“As if in Search of a Happy Human Life”: Personal...

50 STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES

“As if in Search of a Happy Human Life”: Personal Life in High Stalinism in Yuri German’s “Lapshin” CASSIO DE OLIVEIRA, YALE UNIVERSITY «В тридцатые годы, когда все увлекались созданием «масштабной» литературы, меня не покидал интерес к мелочам быта, к рядовым людям, к анализу всей совокупности обстоятельств, в которых живет человек и которые его формируют.»1

I n 1935, writing about Our Acquaintances (Nashi znakomye), a nov-el that was enjoying considerable success among Soviet readers,

Nikolai Tikhonov praised the author’s “attempt to talk about the aver-age person … Yuri German is intent on developing a great epopee about common people” (qtd. in Levin 87). Tikhonov implies that the new literature would concentrate on “normal” people rather than the epic heroes of ancient times, distinct likewise from the frequently su-per-human heroes, real or imagined, of the literature of early years of the Revolution and the First Five-Year Plan. It was in the same year that one of the greatest feats of one such “hero” took place in the Soviet Union, namely Aleksei Stakhanov’s record mining of coal in a single day. While others would praise the achievements of the Stakha-novites, or the quick regeneration through forced labor in the Gulag and the White Sea Canal, the author of Our Acquaintances, Yuri Ger-man, would concentrate—as he declared in the epigraph above—on the common people, the heroes of the Soviet everyday. This essay will focus on Yuri German’s 1937 tale “Lapshin,” one of the two parts of Two Tales (Dve povesti), his next major work following Our Acquaintances. What kind of everyday life is depicted in “Lapshin,” a story set in 1936 on the eve of the Great Purges? How was the work received and evaluated by critics? What do their responses suggest with regards to a general critical stance on the everyday?

The works of the Soviet writer Yuri Pavlovich German (1910-1967) were extensively read and discussed in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, a decade that witnessed both the publication of his early novels and his almost full maturation into an established writer. While

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German’s fate was “extremely unstable during much of his creative life” (Condee 189), it was always closely related to the prominent Len-ingrad writers, filmmakers, and playwrights with whom he was associ-ated. His artistic trajectory from the thirties until his death was marked by official prizes and high readership levels, coupled with concerted attacks from critics and threats of expulsion from the Soviet Writers’ Union. German is now known primarily as the father of the late film director Aleksei German, who, having adapted a few of his father’s works, may have played a role in saving them from complete oblivion since Perestroika. Yuri German’s belated notoriety only came with his son’s rise to fame as a kind of enfant terrible of late Soviet cinema. Ac-cording to Aleksei German, the release in 1984 of My Friend Ivan Lap-shin (Moi drug Ivan Lapshin), the film adaptation of his father’s tales about Cheka officers in the 1930s, occasioned a large print run of the tale “Lapshin” (Lipkov 186).

According to critics and German himself, a defining trait of his works of the 1930s—arguably the period when they were most widely discussed—is his emphasis on the minutiae of everyday life (byt). German understands byt as the details and particular circum-stances of everyday existence that, in spite of their outwardly limited effect, exert great influence on people’s lives; his suggestion that litera-ture can be constructed almost completely from byt shaped critical reactions to his works. Our Acquaintances was Yuri German’s first work in which critics noted the dominant role played by byt. The novel ce-mented German’s fame and figured prominently in a debate on con-temporary Soviet literature in 1938, one that involved critics and writ-ers like Viktor Shklovskii, Veniamin Kaverin, and Nikolai Chukovskii. Shklovskii’s appraisal represents one of the most unfavorable stances on the novel and German in general. The author’s detailed and veri-similar depiction of the lives of his characters is not matched by a counterbalancing attempt at leading them out of the minutiae of eve-ryday life. To Shklovskii, the heroine of the novel, Antonina Starosel'skaia, “for the time when she is helpless, while she moves around without coming in contact with the new life . . . all is well, the methodology of depiction of scoundrels has been mastered.” Yet An-tonina ultimately does not “find a point of contact with life, because it is unknown how she is going to move around there…” (qtd. in Levin 83). Shklovskii’s position contrasts with those of Kaverin and Chu-kovskii, and that of Tikhonov (quoted earlier), who appear to have read a positive depiction of “common” people in German’s novel:


those who constitute the new, true heroes of contemporary Soviet literature.

These two extremes encapsulate the standard critical ap-proaches to German’s work of the 1930s, and will orient this analysis of responses to the tale “Lapshin,” published in book form as part of a volume entitled Two Tales. Whereas Our Acquaintances was challenged by some critics based on the argument that German got bogged down in the depiction of byt, Two Tales presents a different challenge, but equally relevant to the understanding of byt during the 1930s. Some critics claimed that the depictions of the protagonists of the two sto-ries, a lonely and hard-working Chekist and a petty recidivistic crimi-nal respectively, were unrepresentative of real Soviet individuals. Oth-er critics praised German’s capacity to once again reproduce various details of everyday life with fidelity. One fundamental way this article will analyze the question of byt in “Lapshin” is through German’s choice of hero, Ivan Lapshin, the representative of law enforcement and direct descendant of Dzerzhinskii’s lineage of old-school Bolshe-vik investigators (in the story, he is said to have joined the Cheka in Dzerzhinskii’s time and worked under him). The relevance of charac-ters like Lapshin, in Soviet everyday life, to German is such that he becomes the main element that links the two parts of Two Tales. In “Aleksei Zhmakin,” Lapshin plays the role of mentor of the epony-mous hero’s socialist rehabilitation, an achievement crowned at the end of the story, when Zhmakin risks his life to help Lapshin and his group arrest a dangerous criminal.2

While critics had qualms about the extent to which Lapshin was a true and realistic Soviet hero, the story represents Soviet every-day life in the 1930s because it shares some characteristics with mid-dlebrow literature, much in the way that Vera Dunham describes this genre in the post-war Soviet Union. “Middlebrow fiction has nothing to do with the high road of literary art. Instead, it echoes the official views of the moment. It is compliant, didactic, grey and routine.” As a result of the purposes it serves, middlebrow literature makes use of “current” circumstances and topics to ensure its attractiveness to con-temporary readers. The protagonist, furthermore, becomes the key element of the tale, embodying the message of “the fulfillment of the regime’s desired values” in the model Soviet citizen (Dunham 29). Hence there is the tendency in Soviet criticism to discuss and judge the behavior of characters as if they were living persons, as it is the purported “message” of the work that these characters do embody a

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synthetic Soviet population. Before the euphoria of post-war Stalinism, in “Lapshin” the

embodiment of an ideal unmediated reality is achieved through byt. As the epigraph demonstrates, it was German’s avowed goal to build a literary work on the grounds of details of everyday life that ultimately exert a defining influence on people’s fates. German’s intentions dis-tinguish his works from the mainstream socialist realist literature of the 1930s. “During the period of enthusiasm for general ideas without necessary or sufficient life experience, during the period of domina-tion of the so-called ‘industrial themes,’ German was one of the first whose attention was again turned to circumstances of life which are said to be routine, domestic, familial: everyday feelings and desires, everything that [. . .] should be the subject of literature, for there is where the main tone of life is sounded” (Bondarin). This position stands in stark contrast to the conventional duality between narrative and “reality,” the former consisting of a selection of significant events, and the latter made up of the unfiltered, normative (i.e. routine-based) and uninterrupted flow of existence.3 German, by contrast, attempts to create a narrative based to a far greater extent on ostensibly routine events, on the everyday norm rather than the exception. He drives to its logical limit the socialist realist emphasis on plausibility. “The more persistently what was given as authentic was not what actually hap-pened, but what should happen; the more persistently verisimilitude was required of the artist, then the more strictly the least deviation from verisimilitude was punished. Demanding realism from artists meant that verisimilitude was demanded—the reproduction ‘in the forms of life itself’” (Chernoivanenko 148). For German, however, the question of realism “in form”4 also contaminates his search for “realist” content, resulting in an emphasis on byt that distinguishes his work from socialist realist texts that typically emphasize the ideal, he-roic aspect of their heroes and events.

While German’s affiliation with socialist realism and Soviet middlebrow literature will become evident during the course of this article, it is also important to note that “Lapshin” may be in a unique position vis-à-vis the socialist realist doctrine. German’s emphasis on an everyday life out of which the plot is developed stands in contrast to the transformative trope in the socialist realist master plot, in which the hero’s elemental “spontaneity” is finally channeled by the mentor’s party “consciousness,” characterizing a fundamental turning point for the hero.5 There are no such momentous turning points in “Lapshin.”


Dzerzhinskii’s “mentorship” of Lapshin, for instance, appears purely professional in nature, not political or ideological, whereas Lapshin’s own lessons in dealing with criminals are all an inherent part of his job and take for granted the hegemony of the Party.

This affirmation of socialism as an ideological fait accompli on course to its material manifestation distinguishes “Lapshin” from some of the most successful works of socialist realism in the 1930s, many of which focus on the historical turning points of the October Revolution, like Nikolai Ostrovsky’s 1934 novel How the Steel was Tem-pered (Kak zakalialas′ stal′). In terms of the ensuing Civil War, Dmitrii Furmanov’s 1923 novel Chapaev and the 1934 film adaptation by the Vasil′ev “brothers,” are moments that signify material as much as ide-ological victories for the socialist cause. German’s assertion of a byt-based literary work also stands out from the hostility in “highbrow” literature toward byt in its most negative manifestations: “automatism, eventlessness, petty intrigue, ugly uniformity” (Hutchings 48). This hostility endures throughout the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the Revolution. It is reflected in works like Mikhail Zoshchenko’s tales from the 1920s, with their characteristic blend of narrative triviality (on the verge of plotlessness) and existential pessi-mism. The proliferation of adventure tales about expeditions to fara-way lands, which had become extremely popular during the second half of the 1930s in the wake of real-life Soviet achievements in avia-tion and polar exploration, also reflects the avoidance of what was viewed as the deadening patterns of everyday life.6 Soviet men and women should instead, of course, aspire to heroic and extraordinary deeds.

Yet it appears from the narrative line of “Lapshin” that byt is the “ideal” to which Soviet citizens should strive. The effort of social-ism after the Revolution, in other words, should consist of a daily, routine achievement or maintenance of happiness—personal and so-cial—rather than a momentous change or sequence of discrete, major changes. Semyon Gekht, for instance, writes that “The merit of ‘Lapshin’ lies in the fact that we truly recognize our acquaintances in this tale. . . . Byt, unattractive in many aspects, does not frighten Yuri German, since it is Lapshin’s wit, his feelings and actions, which pre-dominate in the story, and not those unattractive details” (Gekht 11, 13). For Gekht, Lapshin demonstrates his worth in spite of those de-tails of everyday life that pervade the narrative. Likewise, Kl. Lavrova, in a review essay of German’s literary output throughout the 1930s,

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argues that the author’s attention to the role of everyday details in “the process of establishment of the new society” presupposes an eventual “rejection of this ordinariness” (Lavrova 157), as if the ulti-mate achievement of socialism were to extinguish the routine of the everyday from people’s lives. Lavrova also defends “Lapshin” and its presumably positive protagonist against negative reviews in the press. “Acknowledging the beautiful qualities of Lapshin [as] the worker of socialist labor . . . M. Charnyi [in a review in Kniga i proletarskaia revoli-utsiia] at the same time sharply and resolutely stresses the ‘inadequacy’ of Lapshin as a positive hero. He points to those traits that cause the intended image to lose value: the shyness of feeling, the helplessness in his personal life, finally, the ideological [ideinuiu] sluggishness and vagueness, the absence of a wide horizon, of creative revolutionary thinking, and of conscious discipline and behavior” (Lavrova 165). Here one encounters the usual adjectives and nouns used in reference to the foremost qualities of socialist heroes: ideological mindedness (ideinost′), creative revolutionary thinking (tvorcheskaia revoliutsionnaia mysl′), and (class-)consciousness (soznanie). For Charnyi, Lapshin falls short of these requirements precisely because of the bytovaia inertsiia (everyday life inertia) that causes him to be a communist out of habit rather than conviction. Interestingly enough, both German’s defend-ers and critics appear to agree on how harmful byt can be; the point of contention lies only in whether the hero—Lapshin—succeeds in over-coming the obstacle of everyday life and its details.

German’s “idealization” of byt as a condition which, while it could be improved, was an inherent aspect of people’s lives (and thus not likely to be fully eliminated), can be attributed to his allegiance to the socialist regime and its own ideals of material comfort and obedi-ence to the Party (i.e., to his affiliation with Soviet middlebrow litera-ture). It is surprising, however, that this apparent praise of byt was tak-ing place in 1937, the year that marked the beginning of the Great Purges, and a time during which the urban middle classes were still not fully consolidated in order to develop a characteristic taste. The everyday life of the characters of “Lapshin” is far from comfortable. Lapshin, for instance, lives in a communal apartment, and his child-hood friend avoids joining the Communist Party due to his marriage to the daughter of a priest, a compromising element at the time of the Great Purges which points to the general uncertainty that contaminat-ed people’s lives at the time. The year 1937, furthermore, had very little of the sense of stability that characterized the post-war era de-


scribed by Dunham, during which the political paranoia of Late Stalin-ism was compensated by the ostensive sense of superiority, joy and celebration that accompanied the victory in the Great Patriotic War and the improvement in living standards in the Soviet Union.

The possible lack of an established “middlebrow ideal” (of material comfort, of social and professional fulfillment, of personal happiness, of full reliance on the Party as the solution to all social ills) in the Soviet society of the late 1930s is, in a way, also reflected in the varieties of byt that are displayed or desired in Two Tales. The following pages will sketch a description of High Stalinist byt based on the life of Ivan Lapshin in the eponymous tale. For this reason, it will focus on interpersonal relations as they are established on the personal level, in particular on the level of family and its surrogates.

During the Revolution and the ensuing years, the importance of the family nucleus in society progressively lost importance against each individual’s direct duty to the regime and to the construction of socialism.

In the 1920s, Communist attitudes toward the family were often hostile. ‘Bourgeois’ and ‘patriarchal’ were two words often coupled with ‘family.’ The conventions observed by respectable society before the revolution were dismissed as ‘petty-bourgeois philistinism,’ and the younger generation in particular made a point of its sexual liberation and disrespect for the institution of mar-riage. (Fitzpatrick 142)

The legalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce laws, the proliferation of orphanhood and homeless children, and their place-ment under the direct care and responsibility of the state, were all ele-ments that either facilitated or suggested the breakdown of the tradi-tional family in the new Soviet society.

The anti-family impetus began in the years immediately fol-lowing the Revolution and the Civil War, historical phenomena that almost necessarily caused families to be destroyed or broken up be-cause of drafting, voluntary military service, emigration, internal mi-gration, or prison. Around the middle of the 1930s, the Soviet govern-ment assumed an explicitly pro-natalist and pro-family stance. “This change seems to have been primarily a response to falling birthrates and alarm at the failure of Soviet population figures to show the ro-bust growth expected under socialism” (Fitzpatrick 142). By 1937, the

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consolidation of the Soviet Union, the triumphant completion after four years of the first Five-Year Plan, and the stabilization of the planned economy, brought populations in the large urban centers (if not in the countryside or smaller cities) a measure of social and eco-nomic stability, albeit with the growing threat of political repression. This situation allowed an increased emphasis on family ties as an ele-ment of social cohesion, although it was not until the post-war era that some level of private life would be actively encouraged among Soviet subjects. After 1945, “Former prescriptions for former heroes, calling for neglect of the family and of domestic bliss, were no longer in effect. A desired new balance was in the making” (Dunham 79). This balance, achieved only in Late Stalinism, and with ambiguous results, is already shown as something for which Lapshin and other characters yearn. The following section will discuss how German’s tale attempts this. “Lapshin”: The Ascetic Knight of Revolution

«Лапшин жил, действительно, и чисто, и неинтересно»7 “Lapshin” was first published in a single installment of the journal Zvezda in December 1937. The story begins at the end of December 1936 on the occasion of Leningrad police investigator Ivan Lapshin’s fortieth anniversary. It contains some explicative episodes through which the narrative backtracks to earlier years, but it eventually ends in August 1937, when Lapshin’s friend, Khanin, departs from Lenin-grad, and fellow policeman Vas′ka Okoshkin returns to Lapshin’s apartment after a failed marriage. While it is easy to establish the tem-poral boundaries of the tale, defining its central plot is more difficult. It might consist of the description of the love triangle involving Lap-shin, the journalist Khanin, and the local actress Adashova, although this episode is developed only in a later section of the tale.8 It might also be read as an early example of a Soviet detective novel,9 centering primarily on the investigation of a gang led by the “enemy of the peo-ple,” Mamalyga, although there is also room for a separate criminal plot involving Okoshkin’s investigation of his friend Tamarkin. The fact that Lapshin figures into all the subplots indicates his prominent role in the tale; and yet, as the story ends, his life has not been altered much in comparison to the beginning. This suggests that, rather than emphasizing a narrative line, German prefers to draw attention to the prominence of byt in Lapshin’s life, of a routine or stabilizing force that once all is said and done, ensures that things will be as they al-


ways were for better or for worse. Although Lapshin remains, for the most part, unchanged throughout the story, some mutual influence is exerted between him and his surrounding world. His infatuation with Adashova is perhaps the most convincing instance of this influence, although by story’s end, Lapshin has changed little in reaction to it. The essence of a plot (or many plots) is instead to be found in the specific instances of interaction, the self-contained episodes within the tale. The notion of byt in “Lapshin” implies a conflation of different dimensions of existence that are tightly bound together, accounting for most of Lapshin’s experience of the world. These core categories of interaction are personal life (expressed through the concept of “family”), work, and social duty.

Family is an important theme in the story, but it is evident that it must be understood in terms different from the conventional notion of blood and affective ties. Lapshin surrounds himself with characters who play the role of surrogate family members, and his attempts at establishing a “normal” family through marriage remain fruitless. The unusual character of his “family” relationships, however, reinforces the roles of work and social duty, spheres of existence that become more prominent precisely through the elimination of family in a conventional sense and the establishment of family ties that rein-force those social spheres.

The unconventional character of Lapshin’s personal life is revealed from the outset. The guests to Lapshin’s birthday party are Okoshkin, Lapshin’s roommate and colleague at work; “one Tamarkin,” a friend of Okoshkin’s; the doctor Ashkenazi, another resident in Lapshin’s apartment; and Lapshin’s childhood friend, Khokhriakov. While it appears that the former three guests are there by force of the circumstances, one of the story’s first significant dia-logues exposes the incompatibility of Lapshin’s friendship with Khokhriakov. Khokhriakov explains that he did not join the Com-munist Party because he married the daughter of a priest. His invita-tion for Lapshin to come visit him in his provincial town provokes Lapshin’s evasive reply, followed by the narrator’s remark. “And he looked closely at Khokhriakov and thought about how they are now different people, unnecessary to each other” (German, Sobranie 2: 167).10 For German, this sense of mutual superfluity is due as much to Lapshin’s refusal to renew a friendship with a politically undesirable individual (a particularly significant theme for readers at the height of the Great Purges), as it is due to Khokhriakov’s own decision to iso-

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late himself from society by marrying the daughter of a priest and not joining the Party. This exchange suggests a trade-off on both sides. Khokhriakov sacrifices his social life (as part of the socialist body through membership in the Party) for the fulfillment of his personal life, while Lapshin’s loyalty to the regime exposes his alienation from a childhood friend and, more generally, the absence of a personal life. The remainder of the story constitutes Lapshin’s attempt to overcome this imbalance.

Lapshin declares throughout the story that he is a “resolute bachelor” and is not alone in being deprived of family and close per-sonal ties. Nothing is known about his family history or about the previous lives of the other residents of the collective apartment, Ash-kenazi and Patrikeevna: “an old lady arrived who knows from where, limp …, very mean and very good at cooking” (German, Sobranie 2: 168).11 The only character about whom something is known is Okoshkin, who, earlier in the story, lives with his sister. After she gives birth, their mother moves in with her, and there is no room left for him in the house. Okoshkin is sent in from the Komsomol to join Lapshin’s team in the police. After moving in with Lapshin, Okoshkin’s decision to live there in a semi-permanent state is accept-ed almost naturally by the latter. “Stay here for a while, – Lapshin said to him. – Just don’t throw parties at my house, I don’t like them” (German, Sobranie 2: 171).12 Okoshkin’s change of residence is also a change of home and, by extension, of family. Rather than being a member of his personal family, Okoshkin becomes a member of Lapshin’s communal family in his apartment, a metonymical extension of his family of Chekists at work. Okoshkin’s admission to the Party under Lapshin’s sponsorship is another sign that this relationship, from the realm of work, also occupies the realms of personal life and social duty. Whereas Lapshin agrees to host Okoshkin in his apart-ment out of compassion, this compassion is fully credited to them working together. The conflation of aspects of everyday life is further reinforced through the narrator introducing a conversation between Lapshin and Okoshkin about marriage:

In 1932 Okoshkin was admitted to the Party. Before recommending him, Lapshin for a long time drank his beloved Borjomi mineral water and talked to Vas′ka about trifles. Then, staring at the sky with his blue, clear eyes, he asked him, the way he used to ask at interrogations:


–All of this is good. And what is going on between you and the ladies? (German, Sobranie 2: 173)13

The question of marriage and personal relations is, therefore, inti-mately related to the issue of joining the Party. Okoshkin’s extensive relations with various women are a source of arguments between the two Chekists, since Okoshkin’s late-night phone calls will disturb Lap-shin’s sleep.

While Lapshin encourages Okoshkin to get married, Lapshin does not seem to fathom the mysteries of love relationships. In a flashback to Okoshkin’s acceptance into the Party, as he and Lapshin walk back home, Lapshin narrates a case he encountered: “A woman and a man, not that young already, poisoned themselves. What a love was binding them, strong in the highest sense…” (German, Sobranie 2: 174).14 Lapshin’s commentary belies his incapacity to penetrate the mystery of the double suicide and, by extension, of intimate relation-ships, which he replaces with work. He later expresses his disgust at people who use personal problems as obstacles to greater integration with society as a whole (such as Pobuzhinskii, a fellow policeman who had been slacking at work since his brother’s death), revealing a posi-tion that presupposes that one’s duty to society takes precedence over one’s personal needs or attachments.

The absence of conventional family ties is most evident in the episode of Lapshin’s visit to a sanatorium. There, he befriends a fa-mous aviator and his family. Lapshin soon becomes restless and anx-ious to get back to work in Leningrad, presumably because of the peacefulness that borders on boredom in the sanatorium. Lapshin confuses the sound of the waves with cannonades, and the realization of his confusion causes mixed feelings: “and, both because cannons were not being fired, and because he did not need to go to the front, he felt peaceful, and happy, and a bit annoyed” (German, Sobranie 2: 175).15 Various situations in this episode also suggest another cause for his desire to return sooner to Leningrad including his lack of a family, which is repeatedly demonstrated, by contrast, with the avia-tor’s comfortable existence with a caring wife and child. This contrast is made more explicit during the moments when Lapshin is confront-ed with a different everyday life from his own.

One day he takes the aviator’s son Bobka to the beach and, when the child sits on the floor to remove a stone from his sandal, he stares at Bobka’s nape and imagines that he could be his own son.

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They play on the beach, but Lapshin “suddenly became bored, dried himself and told Bobka that it was time to go home. … here one might very well go crazy out of idleness” (German, Sobranie 2: 177).16 On the day of the departure of the aviator and his family, as his wife removes his shaving kit from the suitcase because he always likes to shave on the road and needs the kit close at hand, Lapshin “thought with sadness that nobody knows how and where he shaves and what his habits are, and throughout his life nobody ever put his things away for him” (German, Sobranie 2: 178).17 Lapshin is faced constantly with personal experiences of everyday life (and death) that seem inaccessi-ble to him: the double suicide of the old couple; the wife who knows her husband’s habits and preferences; the child who could be his own. Yet the response to these varieties of familial byt consists of escaping to a different level of everyday life. Lapshin thinks about his work and about Okoshkin as his ideological “son” or pupil. He writes a number of letters to friends and coworkers in Leningrad. “And the letters were sad, and all who received them understood that Lapshin was bored” (German, Sobranie 2: 179).18 Besides work, however, there is a stronger force: social duty. After the aviator’s departure, it is only this sense of duty (toward society, the Party, the regime) that stops Lap-shin from an early departure home: “if his government sent him to rest, then he must do it as necessary” (German, Sobranie 2: 179).19

The episode at the resort allows Lapshin to encounter an ide-al Soviet hero, one with a successful career and a happy family living comfortably. This ideal of Soviet middlebrow life is projected on Lap-shin’s own search for affective happiness. As the most experienced member of his brigade, Lapshin is asked to lecture a troupe of actors on the rehabilitation and punishment of criminals. His initial reaction to the actors is negative. “In each one of them there was something deliberate, willful and annoying, something that caused Lapshin to think with vexation: ‘Oh, you fops!’” (German, Sobranie 2: 187).20 One actress—Adashova—catches his eye because of her modesty and dis-creetness. Later, Adashova’s interest in meeting real prostitutes who serve as models for her character in the play leads her to witness Lap-shin’s interrogations, after which he introduces her to a prostitute in prison. Lapshin’s infatuation with Adashova represents, perhaps, the closest thing to an ideal personal relationship for him, one that is mo-tivated by their acquaintance in a professional environment and with a common underlying goal, namely social and ideological progress in the Soviet society.


This ideal, still, remains unrealized to all central characters in “Lapshin.” Lapshin’s friend, the journalist Khanin, returns from a trip to the Far East to discover that his wife died while he was away. Khanin’s personal life also remains unfulfilled, but when Adashova falls in love with him and shuns Lapshin, he also contributes indirectly to Lapshin’s unfulfilled aspirations to family life. This becomes most obvious when Khanin is convalescing in the hospital after being shot while witnessing a police raid. Since Adashova spends countless hours by Khanin’s bedside, Lapshin avoids going to the hospital while she is there, preferring to visit “when rehearsals were going on in the theater and he would not be able to meet Natasha [Adashova]” (German, Sobranie 2: 261).21 The narrator, however, continues: “in everything that surrounded Khanin – in the details, in the trifles, – Lapshin felt her presence: either on the puff lay a book about which she had once talked to Lapshin, or some homemade compote had been poured into the little vase he was familiar with, or on the head of the bed hung the little scarf that belonged to her…” (German, Sobranie 2: 261).22 While these objects remind Lapshin of Adashova’s absence, and represent the presumed end of his infatuation with her, Khanin’s departure from Leningrad, first to Moscow and then to the Far East, also repre-sents the partial breakup of Lapshin’s informal family (which will then be compensated by Okoshkin’s return after the separation from his wife). Lapshin’s Borjomi mineral water, which he buys after driving Adashova to her house after they see Khanin off,23 and Okoshkin’s return, symbolize, in a way, Lapshin’s own return to a routine, initially broken by Khanin’s and Adashova’s appearances in his life.

The result of this return to Lapshin’s “personal” routine is loss of privacy, symbolized by the motif of one roommate observing the other in his sleep. The first instance of this motif occurs at the end of the second chapter, after Lapshin mentions the case of the double suicide: “Having had potato salad for dinner and lied down to sleep, Lapshin was silent, and Vas'ka could hear how he let out long and sad sighs, and how when he turned around the springs of the mattress crackled and clicked under his massive body” (German, Sobranie 2: 175).24 This scene is mirrored in the conclusion to the story, on the first night after Okoshkin’s return to the apartment: “They read a bit still for half an hour, then Lapshin asked if he could turn off the light. But Vas′ka already did not answer – he was fast asleep. He was wear-ing a new undershirt, white and pink, and Lapshin felt amused and a bit sorry for Vas′ka” (German, Sobranie 2: 268).25 These two comple-

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mentary moments suggest that the ad hoc companionship between Lapshin and Okoshkin is more intimate and authentic than Okoshkin’s marriage, or even the unfathomable double suicide of the aged couple. In the second quote above, for example, Lapshin notices Okoshkin’s new shirt, and his reaction, a mixture of irony and com-passion, suggests an almost paternal or fraternal intimacy with his roommate. This implies that, while both Okoshkin and Lapshin at-tempt to form stable love relationships in the story, their collective failure in their enterprises sets in relief the harmony of their friend-ship, as well as the overwhelming role of service to the socialist cause in their lives. Gekht develops this reading: “In the evening tonalities, in the sad tone of the tale there is more optimism than in many works, written as if in a major key, whose flashy optimism causes uneasiness and mistrust” (Gekht 12-13). By choosing a more “sobering” fate for the personal lives of his characters, German demonstrates the irrele-vance of this dimension to a Soviet life well lived.

Lapshin’s gaze upon Okoshkin also harks back to questions posed above, namely: what do Lapshin’s and his circle’s experiences in the story represent for German’s readers? How did critics read the apparent contradiction between Lapshin’s successes as a police agent and Soviet citizen on the one hand (evidenced by the admiration from a former thief turned into a law-abiding citizen, other demonstrations of appreciation from friends and co-workers, and the granting of the Order of the Red Star to Lapshin [German, Sobranie 2: 227]), and on the other, his failure on the personal plane? Can his lack of a wife be understood as a failure?

Lavrova, for one, thinks otherwise. For her, Lapshin’s and Okoshkin’s love disappointments, as well as other ostensibly tragic details (the murder of the Chekist Pobuzhinskii’s brother), add com-plexity to this story. “But this complexity more fully, essentially and markedly expresses the true optimistic idea of the tale.” This “optimistic idea” consists in the elimination of “the contradiction be-tween the social and the personal … If in the pre-socialist society these contradictions were natural and fully evident, then under social-ism they are altogether unnatural. In the conditions of our reality there are no grounds for contradictions between our intimate feelings and our social action in the general sense” (Lavrova 164). This contradic-tion is eliminated through the blend of various dimensions of exist-ence, as Rostislav Aleksandrov suggests: “Lapshin is a conscious [soznatel'nyi] organizer of the new life; he is incapable of separating the


duty of service and the interests of society from the interests of a per-sonal life. It is impossible to tell something about him with the least elaboration without surrounding him with valuable Soviet people, an impressive ensemble of positive heroes” (20). Even this critic admits, however, that Lapshin feels the absence of personal, affective rela-tions, but that “he has so much work that keeps him distracted, so many of the most varied societal interests and such a burning love for people, that there is not a shade of sickly anguish or collapse of moral strength in his intimate anxiety” (Aleksandrov 21). Lapshin’s personal stoicism is a result of the consolations of social action and of a ful-filling professional life.

A. Ragozin makes a similar point, arguing that Lapshin, dur-ing the hardest moments of his unrequited passion for Adashova, finds comfort in his work, which helps him “maintain his spiritual balance” (Ragozin 121). Besides work, Ragozin also mentions the beneficial nature of Lapshin’s friendship with coworkers and others, who care about him and help him survive his personal crisis, although they are unaware of it. For the critic, what stands out in the story is the general failure of most characters to find some sort of comfort or stability in their personal lives; he argues that the only character whose conjugal situation is solved is Bychkova, the wife of the police agent, who is given a job in the police in order to spend more time near her husband. All other characters are unfulfilled in a way or another: Pobuzhinskii loses his brother; Khanin’s wife is dead; neither Adasho-va’s love for Khanin is reciprocated, nor is Lapshin’s love for Adasho-va; Okoshkin’s marriage ends in failure.

German, therefore, “takes us from door to door, as if in search of a happy human life” (Ragozin 124), a search that, as the sto-ry ends, appears to be fruitless. Even worse, for the critic (and in con-trast with Lavrova or Gekht), German offers no way out of this seem-ingly absolute negativity or absence of happiness: “The author con-trasted with the chain of misfortunes not a single completed episode that would have demonstrated that unhappiness, failure, and grief, are nothing but fortuitous occurrences [eto ne bolee, kak sluchainosti], overshad-owing our personal life, but far from making up its sole con-tent” (Ragozin 126; emphasis added). Ragozin is unable to read into the work the optimism in spite of everything that is noticed by other critics; for him, these details of everyday life, emphasized by German, are only accidents, incidents fully at the mercy of chance. The critic’s position is similar to that staked in Shklovskii’s remark on Antonina

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Starosel'skaia, the heroine of Our Acquaintances. As the characters of “Lapshin” get bogged down in the details of everyday routines that appear to be solely by chance, there is no suggestion of a positive path towards a greater truth.

As it is now apparent, this is a recurrent point of contention with Yuri German’s oeuvre of the 1930s. But is it fully justified? The answer lies in the saying that Lapshin learns from a fellow Chekist who is eventually a victim of the kulaks: “We will clean the earth, plant a garden, and then we will walk together in the gar-den…” (German, Sobranie 2: 206).26 Lapshin quotes this in response to Adashova’s question on whether he ever regrets executing criminals. Adashova’s positive reaction underscores, in a way, the aspects in common between Lapshin’s and Adashova’s professional activities. Whereas Lapshin “cleanses the earth” by hunting down criminals, Adashova does so through participation in the ideological indoctrina-tion of the masses as an actress in a play about the rehabilitation of criminals.27 The saying can also be read as a declaration of love, social-ist-realist style. The walks on the garden imply a peaceful, idyllic fu-ture, one built by the labor of two people (“poguliaem s toboi”) whose enjoyment of this future relies on their own service to society and the greater good. The social and personal dimensions of existence are, therefore, mixed in this quote; the socially useful act of cleansing the earth leads to the intimate walk in the garden as an allegory of happi-ness. But more important is the temporal sequence of events. The idyllic walk in the garden is a necessary result of cleansing the earth; the moral duty to society has to precede the gratification.

If there are, therefore, no “completed episodes” in the story, as Ragozin points out, it is because for German the socialist ideal is still a work in progress, and is manifested in the everyday life of the characters, precluding the fulfillment of their personal lives. Their col-lective personal unhappiness is tied necessarily to their collective work towards the achievement of socialism. To be sure, this does not ex-plain why certain characters do achieve a measure of personal happi-ness, namely Bychkova and the aviator at the resort. Even these char-acters encounter shortcomings in their lives. Bychkova seems unable to understand the greatness and heroism of her husband, while the aviator is shy and unable to handle his celebrity status. Khanin’s dedi-cation to his work as journalist, which causes him to be absent during his wife’s death and prompts his departure to the Far East after his recovery from the gunshot, indicates a fundamental pattern of sub-


mission, voluntary or not, but seemingly taken for granted, of one individual’s personal life to a larger social(ist) goal among the central characters.

Whereas personal stoicism is a frequent trope of socialist real-ist characters, the sacrifice of personal happiness is a somewhat anach-ronistic element in a story set in 1936-37, a time when life is already “merrier” and “better” according to Stalin, and characters are presum-ably able to dedicate more of their lives to personal betterment. Yet, if in its ignorance of the discursive achievement of socialism in the Sovi-et Union “Lapshin” is somewhat off the mark as a socialist realist work is conventionally understood, it is nonetheless fully in line with a different understanding of this concept. Petre Petrov criticizes the conventional definition of socialist realism as “the general name for the practice of manufacturing a surrogate reality and . . . an indispen-sable component of the Stalinist system” (Petrov 875). While the standard reading of socialist realism views it as a “bogus real-ism” (Petrov 873) serving as a tool for ideological falsification of the “real” reality (possibly with the full connivance of the socialist realist authors), Petrov regards socialist realism as the way through which socialism shows itself in all its manifestations: “Before anything or anyone else, it is socialism that trues. Because, in this dynamic, truth has ‘happened’ before their appearance on the scene, writers are simp-ly asked to write it; this means: to let truing do its work in their work, to let the showing show, to not interfere with the assertive visibility of socialism” (Petrov 889). Socialist realism “begins with the realization of socialism’s happening” (Petrov 887), a realization that implies a simultaneous process of “becoming aware,” “acquiring conscious-ness,” and “achieving,” “coming to be.” This double process of reali-zation eliminates any semblance of an individual’s outside perspective or consciousness that cannot take part in the actual process of the “happening” of socialism. As a consequence, it is as if every work which purports to depict the “happening” of socialism from an inside perspective belongs to the system of socialist realism including, evi-dently, “Lapshin.”

In its emphasis on the minutiae of byt at the expense of an overarching, all-encompassing solution to each character’s individual and personal problems, “Lapshin” is a foremost example of a socialist realist work viewed in Petrov’s terms: a narrative about heroes who contribute to socialism in their daily routines (catching thieves, resting at resorts, interpreting prostitutes in socialist plays, drinking Georgian

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mineral water), with the constant awareness of their belonging to so-cialism (and thus with no need of being reminded of any overarching goal). Ultimately, this double realization trumps all personal unhappi-ness.

The “realization” of socialism in “Lapshin” may account for the generally positive acceptance of the work among critics at a time when such a depiction of life in the Soviet Union was presumably re-jected as not radiant or optimistic enough. And yet, what various criti-cal responses to “Lapshin” at the time of its publication also demon-strate is that the depiction of the everyday life of a Chekist, a faithful defender and ideological worker for the principles of the Revolution, was thought to fall short of what was expected of a “proper” socialist realist work, even if it was not outright subversive. Lapshin finds him-self at the crossroads between the satisfaction of the well-performed duty and the desire for personal and affective fulfillment. Despite claims for a merrier life in the late 1930s, this conundrum was not resolved until after the war in official Soviet rhetoric. The show trials, the Great Purges, and the Nazi invasion postponed any manifestation of personal desires. “Lapshin” expresses this conundrum well, as the story becomes a narrative of at times contradictory (and yet credible) yearnings and desires of established Soviet citizens, rather than an account of their achievements past, present, or future.

Notes

1. “During the 1930s, when everyone was fascinated with the creation of a ‘monumental’ literature, I did not lose interest in the trifles of everyday life, in ordinary people, in the analysis of all the totality of circumstances in which man lives and which form him.” This statement, attributed to Yuri German, is quoted in Levin 82. All translations from Russian sources are mine.

2. For the purpose of my analysis of byt, I will focus in the present essay on “Lapshin,” in which everyday life is emphasized to a much greater extent than in “Aleksei Zhmakin,” which is dominated by the plot of the hero’s rehabilitation. In addition to Two Tales, Yuri German would still return to the character of Lapshin and his circle in at least three more works: the novel and the play entitled Odin god (1960 and 1961), both of which blend the plots of “Lapshin” and “Aleksei Zhmakin” in different ways, and the autobiographical essay “Nash drug Ivan Bodunov” (1964), in which German recalls his friendship with the police officer who inspired the character of Lapshin.

3. See Hutchings 13-24. My discussion of the relationship of byt to narra-


tive and of historical views of byt owes much to Part One of Hutchings’s study.

4. While Aleksandr Gerasimov’s definition of socialist realism as “realistic

in form and socialist in content” (qtd. in Bown 141) was originally ap-

plied to socialist realist painting, I would argue that the quest for some-thing resembling “realist form” in reference to other media led to the formal simplicity or poverty usually associated with other manifestations of socialist realism, e.g. in literature: “[the founders of Socialist Realism] believed that their proselytizing aims would best be served in ‘simple forms’ like the parable and the tale. In the modern day it is of course very difficult to achieve the purity of such simple forms; the effort to do so produced much of the incongruity seized upon by critics” (Clark 37).

5. For a discussion of the duality spontaneity/consciousness, see Clark 15-24.

6. Incidentally, Yuri German himself made a contribution to the consolida-tion of the adventure tale as a dominant plot in the late 1930s, having co-written, with director Sergei Gerasimov, the 1936 feature film Semero smelykh (Seven Brave Ones), about a Soviet expedition in the Arctic.

7. “Lapshin lived, in fact, a life both clean and uninteresting” (German, Sobranie 2: 167). A more recent collection of German’s most important tales (including Two Tales) is German, Lapshin i drugie: povesti.

8. Aleksei German suggests that his adaptation of “Lapshin” encompasses two main aspects of the tale, since his emphasis was “not the detective intrigue, not the love story, but that epoch itself” (qtd. in Lipkov 160).

9. An interpretation suggested for Two Tales in Metter 681, although, to be clear, Metter is not sympathetic to detective literature, and regards the higher artistry of German’s tales as a distinctive feature not usually found in that genre. Metter suggests that German might have written the first Russian detektiv in history; in fact, however, there are examples of crime novels in Russia as early as the 1860s. See Reitblat 7-8, who em-phasizes the documental and bytovye roots of detective novels in nine-teenth-century Russia—aspects which also become relevant in German’s Two Tales.

10. «И он пристально поглядел на Хохрякова и подумал о том, что они теперь разные и ненужные друг другу люди.»

11. «неизвестно откуда взявшаяся старуха, хромая . . ., очень злая и очень вкусно стряпавшая.»

12. «– Поживи немного, – сказал ему Лапшин. – Только гулянок у меня не устраивай, не люблю.»

13. «В 1932 году Окошкина приняли в партию. Перед тем как дать ему рекомендацию, Лапшин долго пил любимый свой боржом и говорил с Васькой о пустяках. Потом, уставившись в него голубыми, яркими глазами, спросил, как спрашивал на допросе:»

«– Это всё хорошо. А что у тебя там с бабами происходит?»

EVERYDAY LIFE 69

14. «Женщина и мужчина, уже не очень молодые, отравились. Какая-то у них там любовь была, в высшей степени сильная...»

15. «и оттого, что пушки не палили и ему не надо было ехать на фронт, ему было и покойно, и весело, и немного досадно.»

16. «внезапно соскучился, завял и сказал Бобке, что пора домой. . . . здесь от безделья можно, чего доброго, и вовсе свихнуться.»

17. «с грустью подумал, что никто не знает, как и где он бреется и какие у него привычки, и что за всю жизнь ему никто и никогда не укладывал вещей.»

18. «И письма были грустные, и все, кто их получал, понимали, что Лапшин тоскует.»

19. «раз его государство послало отдыхать, то он должен это делать, как следует.»

20. «В каждом из них было нечто нарочитое, подчеркнутое и раздражающее, такое, что заставило Лапшина с досадою подумать: ‘Эх, пижоны!’»

21. «когда в театре шли репетиции и когда встретить Наташу он не мог.»

22. «во всем том, что окружало Ханина – в мелочах, в пустяках, – Лапшин чувствовал ее присутствие: то на тумбочке лежала книжка, о которой она в свое время говорила Лапшину, то в вазочке, знакомой ему, был налит домашний компот, то на изголовье кровати висел шарфик, принадлежавший ей...»

23. Earlier in the story it had been said that “Once in his life [Lapshin] had been to Borjomi, and since then he had been enamored of that place” (German, Sobranie 2: 170; «Один раз в своей жизни он был в Боржоми, и с тех пор у него осталась любовь к этому месту.»), a detail which is reinforced by recurrent references to Lapshin drinking the Borjomi-brand mineral water.

24. «Ужиная картофельным салатом и ложась спать, Лапшин молчал, и Васька слышал, как он долго и печально вздыхал и как трещали и щелкали пружины матраца под его грузным телом, когда он ворочался.»

25. «Они почитали еще с полчаса, потом Лапшин спросил, можно ли гасить свет. Но Васька уже не ответил – спал. На нем была новая нижняя рубашка, белая с розовым, и Лапшину сделалось смешно и немного жаль Ваську.»

26. «Вычистим землю, посадим сад, погуляем с тобой в саду...» 27. Benjamin Rifkin identifies the play as Nikolai Pogodin’s Aristokraty

(1936), about the rehabilitation of a group of criminals performing hard labor in the construction of the White Sea Canal (Belomorkanal).


Works Cited

Aleksandrov, R. “O tvorchestve Iuriia Germana.” Rezets 24 (1938): 20-21. Print.

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Bown, Matthew Cullerne. Socialist Realist Painting. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Print.

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Metter, Izrail′ Moiseevich. Ne porastaet byl′em: Povesti. Rasskazy. Poselkovye zametki. Vospominaniia. Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1989. Print.

Petrov, Petre. “The Industry of Truing: Socialist Realism, Reality, Realization.” Slavic Review 70.4 (Winter 2011): 873-92. Print.

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Rifkin, Benjamin. Semiotics of Narration in Film and Prose Fiction: Case Studies of Scarecrow and My Friend Ivan Lapshin. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Print.

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