Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Read online

  In his heart of hearts, Vasily Kiprianovich had little respect for this Writer; he had a huge talent, to be sure, and weighty, meaty turns of phrase, but what a cynic he was! Apart from his novels, tales, and a dozen or more plays—weak things though they were (he also had some silly farces in which abandoned elderly ladies recovered their lost youth)—he managed to keep churning out newspaper articles, each one of them filled with lies. When he spoke in public, as he did quite frequently, he displayed an amazing panache in extemporizing—eloquently and smoothly—the propaganda demanded of him, but always in his own distinctively indi-vidual manner. One could imagine that he wrote his newspaper articles in the same way: someone from the Central Committee would phone him, and within half an hour he would be dictating a passionate article over the telephone. It might be an open letter to the workers of America: What lies were spreading there about forced labor in timber cutting in the USSR? Or he would roar like a lion: “Set free our black comrades!” (Eight American Negroes had been condemned to death for murders.) Then there were his fantasies: we will grow apricots under the open sky in Leningrad and Abyssinian wheat in the marshes of Karelia. He was always being allowed to travel in Europe, and he wrote of various abominations in Berlin and Paris, always with convincing details. His trip into industrial London was boldly entitled “Orpheus in the Underworld.” (Vasily Kiprianovich could only dream of being allowed a week’s trip into any such hell-on-earth.) The Writer might publish an article entitled “I Call Upon You to Hate!” And he often replied to questions from the newspapers with the same obviously insincere intellectual poverty. He wrote on a wealth of literary topics, always treating them in terms of the Marxist view of history, something that was his elixir of life. We writers, he might say, now know less than the upper level of the working intelligentsia. But then he might also say: Until now, only sabotage has prevented our literature from attaining a world-class level, while the American novelists are no better than the pickpockets of an obsolescent culture.

  Still, when you think seriously about it, is there anyone today who isn’t something of a son of a bitch? All ideology and all art are based on that. Vasily Kiprianovich had made similar comments in his lectures—what else could you do? Particularly if you had even one little dark spot in your background. The Writer, in fact, had a very large dark spot, one known to everyone: he had made a major blunder during the Civil War when he emigrated and published some anti-Soviet things over there, but he came to his senses in time and then worked energetically to earn the right to return to the USSR. Vasily Kiprianovich’s own dark spot had almost been rubbed clean, though a little stain remained: he came from the Don region. He was able to cover it up when he filled out some questionnaire, though he had never had any connections with the White Guardists and was even a sincere liberal (and his father, in tsarist times, had also been a liberal, though he was a judge). Still, the very word “Don” was enough to frighten people. And so he could understand the Writer in political terms but not in esthetic terms: How could a man with such talent keep pounding with his sledgehammer and doing it in such inspired language, as if carried away in a rush of sincerity?

  The Writer’s dacha was surrounded by a tall wooden fence painted dark green, unobtrusive among the natural greenery; the dacha itself, set well back on the property, could not be seen above the fence. Vasily Kiprianovich rang the bell at the gate. After a time, it was opened by a watchman, a robust old fellow with a magnificent, forked, graying beard who might have stepped from some nineteenth-century painting (wherever could you find someone like that?). He had been informed of the guest and led him along a sandy path past the flowerbeds filled with red, white, and yellow roses. A little farther back was a dense grove of pines with bronze trunks and towering crowns. Deeper into the grounds were some dark spruce with a garden bench beneath them.

  The air was scented with pine resin. There was absolute silence. Yes, this is the way to live! (And people say that he also has an intricately decorated old mansion in Tsarskoe Selo.)

  The Writer himself descended the staircase from the second floor into the hallway. He was very gracious, and from his first words and gestures he showed cordiality—a particular Russian, expansive cordiality without the least affectation. He was not yet fat but had a very fleshy, broad body with a large face and large ears. The buttonhole of his jacket carried the badge of a member of the Central Executive Committee.

  This was a man who, after marking the passing of his fiftieth year with a lavish party, had obviously tasted enough success and fame and behaved with an almost aristocratic simplicity. He led Vasily Kiprianovich up to his spacious, sunlit office. The stove with its large tiles must give off a lot of heat, and it would be cozy here in winter, looking out on the snowy forest. The huge oak desk was not stacked with books and papers; it held a massive writing set—a model of the Kremlin, evidently one of his birthday presents. On a pull-out shelf sat an uncovered typewriter with a sheet of paper in it. (The Writer explained that he always composed his work directly on the typewriter, without any preliminary manuscript. It was odd that given his massive body, his voice was a reedy tenor.)

  They sat in armchairs by a small, round table. An open veranda could be seen through the broad glass door. The Writer smoked a pipe filled with expensive, fragrant tobacco. His fair, sleek hair had not yet turned gray, though he had a touch of gray at his temples and a large bald spot. His thick brows seemed to weigh down on his eyes, and the lines of his jowls and chin had lost their sharpness and were beginning to sag.

  Their conversation went on in a very friendly though serious manner. The Writer took no notes, and he had a quick grasp of the subject and asked germane and intelligent questions.

  Vasily Kiprianovich spoke of the various ways a screenplay could be written: the concise synopsis that allowed the director complete freedom; the emotional, whose main aim was merely to instill a mood in the director and cinematographer; the detailed scenic type in which the writer sets out each scene and even specifies whether the scenes should change using long takes or montage. It was obvious that the Writer was taking this all in and that he particularly liked the idea that a screenplay must always be coordinated with gesture.

  “Absolutely true!” he agreed, with passion. “That’s virtually the most important thing. In fact, I believe that every sentence has a gesture to go with it, and sometimes even every word. A person is constantly gesturing— if not physically, then always emotionally. And above all we must find gestures appropriate to whatever social environment we are depicting.”

  It was already getting on to five o’clock, and the Writer invited the professor to go downstairs for tea. They went back to the ground floor and passed through the living room, filled with antique furniture—a fretwork sofa, some armchairs, a mirror with an intricately modeled frame. There were copies of Serov’s Girl with Peaches and a Monet landscape with a pink-sailed boat; just as upstairs, there was a huge, white-tiled stove. Obviously they did not spare the firewood in this house.

  The Writer led him around the corner from the dining room, not failing to boast artlessly about a remarkable new appliance—an electric refrigerator he had brought from Paris.

  At this point—had he known that this was the time for sitting and chatting?—his dacha neighbor, Yefim Martynovich, dropped in. Alongside the massive thoroughbred body of the Writer, he seemed a puny figure, little more than a gnome, yet he behaved with no less importance than the master of the house.

  He was about forty, somewhat younger than Vasily Kiprianovich, but what a success he had made of himself! His name was pronounced with awe in Soviet literature, though only until recently and not at the moment. A militant Marxist critic, he was famous for his devastating attacks on some writers and his fulsome praise of others. In all cases he demanded a militant class-based approach from writers, and he was having some success in achieving it. He was everywhere: he taught in the Institute of Red Professors, headed the literary department in the State Publishing House
(in other words, it was he who determined which writers would be published and which would not), and he was also the head of the Fine Art Publishing House as well as the editor of two literary journals. In short, he held the reins of the whole of literature in his hands, and it would be dangerous to have him as an enemy. When he was in RAPP, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, he was responsible for the rout of Voronsky’s group and the school of Pereverzev; and after the recent dissolution of RAPP he had taken up with lightning speed “the consolidation of communist forces on the literary front.” All these things he did with such great success that now he too had acquired a fine dacha, right next door and very likely not a bit worse than this one.

  Vasily Kiprianovich had heard a great deal about him, of course, and was now seeing him for the first time. He had an unintelligent face, eyes that were very alert, and hair with a touch of red in it. Had you met such a person socially, even one wearing a good suit, you would never have guessed that he was a Servant of the Muses but would take him for a successful manager of a manufactured goods depot or, at best, the chief accountant of a complex of enterprises. Dealing with him, however, was like handling a newly sharpened razor. Their paths had not crossed, though one never knew what the future might hold, and Vasily Kiprianovich found it useful to meet the Critic in the home of the Writer, especially when the latter was looking at him favorably.

  The Writer’s wife was not at home, but on the ground floor veranda, facing the rays of the late afternoon sun; tea had already been served by an elderly maid with a peasant’s face. They sat down in comfortable wicker chairs. Some soft white bread had already been sliced for the butter and cheese, while there were dishes with two types of pastry and two types of jam—cherry and apricot.

  There was no breeze. The cap-like crowns of the pine trees towered high above their bronze trunks, and every needle on their branches was motionless. As before, not a sound came from anywhere.

  The pleasant aroma of pine resin, the peace, and the silence all accentuated their total isolation from the world outside.

  Fresh tea, deep brick red in color, was poured into glasses with filigree holders. The conversation, naturally, turned to literary topics.

  “Ah, yes,” sighed the Writer, admitting even his imperfections. “How we ought to write! Flow powerfully we ought to write! We are given the esteem of all the people, we are given the attention of the party, the government, and the particular attention of Comrade Stalin himself ...”

  Was this last little phrase really appropriate for a tea table? But no, it had now become the fashion to speak this way in private gatherings. And the Writer, as everyone could see, was in Stalin’s personal favor, to say nothing of his close relationship with Gorky.

  “Creating an art of world significance—that is the task of the writer today. The world is waiting for examples, for architectonics from our literature.”

  His arms, not powerful and even a bit plump but still flexible and free of rheumatism in the hands and fingers, extended to show the scale on which he was prepared to work. (Surely he was not hungry? Yet he had fallen upon the sandwiches almost at once, one after another. People told of how he could give entire lectures, off the cuff, on the kulebyaka or the sturgeon . . .)

  The Critic, of course, had to have his say on a topic like this!

  “Indeed, they are expecting monumental realism from us. This is an entirely new type and genre of art, the epic of a classless society—literature with a positive hero.”

  God knows, Vasily Kiprianovich was of two minds. Even though this sounded crude and clumsy, it might well be what was needed. Though this seemed like nonsense, the literature of the past truly could not be brought back. It was a fact that an entirely new epoch was unfolding in a process that was evidently irreversible.

  Here on this veranda, at this table, in this warm and peaceful light playing in the vivid colors of the jam, it certainly looked as if everything had now been settled and would go on for centuries. The common life that still lagged behind would be raised up to this level and polished by it. None of life’s harshness could penetrate here; there were no days and nights of working to fulfill the Five-Year Plan, one that in fact had now been completed in four years and three months.

  In any case, what was wrong with the elevated striving to create epic forms in art?

  “Take the tragedy of Anna Karenina, now,” said the Writer, making an expansive gesture. “That’s no more than an empty spot today; it can’t be the basis for anything in our art. The wheel of a locomotive can’t resolve the contradictions between romantic passion and social censure.”

  But the Critic, that guardian who had administered so many public reprimands, now seemed to have much less of the assurance and intransigence he had displayed in his earlier articles. In fact he had none of the bold, persuasive manner of the Writer. He stood up for How the Steel Was Tempered: there was no question about that; it was the high point of the new literature; it was the new epoch.

  It was obvious that the Writer did not care for this Critic at all; it was simply that he was a neighbor and he could not tell him what he thought right to his face.

  He did not dispute How the Steel Was Tempered, though he did parry by saying that not everything new shows us the way forward. Take RAPP itself, for instance: it presented itself as something entirely new, yet it turned out not to be the tribune of the broad masses and in fact was isolated from them behind a wall of dogmatism.

  Now that shot hit the mark! And it seemed that it had been carefully aimed at a spot still tender and vulnerable. The Critic shrank like a mushroom near a flame. How this would have infuriated him only a year ago! But as he retreated, he could only say in his high-pitched voice: “Yet RAPP did contribute many valuable things to proletarian culture. It gave it a solidly established center.”

  “Nothing of the kind! Not a bit of it!” the Writer said, totally sweeping aside the Critic’s remarks and almost laughing aloud at the change that had now taken place. “Those who voiced their suspicions that the RAPP leadership was edging into the ranks of the ‘wreckers’ weren’t just making idle chatter.”

  Indeed! What do you think of that?

  “They were trying to find some crafty means of discrediting our literature. They defamed me by calling me reactionary and bourgeois and even claiming that I had scarcely any talent. Yet the critic . . .” he paused, gazing intently at the Critic and, it seemed, considering whether to deliver a final blow. But no, he still had his humor and went on, sounding even inspired: “. . . the critic should be a friend to the writer. It is important to know that you have a friend like that when you write. You don’t want some Robespierre in a National Convention trying to use his proscriptive gaze to penetrate every convolution of a writer’s brain simply to devise a class-based label for him without caring whether you write with a pen or a piece of chalk.”

  The bit about Robespierre was a shot right to the head. Yes, the epoch had broken in two in quite a disgusting way, and this Writer had managed to shift from being a suspicious Fellow Traveler to someone more reliable. He now had a mysterious aura of independence about him.

  Yefim Martynovich blinked his lashless eyes and shrank even more. But was he not a friend? He had come, after all, to inquire about the Writer’s current work and his plans for things to come. The Writer, with his delightfully expansive nature, no longer bore him any malice, however. He revealed that he was now reworking the second part of his trilogy on the Civil War: “I haven’t adequately shown the organizing role of the Party in it. I also have to come up with a courageous and disciplined Bolshevik to include. But how can you go against your heart? Yes, I also love the old Russia. And because of that I was slow to understand all that had happened and didn’t come to terms with the October Revolution immediately. That was a serious mistake. And I spent some difficult years there in Europe.” All of this he said easily, in his tremulous tenor voice and with the captivating sincerity of a generous nature. And the strength of his soli
d position at the center of Soviet literature radiated from him all the more tangibly. (After all, even Gorky had made the same serious mistake by emigrating for a time.)

  “And who dares speak of our writers’ lack of freedom? When I write, I feel the same free sweep of a mowing peasant from one of Koltsov’s poems. My hands are simply itching to get to work!”

  What he said had to be believed. It came straight from his heart. Yes, what a fine fellow he was.

  Even the bald spot on his venerable head shone honestly and impressively.

  But one could never accept that he regarded the upper level of the working intelligentsia as better informed than he.

  “Invention in literature is sometimes superior to truth. Literary characters may say things they would never have said in real life, and this can be a greater revelation than the naked truth. It can be a regular festival for art. When I write, I can comprehend my reader through my imagination, and I can see exactly what he needs.”