The Purge Of the Artists

This morning I read the chapter in Conquest’s book The Great Terror about the purge of the artists in Stalinist Russia. For obvious reasons, this chapter affected me deeply. The writers, actors, theatre directors, poets … and of course, the ballerinas. Ah yes, because it is well known that there is only ONE way to dance a ballet and that is the Stalinist way … and it is OBVIOUS when a ballerina, in the middle of a pas de deux, is expressing, through her movements, traitorous sentiments and the desire to blow up traintracks across Siberia. The whole thing would be laughable if the consequences hadn’t been so dire. The sentences had no basis in reality. I mean, NONE of it had any basis in reality, obviously. People were accused of things they hadn’t done. There’s one anecdote of an actor being imprisoned for 15 years for saying, “Let’s not give them Soviet straw. Let’s do the classics!” Gorky’s role in all of this is really interesting to me. I don’t know much about him, and I believe in the end he was a victim of the Purge too (haven’t gotten to that part yet) – but he championed the rights of writers, was a big mouth, he had the attention of international writers … but it is amazing to me that he was allowed to survive for so long.

I was very interested to read the account of the imprisonment of theatre director V.E. Meyerhold (one of my cultural idols). I’ve spent years studying this guy’s work since I first encountered it in college. His name comes up again and again, in my world. He is still referenced all the time and his writings on theatre and the art of it are considered classics in the genre. A brilliant man. I wish, again, that I had a dern time machine so that I could go back and see some of his productions. His speech denouncing what was going on in the Purge at the time of his arrest moved me to tears.

What interests me (in an awful kind of way) was the complete decimation of the country’s intellectual life. The purge of historians, the purge of scientists and engineers, the purge of librarians, the purge of writers and artists … all of them – GONE. Leaving what in its wake? Unimaginative brutal kow-towers, with no talent, no gifts, willing to parrot the party line handed down … A wasteland. An intellectual wasteland. The triumph of Newspeak. Conquest describes the scientific academies in Byelorussia and Kiev, etc., sitting literally empty for years.

All of this reminded me of one of the passages I found most moving in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book Imperium (his great great book about the Soviet Union). It is about censorship, and the suppression of writing, and how certain talented writers wiggled their way around this problem. Listen:

Rim Ahmedov. He gave me his book A Word About Rivers, Lakes, and Grasses, published in 1990 in Ufa. People in the former Soviet Union had resolved the problem in “the system and I” in various ways. Some supported the authorities, others were in the opposition, and many simply sought some kind of sanctuary for themselves — the further away from politics, the better (like the couple of married zoologists in the former Leningrad who chose as their subject of specialization the mimicry of monkeys).

Seemingly, but only seemingly, nature was such a subject/sanctuary. During Stalin’s lifetime, the master descriptive naturalist was Mikhail Prishvin. During this time, when there was still no television or color photography, Prishvin’s prose had no equal and glistened with all the colors of an autumnal forest, of pebbles at the bottom of a stream, of the crowns of mushrooms and the feathers of birds. I have always thought that these descriptions of dewdrops and of the flower of bird cherry were a kind of escape, a peaceful retreat. I said as much to the Russian poet Gala Kornilova. “But not at all!” she protested. “This was opposition writing! The Kremlin wanted to destroy our language, and Prishvin’s language was rich, magnificent. They wanted everything to be without character, without distinction, gray, and in his writing Russia is so colorful, gorgeous, unique! We read Prishvin during those years so as not to forget our real language, for it was being replaced by newspeak.”

And there is something similar in the prose of Rim Ahmedov. Rim does not write about the achievements of the Russian government — about the chemical industry, about plastic conductors, about faucets and tannins. Rim doesn’t notice this at all. On the contrary, in opposition to the destroyers of his Bashkiria, he describes the natural beauty that still survives — the bream in the Sutoloka River, the trees on the Nurtau Mountain, the country road lined with flowers leading to the Janta-Turmush farm. He travels by boat or wanders around his country with a tent and a dog.

Grasses are his favorite plant. Ahmedov is a herbalist; he collects grasses, dries them, mixes them, adds something or other to them, and makes medicines. He tells me that any single medicine meant to treat everyone is bad and cannot be efficacious. Each medicine must be prepared individually, after a conversation with the sick person. Such a conversation is necessary so that one can select the right type of grass to awaken in that particular individual the strength to combat the disease. Without this, healing is impossible.

The creature that Ahmedov best remembers from his childhood is a small golden-green beatle — Cryptocephalus sericeus. Rim found it on the leaf of dead nettle — dead meaning the kind that does not sting.

And although he is now sixty years old, he has never been able to find such a beetle again.

Obviously it would take a very very good eye to see that nature writing could be oppositional … you have to be in tune with the entirety of that society, you have to be able to pick up the hidden signals, understand the total context of the DEATH of imagination, the DEATH of creative liveliness … but that anecdote about Prishvin strikes me as intensely moving.