This is not a novel. It has too much to explain to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people involved. The idea is the hero. It is the idea that sets forth, into a world of hazards and illusions, monsters and transformations, helped by some of those it meets along the way and hindered by others. Best to call this a fairytale, then –though it really happened, or something like it. And not just any fairytale, but specifically a Russian fairy tale, to go alongside the stories of Baba Yaga and the Glass Mountain that Afanaseyev the folklorist collected when he rode over the black earth of Russia, under its wide sky, in thee nineteenth century.
Where Western tales begin by shifting us to another time – ‘Once upon a time’ they say, meaning elsewhere, meaning then rather than now – Russian skazki made an adjustment of place. ‘In a certain land’, they start; or, ‘In the three-time-ninth kingdom . . .’ Meaning elsewhere, meaning rather than here. Yet these elsewhere are always recognizable as home. In the distance will always be a wood-walled town where the churches have onion domes. The ruler will always be a Tsar, Ivan or Vladimir. The earth is always black. The shy is always wide. It’s Russia, always Russia, the dear dreadful enormous territory at the edge of Europe which is as large as all Europe put together. And, also, it isn’t. It is story Russia, not real Russia; a place never quite in perfect overlap with the daylight country of the same name. It is as near to it as a wish is to reality, and as far away too. For the tales supplied what the real country lacked, when villagers were telling them, and Afanaseyev was writing them down.
Real Russian fields grew soggy crops of buckwheat and rye. Story Russia had magic tablecloths serving feasts without end. Real Russia’s roads were mud and ruts. Story Russia abounded in tools of joyful velocity: flying carpets, genies of the rushing air, horses that scarcely bent the grass they galloped on. Real Russia fixed its people in sluggish immobility. Story Russia sent its lively boys to seek the Firebird or to woo the Sun Maiden. The stories dreamed away reality’s defects. They made promises good enough to last for one evening in the firelight; promises which the teller and the hearers knew could come true only in the version of home where the broke-backed trestle over the stream at the village’s ends became ‘a bridge of white hazelwood with oaken planks, spread with purple cloths and nailed with copper nails’. Only in the wish country, the dream country. Only in the twenty-seventh kingdom.
In the twentieth century, Russians stopped telling skazki. And at the same time, they were told that the skazki were coming true. The stories’ name for a magic carpet, samolet, ‘self-flyer’, had already become the ordinary Russian word for an aeroplane. Now voices from the radio and the movies screen and television began to promise that the magic tablecloth amobranka, ‘self-victualler’, would soon follow after. ‘In our day,’ Nikita Krushchev told a crowd in the Lenin Stadium of Moscow on 29 September 1959, ‘the dreams mankind cherished for ages, dreams expressed in fairytales which seemed sheer fantasy, are being translated into reality by man’s own hands.’ He meant, above all, the skazki’s dreams of abundance. Humanity’s ancient condition of scarcity was going to end, imminently. Everyone was going to climb the cabbage stalk, scramble through the hole in the sky, and arrive in the land where millstones revolved all by themselves. “Whenever they gave a turn, a cake and a slice of bread with butter and sour cream appeared, and on the top of them, a pot of gruel.’ Now, instead of being imagined compensation for an empty belly, the sour cream and the butter were truly going to flow.
And of course, Krushchev was right. This is exactly what did happened in thhe twentieth century, for hundreds of millions of people. There is indeed more food, and more kinds of food, in one ordinary supermarket of the present day, than in any of the old hungry dreams, dreamed in Russia or elsewhere. But Krushchev believed that the plenty of the stories was coming in Soviet Russia, and coming because of something that the Soviet Union possessed and the hungry lands of capitalism lacked: the planned economy. Because the whole system of production and distribution in the USSR was owned by the state, because all Russia was (in Lenin’s words) ‘one office, one factory’, it could be directed, as capitalism could not, to the fastest, the most lavish fulfillment of human needs. Therefore it would easily out-produce the wasteful chaos of the marketplace. Planning would be the USSR’s own self-turning millstone, its own self-victualling tablecloth.
This Russian fairytale began to be told in the decade of the famine before the Second World War, and it lasted officially until Communism fell. Hardly anyone believed it, by the end. In practice, from the late 1960s on all that the Soviet regime aspired to do was to provide a pacifying minimum of consumer goods to the inhabitants of the vast shoddy apartment buildings ringing every Soviet City. But once upon a time the story of red plenty had been serious: an attempt to beat capitalism on its own terms, and to make Soviet citizens the richest people in the world. For a short time, it even looked – and not just to Nikita Krushchev- as if the story might be coming true, Intelligence was invested in it, as well as foolishness: a generation’s hopes, and a generation’s intellectual gifts, and a tyranny’s guilty wish for a happy ending. This book is about that moment. It is about the cleverish version of that idea, the most subtle of the Soviet attempts to pull a working samobranka out of the dream country. It is about the adventures of the idea red plenty as it came hopefully along the high road.
But it is not a history. It is not a novel. It is itself a fairytale; and like a fairytale it is wishful, irresponsible, not to be relied on. The notes at the back indicate where to story it tells depends on invention, where the explanation depends on lies. Remember, as you read, that this story does not take place in the literal, historical Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but only in some nearby kingdom; as near to it as wishes are to reality, and also as faraway.
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