Tolstoy in Soviet Hands

by MIKHAIL KORIAKOV

1

THE director of the Tolstoy Museum, Alexei Ivanovich Korzinkov, had a face like the udder of a cow — it was a delicate pink, in fat creases, covered with a golden down. Although he was not an army man, he wore cavalry breeches and a cloth blouse, held tightly in place by a yellow belt. Before the war, this was the (unwritten) regulation uniform for responsible regional representatives of the Party. A. I. Korzinkov had been the president of a fishery coöperative in Archangel. But, as the poet has said, “The Central Committee plays with men.” By some twist or movement of the Party line he landed in Tula and found himself the director of the Museum-Estate of Leo Tolstoy.

He felt quite at home there. The Museum as an intellectual institution did not exist at all for him: it was a State Farm. To the manor house belonged the former Tolstoy lands, the forests (the famous Crown Woods, the Abramtsevski birch grove), seventeen acres of orchards (35,000 apple trees), and finally the hothouses and vegetable gardens. All this was a subsidiary enterprise attached to the manor house. But it was “subsidiary” in form only: actually it was the main enterprise, completely absorbing all the energies not only of the Museum staff but also of the entire village attached to the manor house.

The entire harvest, without any deductions whatsoever, was subject to requisition by the government. The peasants who worked in the various subsidiary departments were considered government employees, as were the members of the Museum staff. In the absolute and literal sense of the word they were State peasants, State serfs as in the pre-emancipation days. The Soviet government is a serf-owning landlord. The master’s concern for the welfare of his serfs finds its expression in the fact that a State peasant receives a pound of bread for a day’s work.

That bread is brought all the way from Tula, ten miles away, or Occasionally it comes from the bakery attached to a metallurgical plant at Kosaya Gora. The usual procedure was this: The working day is over. In the twilight a half-starved crowd in tattered clothing gathers in front of the Volkonski mansion built by Tolstoy’s grandfather. They are waiting for their bread. The man who brings it is an hour or two late. Perhaps his horse has gone lame, or there was some delay at the bakery. Finally, along the dam between the ponds a covered sledge comes into view. A slight steam rises from it. The crowd breaks into an animal-like roar: —

“Bre-e-ad! Hot, hot, and good, that’s what. . . .”

“Come out here, you timekeeper, Pashka Gorshkov! Where are you? Come on out! Give us our bread like a good fellow. . . .”

“Here it comes! Here it comes!”

Pashka, the timekeeper, appears on the stoop of the house, holding the list of those who have worked today for the Museum’s farm. The heads of brigades have already informed him who did and who did not fulfill the required amount of work. The latter receive a proportionately smaller ration: instead of 500 grams they get 400, or perhaps only 300. But a State peasant is glad to get even that: a collective farm peasant gets nothing at all. The chunk of fresh bread is carefully stowed in the bosom and carried home, to the village.

The brain laborers receive their ration first. If they choose they may even draw it two to four days in advance. For them, in accordance with a special list, the bakery sends a certain amount of white or so-called “70 per cent” bread. The definition of “brain worker” is elastic. It covers not only the “scientific” secretary himself and those directly under him, but also various members of the administrative staff: accountants, timekeepers, heads of brigades, the Party organizer, the labor union organizer, and finally the Commandant (shades of Tolstoy the pacifist!) of the Museum. All this top crust enjoys a variety of privileges: the warehouse superintendent gives them vegetables, and the dairy woman provides them with milk. In the autumn of 1939 the “scientific” group each received a hundredweight of winter apples. The price was fantastically low — 50 kopecks a kilo (by standard exchange rates, roughly 10 cents for 2.2 pounds). This dispensation was bestowed, however, only on the true brain workers, five or six people, and not on the administrative staff as a whole. Korzinkov described it as being “for the purpose of encouraging outstanding work on the displays in the literary section of the Museum.”

Another privilege enjoyed by the “scientific’ staff derived from the fact that the main administration of Tolstoy Museums was situated in Moscow. This meant that the “scientific” staff were sometimes sent to the capital on business errands. By keeping on good terms with Ivorzinkov and Nelyubov, the “scientific” secretary, one might manage a trip as often as once a month. From Moscow one could bring back butter, macaroni, vermicelli, and sacks of various kinds of meal.

But there were difficulties about this. In the railroad station at Tula, beside the ticket window, there was always an NKVD officer flanked by two or three policemen. He always checked on one’s right to go to Moscow: the order issued by the Museum, leave of absence, ticket, passport. This NKVD man occasionally found that the reason for the mission to Moscow was “insufficient" or, and this was frequently the case, “improperly stated.” It all depended on his mood. “Let the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow send a personal call for you,” he would say. “Otherwise I cannot see that your trip to Moscow is really necessary.” With a smile he would then ease the crestfallen man with a mission to Moscow away from the ticket office.

The Yasnaya Polyana peasants hated the Museum administrative staff. The top crust in turn wasted no affection on the “scientific” people, because of their privileged position. My food was modest enough, my supplies were meager indeed, yet my meal stuck in my throat when I remembered that right next door, in the village, bread was being measured to the last crumb, the people growing bloated, the children dying of starvation.

2

THE directive sent down from Moscow, and covering several pages of fine rice paper, was definitely disturbing. It carried the imprint of the People’s Commissariat for Education of the Russian Socialist Soviet Republic and was on the subject of “the extension of socialist competition among museums.” The directive stated that the progress of this competition had been unsatisfactory: “the checkup which has been carried out shows that social duties are not being performed and that several museums do not even have social contracts.” A separate slip attached to the directive contained a special order to the Museum-Estate of L. N. Tolstoy to enter into socialist competition with the Museum-Estate of I. S. Turgenev.

Nelyubov locked himself up in his office for two days and did not speak to anyone: he spent his time mulling over the directive, underlining this with a red, that with a blue, and a third with a green pencil, and constructing various hypotheses — a, b, c. On the third day he chucked his alphabet full of tentative plans into the scrapbasket. “What kind of socialist duties are we supposed to assume?” said he. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Koriakov. We’ll call everyone in and perhaps someone will come up with a bright idea.”

Suddenly the former Tolstoy kitchen, seat of the “scientific” section, was invaded by an unexpected caller who burst in on us in a cloud of snow and vapor.

“I am Yermakov,” he said, “the director of the Turgenev Museum. How in the name of Marx do I engage in socialist competition with the Tolstoy Museum!”

He was in the same quandary as we, so he had galloped over from Orel to consult with us. As he thawed himself out he told us about an incident that had deeply disturbed him: the theft of a Turgenev manuscript.

It was no laughing matter to him although we roared as he told us about it. It was really a gorgeous story, involving V. D. Bonch-Bruyevich, onetime secretary to Lenin, administrator of the Sovnarkom and, before the war, director of the State Museum of Literature. This museum was his child. He must be given fair credit for accomplishing an enormous piece of work in a short space of time. Inside of a few years he had published forty volumes of “Literary Heritage.” He had gathered together a mass of material related to the history of Russian literature and social thinking. But he had acquired it by tactics which were frankly those of a bandit. Bonch’s agents snooped around everywhere. It was sufficient for them to pick up a scent leading them to some old lady said to be in possession of her great-grandmother’s album, and she might as well kiss it good-bye: Bonch’s boys would arrive on the scene, ask “to take a look at it,” then carry it off as an object of “necessity to the State.” The hapless Yermakov had also fallen a victim to what he called this “superbandit.”

“One day, out of a clear sky, Bonch dropped down on me in Orel,” his story ran. “I received him as I would a welcome guest — Vladimir Davidovich, what an honor! I ordered dinner served. Meanwhile we sat and chatted. ‘Well, what treasures do you have to boast about here?’ asked Bonch. ‘Show me your prize pieces. I suppose you have trunks full of Turgenev manuscripts?’ ‘What trunks are you talking about?’ I replied. ‘All I have is one manuscript which I guard like a holy relic.’ ‘Well, then, show me that.’ So I went and fetched it. But then as bad luck would have it I was forced to leave the room because my digestion was upset. When I came back not a soul was there. ‘Vladimir Davidovich! Vladimir Davidovich!’ But there was no trace to be found of him or the manuscript. Five days later I had a letter from him. ‘Forgive me,’ it ran. ‘While you were absent my car came for me and it was quite impossible for me to wait for you any longer.’ As for the manuscript — blank silence. So I wrote him, how about the manuscript? ‘Don’t worry,’ he replied, ‘I’ll send it to you.’ ”

Yermakov waited for a year and a half. He made trips to Moscow, but to no avail. Bonch offered him a typewritten copy in exchange for the original manuscript. The director of the Turgenev Museum raised a row. The director of the Moscow Museum attempted to soothe his feelings by saying, “Well, if you don’t want, a typewritten copy, I’ll give you a photostat — what difference can it make to you?” Yermakov filed a suit. It had come up for trial not long before and Bonch-Bruyevich had turned him, the plaintiff, into a defendant: —

“You listen to me, Citizen Yermakov. Russian literature will be grateful to me for having saved that manuscript of Turgenev. Why, you were on the point of using it for toilet paper!”

The scene in the court was farcical. The judge held his head in both hands, the courtroom rocked with laughter.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Vladimir Davidovich!” shouted Yermakov. “I just let you hold the manuscript in your hands while I went to the toilet!”

But plead as he might, they only laughed at him and he was finally left helpless. Although important literary experts appeared on Yermakov’s behalf, the judge did not hand down any decision. Perhaps the reason was that he feared to make a ruling against such an important man as the former secretary to Lenin. The case was adjourned: the manuscript remained in Bonch’s possession.

Although our loud laughter at first offended our colleague from Orel, he finally smiled and said, with a sigh, “What a bandit he is! Oh, what a bandit!” But the story cut deep with another person present: Sergei Ivanovich Shchegolov, with whom I had made friends there on the Estate.

“You’ll see, they’ll come and loot our museum, too,” he said with a woebegone expression when he heard about the theft of the Turgenev manuscript. “Look what happened to Tolstoy’s saddle. Where is it now? It’s three years since they carried it off to Moscow. And the portrait. If only Comrade Ivorzinkov would at least persuade them to do something about the portrait.”

This was perfectly true. On order from the Commissariat of Education the Khramskoy portrait had been taken out of the big reception room and sent to Moscow. It was supposed to be gone some six weeks or two months, the length of the Khramskoy exhibition in Moscow. But afterwards the whole exhibit had been sent to various provincial cities, to Siberia, to Central Asia, and so forth. The time had lengthened to more than a year. Meanwhile the original portrait by Khramskoy had been replaced by a none too successful copy made long ago by Tolstoy’s daughter Tatiana.

But Korzinkov’s interest was not at all centered in the “mementos”: his principal concern was the Slate Farm — apple crops, eggs, meat packing, feathers, down, bristles, and so forth. The director’s head was in enough of a whirl already. Agitators had been sent down by the regional Communist Party committee to carry out a propaganda program for instituting a Stakhanovite movement in the grain fields, orchards, and dairies. So Korzinkov suggested to Yermakov that the two museumestates could stage a competition under the slogan: “Let’s get in a Stakhanovite harvest.” But the proposal did not strike a spark because the Turgenev Museum did not have a large enough estate with which to compete.

3

MY OWN life in Yasnaya Polyana, which seemed so attractive in the beginning, was ruined by the new director — a real museum specimen of a fool who could talk about nothing but the “mirror of the Revolution.” ‘The core of our “scientific” work was on exhibits of the literary museum. So what does the Red Banner director do but insist , first of all, on our rearranging the first of the five rooms in accordance with the leitmotiv, “Lenin and Tolstoy”! At any hour of the day or night, on any or all occasions, the director was to be found either holding in his hands or carrying in his pocket a little pamphlet of collected articles by Lenin on Tolstoy. Once he brought a stack of the pamphlets down from Moscow. Then he called all the employees of the Museum together, not just the brain workers, but the accountants, the timekeepers, the cleaning women, and presented each of them with a pamphlet, personally inscribed.

“ In order to justify your job as a co-worker in the Tolstoy Museum,” he insisted, “you must make it a rule to read this book every day. This is how I execute the task I set myself: every morning for two hours, at least, I read this immortal masterpiece of Comrade Lenin.”

The immortal masterpiece was 36 pages long.

This is one of the disastrous difficulties which beset the path of scholars of literature in the Soviet Union: they meet with articles by Lenin on the subject of Tolstoy, or Herzen, or somebody else. These are not articles, they are manacles, heavy chains which weigh down the research man. The question of Tolstoy, from the official point of view, was conclusively settled by Lenin’s 36-page pamphlet. Researchers are left with nothing to do except to cull — from 100 volumes of Tolstoy’s work — such quotations as will illustrate and confirm the 36 pages of Lenin. In line with this we were directed to reorganize the exhibits in the literary museum.

In the first room, now given over to “Lenin on Tolstoy,” we set up a four-foot clay bust of Lenin, and laid out copies of Lenin’s pamphlet and photostats of Lenin’s manuscripts. Nor was that all: each one of the remaining rooms was devoted to an “idea,” expressed as usual in a quotation from Lenin and exhibited in a prominent place on the wall. The life and creative works of Tolstoy were presented, not on their own, but as adjusted to fit the Lenin quotations.

Besides this we were handed another problem to solve: to reflect “A Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)” in the exhibits of the literary museum. But how? Naturally by the use of quotations. For example: “In the sixties of the last century, Tolstoy was writing War and Peace, and here, comrades, we have a quotation from the Stalin textbook on the very subject of the 1860’s” — or the 70’s or 80’s, or 1905.

A regional conference of intellectual workers was called in Tula for the purpose of studying “A Short Course.” I was sent as delegate from Yasnaya Polyana. The speakers included teachers, physicians, engineers. One elderly doctor, a roly-poly, clean, prosperous-looking man, whose bald spot glinted as he addressed us from the platform, declared: “‘A Short Course’ is a torch for our lives. Great Stalin did not give it to us just to read once and then put it on the shelf. No, comrades, we must be guided by it in all our daily undertakings. As for me I can say that ‘A Short Course’ is of daily help to me in my medical practice.”

Applause filled the hall. I also clapped of course. Then I was called on to speak a few words about “A Short Course,” arrangement of exhibits, the mirror of the Revolution, and kindred topics. All the blighting nostalgia, of which I had thought to rid myself in Yasnaya Polyana, overwhelmed me once more. Alas, there was no “technical refuge in literature. I dare say there was none even in the truly technical fields. It was impossible to desert from the ideological front. There was no place to desert to. Not even to farthest Siberia, to that kingdom of death — for there, too, as a matter of course, they carry on the same “ Party work among the masses,” “political education work.” The only refuge lay in falsehood.

4

ON SUNDAYS the museum was always crowded and the room where I gave my talk was open at both ends. One Sunday some teachers, who had been attending a regional conference at Tula, came to Yasnaya Polyana on an excursion. The literary museum was housed in the Kuzminski wing, the two-story stone building which used to be the schoolhouse. I do not know what demon prompted me to prepare, not the usual stereotyped lecture, but one with the emphasis on Tolstoy’s pedagogical activities. Of course I must have known what a deviation that was from the regulation “theses and concepts.”

“There is one question, comrade, which I should like to ask,” said an elderly schoolmarm in a plain black bonnet. “Do Tolstoy’s pedagogical ideas have any meaning for our times?”

I reflected for a moment and then I answered exactly what I believed: —

“Undoubtedly. What is Tolstoy’s fundamental idea, as expressed not only in his pedagogical activities but in his whole life and writings? Surely it is that everything significant, affirmative, and worth while that a man accomplishes is the result of a process which takes place in the first instance inside him, something deeply hidden, often not conscious, the source of which is beyond his knowing. It is as though some inner power acts in man. Tolstoy defined it in the words of the Bible: The Kingdom of God is within you. Conversely, what man does without that inner compulsion, under the pressure of external force, such as, let us say, violence, all that is transitory, unsound, void of significance. It is not without calculated reasons, comrades” — I switched back to a clear track—“that the Party and Comrade Stalin have put the training of the masses ahead of everything else. You teachers are the conductors of Party influence . . .”But the fat was really in the fire!

To one side, between the drifting tourists and my listeners, stood an important personage: T. Chmutov, secretary of the Tula Regional Committee of the Party. He was the second secretary — as luck would have it the one in charge of propaganda. I knew him by sight, from pictures and from Party conferences, but this time I had not noticed him. As soon as my talk was over he came up and introduced himself with calculated courtesy. He offered me a cigarette, asked me to show him the famous century-old alley of trees, and Tolstoy’s grave. As we walked he plied me with questions: Had I been in Yasnaya Polyana long? Where had I come from? Where had I been educated? What was my previous work? Finally something stirred his memory: “Of course, of course, it was quite recently that I read an article of yours in Literary Criticism.” As he said good-bye he was again excessively polite, saying with a smile, “ It has been so pleasant meeting you.”

“What did you think of my talk?” I burst out.

“Very competent. Full of material. Of course, it would do no harm to emphasize that although we use conviction, from now on we shall not refrain from using compulsion. Our Party’s strength lies in these two things combined. But on the whole, it is a good lecture. It’s obvious that you know your subject.”

Chmutov’s praise caused me vague forebodings. I knew too much of the ways of Soviet dignitaries. In most cases they try not to stir up animosity directed against them personally on the part of the great non-Party masses. On the contrary they make every effort — personally — to produce a pleasant, worth-while impression. Meanwhile, behind the scenes . . .

Two days later a commission descended on Yasnaya Polyana. It was headed by a woman; her name has slipped from my memory, but I remember that she was the chief of the Tula Regional Division of Public Education. This commission studied our exhibits in the literary museum, checked the materials used by the Museum guides, talked with Korzinkov and Nelyubov behind closed doors. At a general meeting of the whole staff a resolution was passed to ring all the changes on “apolitical attitudes.” Further, the commission noted that the “scientific personnel was not being trained in political activity and the study of the ‘Short Course’ was being left to individual initiative. As a result the talks for tourists lacked political incisiveness and the scientific co-workers, instead of making use of the clear-cut Marxist-Leninist formulations, were juggling with Biblical terminology.” I had a distinct sense that the wind was blowing from the quarter of Chmutov. Nelyubov came in for a dressing down; the commission pointed out to him his lack of political supervision. As I discovered later, my name originally was featured in the resolution, in connection with the “Biblical terminology.” But, as I was leaving Yasnaya Polyana in a week’s time for Moscow in any case, they decided to leave it out.

In the course of the two years I spent at Yasnaya Polyana it goes without saying that I studied a great deal of Tolstoy. There was an interesting thing about this: if, on the one hand, Tolstoy did much to help me understand the people, the elemental temper of the Russians, it was also true that they in turn helped me to understand Tolstoy. When I say the “ people,” I do not mean merely the peasants of Yasnaya Polyana, but also the thousands of tourists who came to the Museum from all corners of Russia. They were all working people who had given up their annual vacations to “go to Tolstoy.” (Vacation tickets give you the right to travel by railroad in any direction, even to Moscow. The only places not allowed are cities in the frontier zones.) The questions of “Tolstoy and the People” and “Tolstoy and Russia” were answered for me in concrete form before my eyes. And the answer was not Lenin’s.