Tag Archives: censorship

from The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes

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‘There were certain rules of listening and talking that we children had to learn,’ recalls the daugher of a middle-ranking Bolshevik official who grew up in the 1930s:

‘What we overheard the adults say in a whisper, or what we heard them say behind our backs, we knew we could not repeat to anyone. We would be in trouble if we even let them know that we had heard what they had said. Sometimes the adults would say something and then would tell us, ‘The walls have ears,’ or ‘Watch your tongue,’ or some other expression, which we understood to mean that what they had just said was not meant for us to hear.’

from The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes

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The Russian language has two words for a ‘whisperer’ – one for somebody who whispers out of fear of being overheard (shepchuschchii) and another for the person who informs or whispers behind people’s backs to the authorities (sheptun). The distinction has its origins in the idiom of the Stalin years, when the whole of Soviet society was made up of whisperers of one sort or another.

From Back in the USSR, an editorial by Ted Genoways and Dimiter Kenarov for the Virginia Quarterly Review

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Poetry – and literature in general – was never just an art form in the Soviet Union. Heavily influenced by Romantic ideology, it exhibited the features of myth, of ritual, of destiny. Poets were priests and purveyors of national ideals, and their rhymed words were a serious affair, at times more important than those of the General Secretary of the Communist Party. The field of aesthetics was a true battlefield, where many were exiled or even lost their heads. The sacred utterance of poetry invested it with enormous cultural capital – a situation envied by many writers in the West – but that uncritical reverence also ossified its forms and range, and made it an easy tool for Soviet propaganda purposes, as much as for dissent.

One reviewer in The Life Of Art, Number 44, 1927, suggested that they should take Bulgakov and “just bash him over the head with a basin” and that Soviet citizens have no more need of Bulgakov’s work “than a dog needs a brassiere.”

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From Bulgakov: A Life in Letters and Diaries by Julie Curtis

A letter from Bulgakov to the Soviet Government

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28 March 1930. Moscow.

After the banning of all my works, I began to hear voices among many citizens of my acquaintance, all giving me one and the same piece of advice: that I should write a ‘Communist play’ (I am quoting them in inverted commas)…The aim: to escape persecution, destitution, and death as the inevitable finale. I did not follow that advice.

…When I carried out an analysis of my albums of cuttings, I discovered that there had been 301 references to me in the Soviet press during my ten years of work in the field of literature. Of these, three were complimentary, and 298 were hostile and abusive…I was referred to as a ‘literary SCAVENGER’ picking over scraps after ‘a good dozen guests HAVE THROWN UP’….I can prove with documents in my hands that the entire press of the USSR has unanimously and with EXTRAORDINARY FURY demonstrated that the works of Mikhail Bulgakov cannot exist in the USSR. And I declare that the Soviet press is ABSOLUTELY CORRECT.

…To struggle against censorship, whatever its nature, and whatever the power under which it exists, is my duty as a writer, as are calls for freedom of the press. I am a passionate supporter of that freedom, and I consider that if any writer were to imagine that he could prove he didn’t need that freedom, then he would be like a fish affirming in public that it didn’t need water…ANYONE WHO WRITES SATIRE IN THE USSR IS QUESTIONING THE SOVIET SYSTEM. Am I thinkable in the USSR?

…All my own endeavours to find work in the only field in which I can be useful to the USSR as an exceptionally well-qualified specialist have resulted in a complete fiasco. My name has been rendered so odious that proposals on my part that I should apply for a job have been met with ALARM…I would like to offer the USSR the services of an entirely honourable specialist director and actor, without a trace of the saboteur, who will undertake conscientiously to stage any play, beginning with Shakespeare and coming right up to the plays of the present day.

If I am not to be appointed a director, then I request that I be appointed a regular extra. And if I cannot be an extra, then I request to be given a job as a stage-hand. And if even that is impossible, then I request the Soviet Government to take whatever action concerning me it considers necessary, but at least to take some sort of action, because at the moment what is staring me in the face, as the author of five plays and as someone who is famous both in the USSR and abroad, is destitution, the street, and death. 

 - from Manuscripts Don’t Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov – A Life in Letters and Diaries, Dr. Julie Curtis


In Memory of Mikhail Bulgakov

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Anna Akhmatova was a contemporary of Bulgakov’s, and experienced many of the same difficulties living and working as a writer in Soviet Russia. This poem was written in tribute to Bulgakov after his death. From Poems of Akhmatova, translated and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward

In Memory of Mikhail Bulgakov

Anna Akhmatova

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.

You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.

Now you’re gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.

Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,

would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.

from Learned by Heart, Simon McBurney

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When the means of direct speech are removed by threat of retribution, then other ways of communicating have to be explored. As a result art flourishes. And art with the minimum of means, in the most desolate of circumstances, nurtured and sustained people in a way that is almost unimaginable now. Art in our culture, here now in 2010, is often regarded as yet another commodity we can either take or leave. A kind of ‘mental cheesecake’, one American critic called it.

But art is surely no escape from reality. We live in a world that is an elaborate fiction. And it is, surely, art’s function to pierce through that. Art is there to show us REALITY. It is the function of an artist to help us see the world anew. Or often simply to SEE IT.

Nowhere was this more true than in the former Soviet Union. A real reflection of what was there, a true description of their lives, was only possible through artistic means. Depicted in the notes of Shostakovich or Schnittke, in the absurd stories of Kharms, the poems of Mandlestam and the fictions of Bulgakov, is a picture of reality the meaning of which was abundantly clear to their audience.