Boris Pilnyak
Boris Pilnyak | |
---|---|
USSR | |
Occupation(s) | Novelist, short story writer |
Notable work | The Naked Year, The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon |
Boris Andreyevich Pilnyak (
Biography
He was born Boris Andreyevich Vogau (Russian: Бори́с Андре́евич Вога́у) in Mozhaysk. His father was a doctor, descended from German farmers who settled on the banks of the Volga during the reign of Catherine the Great. His mother came from an old merchant family from Saratov. Boris first became interested in writing at the age of nine. Among his early influences were Andrei Bely, Aleksey Remizov, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.[1]
Pilnyak achieved fame very quickly at the age of 25 through his novel The Naked Year (Голый год, 1922; translated into English 1928), one of the first fictional accounts of the Russian civil war. He was a major supporter of anti-urbanism and a critic of mechanized society, views which brought him into disfavor with Communist critics. The poet Demyan Bedny denounced him in Pravda on 16 October 1923 as a 'stinking' member of the 'horde of clueless fellow travellers'.[2] The Old Bolshevik, Aleksandr Voronsky, founding editor of the journal Krasnaya nov (Red Virgin Soil), was offended by the remark, made by a character, that the Russian revolution "smells of sexual organs", but acknowledged Pilnyak's talent, and published his next work Materials for a Novel.[3]
Pilnyak followed this with a strange short story The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, published in the literary journal
By now Pilnyak was second only to Maxim Gorky as the most read living Russian writer, in the Soviet Union and abroad. To protect his copyright had an arrangement under which all his works were published simultaneously in Moscow and Berlin. His best known novel, Mahogany (Кра́сное де́рево, 1927, translated 1965), was banned in Russia, but—like his other work—was published in Berlin. This gave Pilnyak's enemy, Leopold Averbakh, head of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers the pretext to launch an attack that was carried through four successive weekly editions of the 'Literary Gazette', which Averbakh controlled, and which headlines such as 'A Hostile Network of Agents in the Ranks of Soviet Writers' and 'Boris Pilnyak, Special Correspondent for the White Guard'. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky joined in, claiming that "at the present time of darkening storm clouds this is the same as treachery at the front" and Maxim Gorky wrote to one of the secretaries of the Communist Party, Andrey Andreyev complaining about how "Pilnyak has been forgiven for his story about the death of Comrade Frunze".[5]
Unlike Yevgeny Zamyatin, who was subjected to a similar attack at the same time and refused to apologise or back down, Pilnyak capitulated and agreed to comply with the regime's requirements. He found a new protector in Nikolai Yezhov, the future murderous head of the NKVD, who acted as his personal censor during the composition of his next novel, The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea (Волга впадает в Каспийское море, 1930; translated 1931), which described the forced industrialisation drive in glowing language. Victor Serge visited Pilnyak while this work was in progress. "Pilnyak would twist his great mouth. 'He has given me a list of 50 passages to change outright! Ah!' he would exclaim, 'if only I could write freely!' At other times I found him in the throes of depression. 'They'll end up by throwing me in jail, don't you think?' I gave him heart by explaining that his fame in Europe and America safeguarded him."[6] In Artists in Uniform, published in 1934 Max Eastman wrote a chapter entitled "The Humiliation of Boris Pilnyak."[7]
After he had debased himself, he was allowed to resume his place in the elite, and to travel to Paris, New York and Tokyo. Another of his well-known works is Okay! An American Novel, (О’кей! Американский роман, 1931; translated 1932), an unflattering travelogue of his 1931 visit to the United States. He used the visit to Japan to write A story about how stories come to be written. He was also allocated a private dacha on an estate reserved for privileged writers, where his neighbour was Boris Pasternak, one of the few who had defended him in 1929.[8] In 1936, they were visited by the French novelist André Gide, who was seeking an honest opinion about life in the Soviet Union. A police informer told the NKVD that Pilnyak and Pasternak had several secret meetings with André Gide, and supplied him with information about the situation in the USSR. There is no doubt that Gide used this information in this book attacking the USSR."[9]
Despite his public debasement, Pilnyak acted courageously in secret. When he heard that
Pilnyak began to be rehabilitated and appreciated again in the USSR in the late 1960s and 1970s.[12]
Bibliography
- With the Last Steamboat (1918) [С последним пароходом]
- The Naked Year (1922) [Голый Год]
- Petersburg Story (1922) [Повесть Петербургская]
- Panicle (1923) [Метелинка]
- Sankt-Peter-Burgh (1922) [Санкт-Питер-бурх]
- Deadly Beckoning (1922) [Смертельное манит]
- Nikola-on-Posadiyah (1923) [Никола-на-Посадьях]
- Simple Tales (1923) [Простые рассказы]
- Tales of Brown Bread (1923) [Повести о чёрном хлебе]
- The Third Chair (1923) [Третья столица]
- English stories (1924) [Английские рассказы]
- Tales (1924) [Повести]
- Stories (1924) [Рассказы]
- Machines and Wolves (1925) [Машины и волки]
- The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon (1926) [Повесть непогашенной луны]
- Blizzard (1926) [Метель]
- The Heirs and other stories (1926) [Настроени и др. рассказы]
- Stories of Shreds and Clay (1926) [Рассказы о клочах и глине]
- Russia in Flight (1926) [Россия в полете]
- Ivan Moscow (1927) [Иван Москва]
- Regular stories (1927) [Очередные повести]
- Kataysky Diary (1927) [Катайскйи дневник]
- Combed Time (1927) [Расплёснутое время]
- The Roots of the Japanese Sun (1927) [Корни японского солнца]
- A Big Heart (1927) [Большое сердце]
- Stories (1927) [Рассказы]
- Stories from the East (1927) [Рассказы с востока]
- Katay story (1928) [Катайская повесть]
- Mahagony (1929) [Красное дерево]
- Stories (1929) [Рассказы]
- The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea (1930) [Волга владает в Каспийское море]
- Stories (1932) [Рассказы]
- Okey! An American novel (1933) [О'кэй]
- Stories (1933) [Рассказы]
- Stones and Roots (1934) [Камни и корни]
- Chosen stories (1935) [Изабранные рассказы]
- Birth of Man (1935) [Рождение человека]
- Fruit ripening (1936) [Созревание плодов]
- Meat (1936) [Мясо]
Influence
Pilnyak is generally considered the greatest Russian novelist of 1920s and was the second most read writer of that time, only behind
References
- ^ Alexandrova, Vera (1963). A History of Soviet Literature. New York: Doubleday. pp. 135–136.
- ^ Carr, E. H. (1970). Socialism in One Country. Vol. 2. Pelican. p. 90.
- ISBN 0-8014-9447-8.
- ^ Maguire 1987, p. 126
- ISBN 1-86046-072-0.
- ISBN 0-86316-070-0.
- OCLC 1819626.
- ISBN 978-1-59558-056-6.
- ^ Shentalinsky 1995, p. 149
- ^ "The History of Hell". The Independent. January 8, 1995.
- ^ "The Writer and the Valet". The London Review of Books. September 25, 2014.
- ^ Smothered Under Journalism, Collected Works of George Orwell. p. 24.
Further reading
- Reck, Vera T. (1975). Boris Pil'niak: A Soviet Writer in Conflict with the State. Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0-7735-0237-8.
External links
- Works by Boris Pilniak at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Boris Pilniak at Internet Archive
- Encyclopedia of Soviet Writers
- "On Pilnyak" by Leon Trotsky
- Bogen, Andrey (2012). The Narrative Form by Boris Pil'niak in the Kontext of Russian Classical Tradition (Doctoral dissertation) (in Russian). University of Hamburg.