit – the quality without which twentieth-century literature makes little sense.
In reviewing, one must avoid the trap of complaining if an author does not fulfil an agenda that was never intended, and I hope I am not presuming to rewrite the book in such a way. But I can only say that any lacunae or lost opportunities (and there are many more) would be forgiven if one felt the author could convey more of the exhilaration, inspiration and sheer strangeness of the arts that he tempted us with at the outset. From that period thinkers (themselves fine practitioners) like Shklovskii and Tynianov could have pointed out a way to go, but Brooks has not much time for thinkers or theoreticians. He gives dutiful, sometimes adequate, plot summaries of prose works – but no inspirational analysis. As for poetry, hugely important in the period, it might as well not exist, save maybe at the margins of literature: no Esenin, almost no Pasternak. Maiakovskii is mentioned as ‘opting for self-aggrandizement’ by conversing with the sun in ‘An Extraordinary Adventure’; I would sooner have learned why this is a wonderful poem – indeed a sort of fairy tale (this thought might well have sharpened the author’s interest: see below). Kharms comes in as an amiable children’s writer (who, by the way, often claimed to loathe children), but not as a prose writer comparable with Kafka, still less as one of the true originals of modern theatre and poetry. Describing art works with no illustrations doesn’t work either; as for music, there is little; on architecture, nothing. To quote Goethe, ‘Wer den Dichter will verstehen, / Muss in Dichters Lande gehen’ – here we never enter the ‘land of poetry’, and hardly glimpse it at a distance.
At this point you would guess the reviewer might as well drop his pen and pronounce this a botched if honest effort. But not a bit of it. There is a side to it that I have not mentioned so far, growing in significance as the book goes on, making it all worthwhile. The clue is in the overall title – two creatures who inhabit Russian folklore – and in the 32 colour illustrations, all of which show popular ‘lubki’ (woodcuts) or illustrations from children’s literature, many or most from the author’s own collection. He describes and analyses these with close attention and evident passion, making a remarkable contribution as to how, for example, various editions of Chukovskii’s well-known tales in verse reflect different moments in the Soviet approach to education. Space forbids a longer account of this. Why Brooks did not stick with, and even expand, this rightly favoured side of his scholarship at the expense of his dutiful trot through the world of modernism, I cannot say; but it ultimately validates the enterprise.