How life writes the book: real socialism and socialist realism in Stalin's Russia

Abstract

Thomas Lahusen. How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. xiii, 247 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Index. $29.95, cloth. A fictionalized account of Project No. 15, GULZhDS's (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei zheleznodorozhnogo stroitel'stva) efforts to construct a pipeline connecting a new oil refinery at Komsomol'sk to Okha on Sakhalin Island, does very little to excite the modem Canadian reader. Yet as Thomas Lahusen shows in this intriguing work, Vasilii Azhaev's Stalin-prize winning and best-selling novel, Far From Moscow, genuinely struck a chord among Soviet audiences. How Life Writes the Book is an analysis of the writing of socialist realist literature. Lahusen shows how the Soviet system created a novelist, a novel, and an audience. Rather than accept the final novel as the sole potential product, Lahusen combs through the author's personal archives, travels to the Soviet Far East in search of clues, and accesses official regional archives in order to penetrate the writing process itself, thereby unveiling the myriad of potentialities that lurk within the life that wrote the book. coincidences and analogies between life and fiction that Lahusen unveils expand our understanding of what it meant to be a writer in the postwar Soviet Union and present an original way of reading the novels that entered the socialist realist canon. Certainly Azhaev's Panglossian portrait of the harmonious conditions under which the momentous Project No. 15 was undertaken can hardly be taken as approximating reality. truth, Lahusen argues, rests beyond the lie. Lahusen's decoding of the roman A clef suggests that Azhaev himself left clues for posterity, alluding to the real conditions under which the builders labored. River Amur, for instance, becomes in Azhaev's universe the River Adun-derived, Lahusen suggests, from the Russian word ad (hell). Azhaev's use of such Aesopian language, however, is only incidental to Lahusen's work. He is more concerned with the role that the author's less subversive fictionalization played in merging life with fiction. Through a careful reading of Azhaev's diaries, Lahusen shows that the writer borrowed extensively from his real life observations in the Russian Far East of the late 1940s. biographical segments of Lahusen's work are equally important. Vasilii Azhaev, we learn, was born sometime between 1912 and 1915 into extreme poverty. After working as a chemist in Moscow, Azhaev fell victim to the Great Terror, and in 1935 was exiled to an NKVD labour camp in the Far East, where he remained a prisoner for two years. Upon completing his sentence in 1937, Azhaev remained at the camp as a free laborer and administrator until 1946. It was during his tenure as a camp prisoner that Azhaev first explored creative writing, publishing a series of socialist realist short stories in camp newsletters. opportunities that the labour camp provided for cultural education provides a provocative addendum to our understanding of camp life. Azhaev was to benefit directly from the literary purges of 1937, when the editorial policies of the Khabarovsk journal No rubezhe came under attack for lack of vigilance. In the ensuing scramble to solicit politically appropriate material and promote promising novices, Azhaev was given his first big break. His rise within the Far Eastern literary community was, however, a corollary to the purging of native regional writers. It was Azhaev's willingness to discover literature in the most mundane activities of daily life that fueled his literary ambitions. His personal diary, documenting the administrative and technical operation of the camp, would become the basis for his Stalin-prize winning novel. As Azhaev gradually transformed himself from a worker into a writer, his frustrations became more thoughtful: The more ardently I serve my people and my government, the more absurd, painful, and morally unbearable becomes my situation of half-citizen, (p. …