Owen Hsieh
The Town of N by Leonid Dobychin is a novella about a nameless boy in
provincial, pre-revolutionary Latvia. Beginning in 1901 when he is seven years
old and concluding a decade later. It has been compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses,
there is hardly a plot, chronological in style, it is replete with 100
different characters over 102 pages. Something of a minor epic, it has a number
of thematic threads. It delights with a litany of understated literary
references from the naive perspective of the young boy while creating a
compelling portrait of what parochial, pre-Soviet, provincial life.
While chronicling the major events in the first quarter of the
20th century with the introduction of rubber tyres, the electric light, the
gramophone and living pictures, the disastrous Russia-Japan war, and the failed
revolution of 1905, this allegory sparkles with literary metaphor.
The town of N is a reference to Nikolai Gogol novel Dead Souls,
which is set in a town of the same name. Some of the characters are smug,
bigoted and mean, Gogol’s characters seem to reappear! For instance we see
another instance of a Chichikov the con man, the insipid Manilov, the
misanthropic Sobakevich, the miser Plyushkin, and the untruthful Nozydrov. It
also contains references to the works of Cervantes, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky,
Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dickens.
Innovative, playful, ironic and inventive, rich in symbolism. Each
reading delights with a series of new discoveries. Minor details that are
seemingly hardly worth examining on the first reading wait to be discovered and
rediscovered on the next read through. This is a good example of the novel that
the serious critic would aim to read once per year, re reading it anew with
fresh eyes and (ideally) a greater appreciation for the nuance with the
historical and literary references.
The Translator, Richard Chandler Borden, explains Dobychin’s
method in his introduction to the novella:
“Dobychin’s texts demand close reading and rereading. Much
information necessary for appreciating their subtleties is revealed
sequentially and inexplicitly.”
“[He] was an excruciatingly, slow writer, who would spend days
even months on the tiniest of details, often producing stories of but four or
five pages in length and expressing astonishment, perhaps disingenuously, that
others could churn out so many works of dimensions attractive to publishers.
The result of such laborious creation is that the reader may invest fully in
each detail - each word, each oddity of syntax, diction, or style - confident
it has been selected for its maximum informativeness. Nothing has been left to
chance.”
This book is a joy to read, a full appreciation of all the
subtleties of this novel hardly seems possible in this short review. This is a
work of genius by a modernist master.
But sadly, the appearance of his novel preempted vitriolic
denunciation in the ensuing year that led ultimately to the authors
suicide.
“Dobychin's experimentalism was not understood by his
contemporaries, as it adhered neither to the dictates of socialist realism nor
imitated the ornamental prose of Pilniak and Zamiatin, and he remained on the
periphery of Russian literary life."
(Cornwell and Christian (eds.), Reference Guide to Russian
Literature, 1998, p. 53).
After the replacement of the various artistic schools and unions
with the official union of Soviet Writers in 1934, and the adoption of the ‘new
line’ of socialist realism in all the arts at its congress the same year.
Dobychin had the great misfortune of publishing in 1935, a year prior to the
Stalinist campaign against formalism reaching its apotheosis.
Dobychin takes the unenviable title of being probably the last
work of formalism published in this period and was savaged by the Stalinist
literary critics.
Where formalists sought to analyse literatures form, structure and
style rather than its socio-political content. The adherents of Socialist
realism gave primacy to political considerations in literature, aiming to
create works that showed the positive side of Soviet life with a blend of
optimism and patriotism after the policy of socialism in one country. It
discouraged abstraction and experimentation and favoured a conventional
straightforward narrative structure. The Town of N was an
anathema to the socialist realists.
“Socialist realism was a special theory worked out for the sphere
of art, establishing a sort of normative aesthetic code, which could not be
deviated from without incurring penalties.” - (Boris Kagarlitsky - The Thinking
Reed, 1989, pp 112).
Dobychin was singled out in 1936 as the first whipping boy and
chief formalist. With unsubtle hints that he was a class enemy and accused of
sharing the views of the novels protagonist:
After a fierce meeting with the writers union on March 25th,
1936:
“He responded only by stating that, regrettably, he could not agree with what had been said and departed. He disappeared the next day, after organising his affairs and confiding plans to kill himself to an acquaintance, he later proved to have been a police spy assigned to report on his activities. He was never seen again.”
His body was fished out of the Neva river months later, a presumed
suicide.
It is a tragedy that Dobychin joins the ranks of Bulgakov, Babel,
and a generation of Russian Avante Garde authors who were born from the
creative impulse created by the Bolshevik Revolution, with the democratization
of the arts and the ensuing flourishing and healthy competition of the artistic
schools of thought but were later repressed or silenced under Stalinism.
Dobychin’s life was cut untimely short, and all we have of his literary legacy
is a collection of short stories entitled: Encounters with Lisa and
other stories, and this novella.
It is worth quoting Trotsky and Rogovin at length to give the
concluding comments to highlight the opposing perspective of the left
opposition against the philistinism of the Socialist realists:
“While the dictatorship had a seething mass-basis and a prospect
of world revolution, it had no fear of experiments, searchings, the struggle of
schools, for it understood that only in this way could a new cultural epoch be
prepared. The popular masses were still quivering in every fiber, and were
thinking aloud for the first time in a thousand years. All the best youthful
forces of art were touched to the quick. During those first years, rich in hope
and daring, there were created not only the most complete models of socialist
legislation, but also the best productions of revolutionary literature. To the
same times belong, it is worth remarking, the creation of those excellent
Soviet films which, in spite of a poverty of technical means, caught the imagination
of the whole world with the freshness and vigor of their approach to reality.”
“In the process of struggle against the party Opposition, the
literary schools were strangled one after the other.”
“The bureaucracy superstitiously fears whatever does not serve it
directly, as well as whatever it does not understand”
“The struggle of tendencies and schools has been replaced by
interpretation of the will of the leaders. There has been created for all
groups a general compulsory organization, a kind of concentration camp of
artistic literature. Mediocre but “right-thinking” storytellers like
Serafimovich or Gladkov are inaugurated as classics. Gifted writers who cannot
do sufficient violence to themselves are pursued by a pack of instructors armed
with shamelessness and dozens of quotations. The most eminent artists either
commit suicide, or find their material in the remote past, or become silent.
Honest and talented books appear as though accidentally, bursting out from
somewhere under the counter, and have the character of artistic contraband.”
“The life of Soviet art is a kind of martyrology.” - (Trotsky, the
Revolution Betrayed, 1937, pp 153-156).
and:
“There is no place for talented people on Soviet soil, that party
policy in the realm of art excludes creative experimentation, the independence
of the artist, and the display of genuine mastery.” He associated the
possibility that Soviet culture might flourish with the establishment of a
democratic regime in the land, based on the political views which the
Trotskyist have been defending”. - Isaac Babel in conversation with Eisenstein
(Stalin’s Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR, Vadim Z Rogovin,
1997, pp 227)
