Boris Pilnyak
was born in Mozhaisk, Russia, in 1894. He
attended school in Nizhny Novgorod and studied in Moscow. While a
student he published several short-stories in Russia's literary magazines.
During
the First World War Pilnyak visited the Eastern
Front on behalf of the Provisional
Government. After the October Revolution
Pilnyak was arrested by Bolshevik soldiers and for a time was in danger
of being executed.
Anatoli
Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar of Education, provided Pilnyak
with government funds to enable him to write full-time. His first
novel, The Naked Year
(1922), dealt with the October Revolution
and the Civil War. His story, The Tale
of the Unextinguished Moon (1926), about the suspicious
death of Mikhail Frunze, created a storm
and the magazine it appeared in was immediately banned.
Pilnyak
also upset Joseph Stalin with his novel,
Mahogany, that was published in
Germany in 1929. The book, which provided
a sympathetic portrait of a supporter of Leon
Trotsky, was banned in the Soviet Union.
When Pilnyak
was writing The Volga Flows into the Caspian
Sea (1931), a novel about the Five
Year Plan, Nikolai Yezhov, of the
GPU, was given the task of checking his
manuscript.
Boris Pilnyak
continued to bravely write books that went against the government
line of Socialist Realism and in 1937
he disappeared. It is assumed he was arrested by the NKPD
and executed.
(1)
Boris Pilnyak visited the Eastern
Front in 1917 on behalf of Alexander Kerensky
and the Provisional Government.
Here in Kolomna we are having hunger riots. I have been
put on the list of counter-revolutionaries by our faddish Bolsheviks,
and I greeted the new year in prison. I was arrested, and they even
posed the question about me: "Should we shoot him?" Others
they did shoot."
(2)
In 1924 Boris
Pilnyak wrote an article explaining why, despite receiving government
funds, he could not write Communist Party
propaganda.
I am against a writer having to live "willingly not
seeing," or, simply, lying. And a lie results when some sort
of statistical proportion is not observed. I am not a communist, and
for that reason I do not agree that I should have to write in a communist
manner. To the degree that the communists are with Russia, I am with
them. I admit that the fate of the communist party is less interesting
to me than the fate of Russia. The Communist Party to me is only a
link in the history of Russia.
(3)
Victor Serge, was a close friend
of Boris Pilnyak in the early 1930s. He wrote about him in his book
Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1945)
Boris Pilnyak was writing The Volga Flows into the
Caspian Sea. On his work-table I saw manuscripts under revision.
It had been suggested to him that, to avoid banishment from Soviet
literature, he should remodel Forest of the Isles, that 'counter-revolutionary'
tale of his, into a novel agreeable to the Central Committee. The
body's Cultural Section had assigned him a co-author who, page by
page, would ask him to suppress this and add that. The helpmate's
name was Yezhov, and a high career awaited him, followed by a violent
death: this was the successor to Yagoda as head of the GPU.
Pilnyak
would twist his great mouth: "He has given me a list of fifty
passages to change outright! "Ah!" he would exclaim, "if
only I could write freely! What I would I not do! At other times I
found him in the throes of depression. "They'll end up by throwing
me in jail. Don't you think so?" I gave him new heart by explaining
that his fame in Europe and America safeguarded him; I was right,
for a while. "There isn't a single thinking adult in this country",
he said, "who has not thought that he might be shot."
(4)
Boris Pilnyak, in conversation with Victor
Serge in 1933.
I do believe, Victor, that one day I too will send a bullet
into my head. Perhaps it would have been better if I had done that.
I cannot emigrate like Zamyatin: I could not live apart from Russia.
And I have the feeling that as I come and go, there is a gun in my
back, with a pack of blackguards on the trigger.
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