Monumental Propaganda Page 2

  Zinaida made sure that her husband was always neatly dressed, but with that certain license appropriate for an artist. She herself sewed him the wide flannelette shirts and trousers and the velvet berets in which, as she thought, he resembled Rembrandt. She cooked fish dishes, believing fish contained a lot of phosphorous, which helped to enhance the intellect, talent and male potency. Eventually, Max acquired more or less tolerable working conditions, and in these conditions he was intending to fashion cocks and bears on an even grander scale, but that was when Zinaida had directed his efforts toward new goals and told him that now he must fashion leaders.

  Naturally enough, of all the leaders, Max chose Stalin, and soon he became very successful at manufacturing statues of the great man.

  4

  The group of people who were gathered, stamping their feet, below the pedestal were at one and the same time participants in the ceremony and its audience. Because of the inclement weather there were no other onlookers, and those who had turned out looked as though they were waiting impatiently to rush through the burial of a poor relative rather than engaging in a solemn political ceremony of state importance.

  The monument was unveiled by Aglaya Stepanovna in person. The small number of witnesses later recalled her speech as being precise and firm, without the slightest sign of nervousness, although, of course, she was nervous.

  “Comrades,” she began in a voice made hoarse by a cold and the effects of smoking, and rubbed her frozen nose, “today the entire Soviet people and the whole of progressive mankind is celebrating the glorious jubilee of our very greatest contemporary, the wise leader, the teacher of the peoples, the luminary of all the sciences, the outstanding military leader, our own dearest beloved Comrade Stalin.”

  As she spoke, the gathered public applauded in a habitual manner, reacting to the key words. She briefly explained to her listeners what they already knew, having learned it in their weekly political study sessions. She retold the life of the great leader, recalling the facts of his difficult childhood, his early participation in the revolutionary movement, his role in the Civil War, collectivization, industrialization, the liquidation of the kulaks, the crushing of the opposition and, finally, the historic victory over German fascism.

  She managed to convey in a few words the idea of the exceptional usefulness and necessity, especially in our days, of all forms of propaganda, and in particular of large-scale, monumental visual propaganda designed to endure through the ages. This monument, she said, which had been erected despite the opposition of our enemies, would stand here for thousands of years, inspiring future builders of communism to new feats of heroism.

  Gennadii Kuzhelnikov took note of this phrase. What does she mean by that? he thought. That the Soviet people will be building communism for another thousand years? A stupid slip of the tongue or an act of sabotage? He had not even finished thinking his thought when Aglaya declared the monument open and handed him a large pair of shears like the ones used for clipping sheep. Kuzhelnikov took the shears without removing his gloves, brought the blades together and the ends of the string flew apart, fluttering in the wind. The cover was pulled off with great difficulty, because it had inflated like a parachute and kept tearing itself out of their hands. But when they did finally manage to subdue it, the participants in the event took a few short steps backward, looked up at the monument, gasped in a single breath and froze on the spot.

  None of these people, except for Ogorodov and Zinaida, had the slightest idea about any kind of art, especially about sculpture, but even they could see that they had before them not simply a statue but something quite extraordinary. Stalin was sculpted in full dress uniform with the shoulder straps of a generalissimo, his uniform coat parted slightly to reveal his military jacket and decorations, with his right hand quite obviously raised in greeting to the masses of the people as they passed by, and his left hand lowered, clutching his gloves.

  Stalin looked at the people gathered there as though he were alive. He gazed down on them, grinning mysteriously into his mustache, and everyone thought they saw him actually wave his right hand and move his left, smacking the gloves against his knee.

  At first Max Ogorodov couldn’t believe his own eyes, and when he did, he opened his mouth wide and froze with an expression on his face that can only be called idiotic, as if he himself had been instantly transformed into cast iron.

  In recent years he had sculpted Stalin, only Stalin and nobody but Stalin, but he had sculpted every possible aspect of him: Stalin’s head, Stalin’s bust, Stalin full length, Stalin standing and sitting (lying was the only position he hadn’t sculpted), in a field jacket, in a high-collared tunic, in a long-skirted cavalry greatcoat and in the uniform of a generalissimo. He had eventually grown so skillful at his work that he could fashion Iosif Vissarionovich with his own eyes closed.

  The authorities had given him their seal of approval as a truly fine artist who had completely mastered the method of socialist realism. They valued him and held him up as an example to others, encouraging and supporting him by moral, material and combined means, rewarding him with positions, decorations, bonuses, adulatory articles in the newspapers, the inclusion of his name in the encyclopedia, in the lists of the great modern masters and the lists of recipients of various food products that were in short supply. But his colleagues regarded him as a confirmed second-rater, a cold mechanical artisan, even a hack, and in general whenever his name came up, they said, “Oh him!” And they would gesture dismissively, never suspecting that he had any divine spark in him and thinking that he knew his own worth well enough, and was only concerned to tend his own petty affairs without hankering after an exalted position in art. And that was their big mistake. In actual fact, while well aware that he produced rubbish, the sculptor Ogorodov did hanker after an exalted position, perhaps even one on Mount Olympus itself, and every time he fashioned yet another Stalin he didn’t just churn it out, he strove to create, weaving spells and performing entire religious rites. Each time, he made slight changes to the bearing, the inclination of the head, the narrowing of the eyes and the pressure of the closed lips. As he added the final touches, he would run a long way back, then run up close, sometimes shutting his eyes and making a dent somewhere on a sudden intuition, squeezing up, drawing in and retouching with his fingernail in the insane hope that a miracle would occur through some chance accident. Then he would run away and back again and breathe on his creation through his hands folded into a tube—perhaps it might have seemed funny to an outsider, but he was trying to breathe a soul into his creation! But yet again the creation would turn out lifeless—it had no mystery, no wonder. Ogorodov suffered, sometimes he even wept, tugging at his sparse hair, hammering his fists against his head and calling himself a talentless hack, but he was wrong: a talentless hack is a man who is unaware of his own lack of talent.

  While this sculpture was in the studio, Ogorodov had thought that it too was ordinary, but now, elevated on its pedestal (so that was what had been lacking!), it had come to life and gazed down in mocking triumph on all of them and its own creator with an expression that seemed somehow insolent, even suggesting that it had created itself.

  “My God! My God!” muttered the astounded creator, his eyes fixed on the statue. But it’s alive, really alive, isn’t it? he asked himself, amazed that he hadn’t noticed it before.

  “Calm down!” Zinaida told her husband quietly but firmly, sticking a coarse cigarette with an icicle dangling from its frozen cardboard tube into her mouth.

  “No,” said Ogorodov, without making it clear what he was rejecting, then he reached out his arms to his creation and shouted: “Hey!” And then again: “Hey! Hey!”

  “Who are you yelling at?” Kuzhelnikov asked in arrogant amazement.

  “Not you,” said Ogorodov, dismissing the other’s elevated rank out of hand. And he called out again: “Hey! Hey! Hey!”

  Astounded, the people standing beside Ogorodov drew away from him just in case h
e might be crazy, and he stepped toward the monument with his arms raised aloft in passion and shouted to it: “Hey, say something!”

  Of course, he was not the first sculptor to address such a request to his own work. Long before his time the great Michelangelo had asked the same thing of the Moses he had created. But the people gathered in the square, unsuspecting of any plagiarism, exchanged glances, some of them in fact suspecting—respectfully, of course—that perhaps the sculptor was not quite all there: after all, he was an artist. However, the poet Serafim Butylko approached his brother in art, clapped him on the shoulder and, breathing out fumes of stale alcohol, garlic and rotten teeth, said in a respectful tone: “That’s right, he is almost alive.”

  “Nonsense!” the sculptor protested in a whisper. “What do you mean, ‘almost’? He isn’t almost alive—he is alive. Just look, he’s watching, he’s breathing and there’s steam coming out of his mouth!”

  This was a quite absurd assertion. The iron lips of the sculpture were clamped firmly shut; there was no steam emerging from between them. And there could not be. Perhaps there might just have been a chance eddy of snow in some surface irregularities. But be that as it may, not only the sculptor but everyone else thought they really did see something swirling in the air beneath the iron mustache.

  While Ogorodov shouted incoherently, his wife Zinaida was once again chewing on her extinguished cigarette as she contemplated her immediate future. She had doggedly promoted Ogorodov’s career, fore-seeing even as she did so that if he should really become famous and fashionable, he would be swamped by predatory young female admirers and in the subsequent havoc the position of the faded wife would immediately become untenable. But Ogorodov failed to notice his wife’s emotional turmoil: he tugged off his beret, threw it under his feet and with a cry of “I have vindicated my life!” began trampling the poor rag as furiously as if it were to blame for his not having vindicated his life sooner. “Vindicated, vindicated, vindicated my life!” he carried on bellowing, not understanding that life is given to us just as it is, without any obligations attached, and there is no necessity to vindicate it in any particularly cumbersome fashion.

  He carried on trampling his beret until the wind, taking pity on the miserable rag, snatched it away from Ogorodov and bore it off into the frosty gloom, and Ogorodov, his balding head exposed to the elements, once again raised his hands toward the monument and implored it: “Tell me you’re alive! Prove it, move, give me a sign. Can you hear me or can’t you?”

  And then something happened that is very rare during the winter season: somewhere in the distance there was a low rumble of thunder, as though a cart had rolled along a cobbled street.

  The comrades standing behind Ogorodov were all without exception dyed-in-the-wool materialists and none of them officially believed in either the Supreme Providence or the powers of darkness, but the stronger their official nonbelief, the more they suspected that both of the aforementioned did exist. And so they all flinched instinctively at the sound of thunder, and those at the front stepped back, treading on those behind them, and the lightning that then flashed across the winter sky without any sound of thunder at all left the gathered company absolutely dumbstruck. When the lightning flashed, the eyes of the cast-iron generalissimo lit up with a greedy orange flame that lingered in his eyeballs and faded slowly, as though it were being drawn inward. At this point several participants in the ceremony were overcome by an inexplicable fear, and they involuntarily recalled their transgressions against their wives, their motherland, their Party and Comrade Stalin in person. Remembering the embezzlements, the bribes and the unpaid Party membership dues, they found themselves frozen to the spot, mesmerized by the thought of possible retribution. When this stupefaction began to release its grip, Serafim Butylko spoke up again. In an attempt to raise his own spirits and everyone else’s, he remarked that things still occasionally happened in nature that science was unable to explain.

  “Yes,” regional Party committee secretary Kuzhelnikov replied significantly, “certain inexplicable things do happen in certain districts.” And he shuffled off in his galoshes in the direction of his waiting Pobeda automobile, leaving the participants in the event to ponder what his remark might have meant and what he had been hinting at. That the district was not among the most exemplary? But what had natural phenomena to do with that? A natural phenomenon decides for itself where to manifest itself, without applying to the district Party organs to stamp its papers. Nonetheless, their top Party boss had expressed dissatisfaction, and his subordinates realized there would be personnel changes in prospect, a thought that troubled some of those gathered there and inspired hope in others. And a struggle began, as they used to say in those days, between the good and the better, as a result of which Aglaya was replaced in her responsible post by a certain Vasilii Sidorovich Nechaev, who had previously worked as the Party organizer at the creamery. And Aglaya was transferred, as we have already mentioned, to the children’s home, to nurture the coming generation.

  5

  An abundance of poets is a sign of a people’s savagery.

  At least that was the opinion of my oldest friend, Alexei Mikhailovich Makarov, nicknamed the Admiral, concerning whom we shall speak later. When he said it the first time, his assertion seemed ridiculous to me, but then he listed the countries and the regions of the world where people were wallowing in poverty and ignorance, some not even knowing what electricity or toilet paper were, and yet they had among them an immense number of bards, minstrels and other varieties of folk or court poets. The authorities there regard the state of the poetic word with anxious concern and good poets (who write good words about the authorities) are generously rewarded with all sorts of good things, whereas bad poets (who write bad words about the authorities) have their heads cut off. The risk of being left without a head can act as such a powerful stimulus to the mind that on occasion bad poets write much better poetry than good poets and people copy the poems of bad poets into notebooks, learn them by heart and transmit them from one generation to the next.

  Although in Dolgov the education of poets was conducted in accordance with a less extreme system (their heads were not cut off, but their lives were made a misery), the number of versifiers per head of the local population was clearly in excess of essential requirements. In the late forties the most famous and prominent among them was, of course, our past master and local sage Serafim Butylko, but he was already growing old and antiquated in every sense. He had lost his six upper front teeth and turned gray, he dragged his feet and stooped, his control of metaphor was weak, he was unable to sustain a regular meter and he used weary, banal rhymes: “love—dove,” “folk—awoke,” “desire—perspire,” “hurry— flurry.” And this at a time when the young generation was boldly mastering word-root rhymes—assonant, dissonant, complex and God knows what other kinds of rhymes—such as “empower—yell louder,” “birch-tree—lurching free,” “attributes—hard rebukes,” “forest thickets—foreign critics,” as well as quite mind-boggling images and metaphors. Our most sophisticated and versatile writer was Vlad Raspadov—poet, art historian, essayist, journalist and generally multitalented artist of the word. In 1949, when he was still an eighth-grade schoolboy, he wrote a composition dedicated to the monument. The piece was written as a school essay, but it was so interesting that it was published in the Dolgov Pravda. This essay was called . . . Actually, I can’t quite recall just at the moment . . . Either “A Melody Frozen in Metal,” or “Music Congealed in Cast Iron.” Something of that sort. It was a very vivid and graphic article, with a profound subtext. In speaking of the sculptor Ogorodov’s creation, it said that it could not have been what it was were it not for the miraculous combination of the artist’s talent and his genuine love for the prototype, which had fused into a single unity. “Gazing upon this marvel,” Raspadov wrote, “it is hard to imagine that it was molded or carved or manufactured in any physical fashion at all. No, this is simply a song that has broken
free, that has been breathed out from the sculptor’s soul and frozen in human form to our wonder and amazement.”

  Raspadov’s article, although it was not entirely correct from the viewpoint of socialist realism, impressed the readers and pleased the ideological authorities, and after reading it Pyotr Klimovich Porosyaninov said of Raspadov: “Yes, he’s one of us!” Then he thought for a moment and repeated it: “One of us!”

  As for Max Ogorodov, having created such an absolute masterpiece, he became extremely famous, won many state commissions and a Stalin Prize, Third Class, then Second Class, and then First Class, and soon changed his wife Zinaida, just as she had feared, for a new wife, First Class, who was eighteen years younger. And of course, he became very conceited. In his newfound conceit he claimed that he had surpassed all of his contemporaries in sculpture, even Tomsky and Konyonkov. And the only sculptors of the past he acknowledged as his equals were Myron, Praxiteles, Michelangelo and to some extent Rodin.