SOURCE: "A Modern Demonology: Some Literary Stalins," in Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 59-69.

The publication of Anatolii Rybakov's Deti Arbata (1987) was heralded with much fanfare both in the Soviet Union and abroad. In the novel Rybakov seeks to capture the essence of Stalinism as it affected the day-to-day existence of Soviet citizens, a theme that commands intense interest in the Soviet Union today. Yet it seems unlikely that Deti Arbata would have attracted the attention it has were it not for its lengthy passages devoted to the actions and thoughts of Stalin. The novel's protagonist Sasha Pankratov remains curiously flat, too reminiscent of socialist realist paragons; it is instead Rybakov's Stalin who holds the reader's attention.

Few reliable Soviet histories of the Stalinist period or biographies of Stalin exist. Dmitrii Volkogonov and others are trying to rectify this situation, but literature has attempted to fill the gap and to respond to the national desire for some insight into the mysteries of Stalinism and its creator.¹ Writers of fiction like Rybakov and Mikhail Shatrov try to fulfill the roles of historian and novelist or playwright simultaneously, as they overwhelm the reader with a mass of painstakingly researched details. For the moment, Rybakov's Stalin is the most thoroughly revisionist portrait of the dictator officially available to the Soviet reading public.² This fact invests the novel with a prestige sometimes difficult for the western reader to grasp.

Outside the Soviet Union, Rybakov's Stalin draws the attention of readers as an extensive portrayal of one of the most significant personages of the twentieth century. Much of the curiosity surrounding Deti Arbata, especially in the west, undoubtedly stems from the fact that the novel was published in the Soviet Union. At the same time, on western ground Rybakov's Stalin has competitors who are only beginning to be acknowledged within the Soviet Union. For a historical appraisal of Stalin, western readers may turn to one of dozens of studies produced by émigré and other historians, like Adam Ulam, Robert Tucker, Roy Medvedev, Boris Souvarine, and Anton Antonov-Ovseenko.³ In literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Stalin chapters in V kruge pervom (1968) create a portrayal that has been famous in the west for twenty years.

Deti Arbata and V kruge pervom are not isolated productions. Rather, they are part of a large corpus of literary Staliniana, most of which has only been published abroad. The shared features that typify this body of writings are the subject of this article. A long series of works has sought to deglamorize Stalin and, in order to achieve this end, has used surprisingly similar physical, verbal, and psychological characterizations. The result is often a series of commonplaces. Read in isolation, Deti Arbata may appear to offer an incisive psychological portrait; examined in context, it emerges as a typical product of a tradition of literary stereotyping.⁴

V kruge pervom was published in 1968. In 1969 a pseudonymous work, P. N. Anonimov's povest'-length Utro v mae 1947 goda, appeared, purporting to describe a typical day in the life of Stalin and his associates. In 1971 Aleksandr Bek's Novoe naznachenie, a novel about the bureaucratic upper echelons of heavy industry under Stalin, was published; it finally appeared in the Soviet Union in 1986.⁵ In 1973 the émigré author Vladimir Maksimov produced a parablelike tale entitled "Preobrazhenie tikhogo seminarista," which is included in his novel Karantin. Maksimov later published another novel containing several passages devoted to Stalin, Kovcheg dlia nezvanykh (1979), which concerns Soviet attempts at postwar settlement of the Kurile Islands. Anatolii Gladilin's "Repetitsiia v piatnitsu," a fantastic story of Stalin's resurrection from freezer storage in the 1970s, appeared in 1977, and in 1979 "V krugu druzei" appeared—it is a satirical spoof about Stalin and his associates on the eve of World War II by another member of the third wave emigration, Vladimir Voinovich. Another tamizdat publication of 1979 was "Piry Valtasara," one of the stories in Fazil' Iskander's Sandro iz Chegema cycle; this segment describes a gathering of dignitaries in the Caucasus in the mid-1930s and Sandro's boyhood memories of inadvertently encountering Stalin in the prerevolutionary years. Significantly, "Piry Valtasara" recently appeared in Znamia.⁶ Another story by Iskander in which Stalin figures, "Diadia Sandro i ego liubimets," was also published abroad in 1979. In 1980 Vasilii Grossman's Zhizn' i sud'ba, a massive treatment of the Battle of Stalingrad and Soviet society of the war years that contains a brief sketch of Stalin, was published. Like Novoe naznachenie, Grossman's novel recently appeared in the Soviet Union.⁷ In 1981 two collections appeared that, like several of the works described above, had long circulated in samizdat, Il'ia Suslov's anecdotal portrait, Rasskazy o tovarishche Staline i drugikh tovarishchakh, and Aleksandr Galich's "Poema o Staline."

The works just mentioned were first published abroad between the 1960s and the early 1980s. In the Soviet Union during these years, critical portraits of Stalin—literary portraits of any sort—were rare. A notable exception is Iurii Bondarev's novel Goriachii sneg (1969), a war novel that includes a brief encounter between one of the novel's major characters and Stalin. A few poems dating from the early 1960s also deserve mention: Andrei Voznesenskii's lengthy "Oza" (1964), which in one passage attempts to capture the essence of Stalin's attitude towards his citizens, Boris Slutskii's "Bog" (1964?), and Bulat Okudzhava's "Chernyi kot" (1960). Okudzhava's poem is often thought to be an allegorical representation of Stalin, while Slutskii's, as the title suggests, focuses on the apotheosis of the dictator.

More recently, Stalin has figured as a character within the Soviet Union in the plays of Shatrov. In Brestskii mir (1987), for example, the dictator is an unscrupulous participant in the controversy over the Bolshevik acceptance of the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In Dal'she, dal'she, dal'she . . . (1988) he is one of numerous disputants of the significance of Soviet history. With the advent of glasnost, other portraits may be expected. Indeed, the sequel to Deti Arbata, Tridtsat' piatyi i drugie gody, has already appeared.⁸

This brief catalog of works containing critical portraits of Stalin, while not exhaustive, does show that a large body of such writings exists.⁹ The image of Stalin presented in these stories, poems, and novels is complex and requires an awareness of two major, generally antithetical, bodies of cultural material. One is official Stalinist-era literary and other propaganda that surrounds the person and personality of Stalin. The other is composed of the historical and memoiristic works devoted to Stalin and Stalinism and largely published abroad; these works contain a significant component of political gossip that has long circulated orally within the Soviet Union and in émigré circles. The interaction between these very different bodies of material has decidedly affected the literary portrayal of Stalin in the past three decades.

The genesis of Stalin's official persona can be traced in large part to Stalin himself. As early as the 1920s Stalin singled out for praise certain of Vladimir Lenin's qualities that he later sought deliberately to have ascribed to himself. In a speech given shortly after Lenin's death in 1924, for example, Stalin discussed how he came to understand that Lenin's "simplicity and modesty . . . , [his] striving to remain inconspicuous . . . was one of Lenin's strongest features as a new leader of the new masses" (pp. 54-55).¹⁰ Describing Lenin's rhetorical manner, Stalin speaks of his "simplicity and clarity of argumentation, short phrases comprehensible to everyone, the absence of posing, the absence of dizzying gestures and phrases produced for effect. . . . —all this advantageously distinguished Lenin's speeches from the speeches of ordinary 'parliamentary' orators" (p. 55). He was most captivated, however, by "the irresistible force" (p. 55) of Lenin's logic.

These enthusiastic observations echo eerily in a work published three decades later, the Kratkaia biografila of Stalin, which Nikita Khrushchev asserted was composed to a great extent by the dictator himself:¹¹

Everyone knows the indefinable, shattering force of Stalin's logic, the crystal clarity of his intellect, his steel will, devotion to the party, ardent faith in the people and love for the people. His modesty, simplicity, sensitivity to people and mercilessness to enemies are well-known to everyone. His intolerance for sensation, for phrase-mongers and chatterboxes, for grumblers and alarmists is well known. Stalin is wise, unhurried in the solution of complex political questions.¹²

Many of the characteristics here are the same as those granted Lenin—modesty, simplicity, clarity, logic. Other desirable traits are only hinted at in Stalin's comments about Lenin but are made explicit in the description of Stalin himself. Thus Lenin's purported oratorical restraint suggests an implicit criticism of rhetorical brilliance and its authors, while Stalin is overtly intolerant of both. Lenin's comprehensibility and position as "a new leader of the new masses" point to a harmonious relationship with the people, while Stalin is ostentatiously devoted to them. Where the description of Stalin differs from that of Lenin is in its insistence on the former's "steel will" and other manifestations of toughness of character, such as an appropriate intolerance and mercilessness. Stalin's official persona tends towards stylized reproduction of a stylized Lenin, but the former implicitly exceeds the latter in his refusal to compromise.

Stalin's desire to be admired for the same qualities attributed to the near-deity Lenin was readily apparent to the Soviet intelligentsia of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1950 the literary scholar G. S. Cheremin asserted in Obraz I. V. Stalina v sovetskoi khudozhestvennoi literature that Soviet writers had striven to reproduce Stalin's characteristic traits, which, Cheremin happily reported, are precisely those that Stalin himself singled out as typical of Lenin: "simplicity and modesty, 'an irresistible power of logic,' unshakeable confidence in victory, an ability to 'weigh soberly the strengths of the opponent,' a supreme adherence to principles, a faith in the masses, 'a brilliant perspicacity, an ability quickly to grasp and divine the internal sense of approaching events'" (p. 4).¹³ In its obsession with simplicity, modesty, pretensions to unique intellectual acuity, and a special relationship with the people, this statement is fully compatible with the remarks by and about Stalin cited above. Cheremin later noted additional characteristic traits: Stalin's "love for the truth, his negative attitude towards any kind of farfetched thinking .. . his calm" (p. 25). A similarity with Lenin is not cited here, but the image of calm practicality is consistent with the absence of oratorical fireworks elsewhere attributed to Stalin's predecessor.

Many Soviet writers participated in the creation of a literary Stalin compounded of the traits described above. In Iakov Il'in's novel Bol' shoi konveier (1934), for example, Stalin delivers a speech slowly and quietly, with restrained gestures and a seemingly enviable talent for simplifying the complex: "Posing questions, he would answer them, and the very repetition of this device, the clear, precise development of thought contributed to everyone's ability to repeat after him his complex generalizations, the result of gigantic intellectual labor."¹⁴ Another gift is apparent in Schast'e (1947), Petr Pavlenko's optimistic saga of the 1940s, in which Stalin's rapport with the people achieves truly mystical proportions: "Stalin's face could not help changing and becoming somewhat different, because the people looked into it as in a mirror, and saw in it themselves, and the people had changed, in the direction of even greater majesty."¹⁵ Yet Pavlenko's Stalin does not succumb to pomposity. A soldier's boast about the achievements of the Soviet army inspires a characteristic rejoinder: "It is wrong to think that we did more than we could. Let us say more modestly: we did everything that was in our power" (p. 97).

Many recent literary portrayals of the leader seem to have been composed in direct opposition to this image of the wise, calm, unassuming leader of the people, for they single out for satire precisely the positive qualities he was supposed to possess. To achieve this subversion of what was once Stalin's near divine status, writers often make use of the other corpus of material mentioned above, the great and rapidly growing number of historical and memoiristic works that have been published since the death of Stalin and that have sought to demolish his received image. Works like Antonov-Ovseenko's Portret tirana (1980), Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's Vospominaniia (1970), Khrushchev's secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Roy Medvedev's K sudu istorii (1971), and even chapters of Robert Conquest's The Great Terror (1968) have reached a large audience both abroad and in the Soviet Union.¹⁶ Nor should one overlook the writers' familiarity with critical commentary on Stalin from the 1920s and 1930s, like the famous observations about his rudeness and capriciousness in Lenin's "Testament."¹⁷ How much each work uses gossip and rumors varies, but much of this informal information surfaces in literary depictions of Stalin. Solzhenitsyn's reference to "moist, greasy fingers which left traces on papers and books" suggests a familiarity with Dem'ian Bednyi's observation along these lines.¹⁸ In Maksimov's Kovcheg dlia nezvanvkh Stalin humiliates an aging friend of his youth by making him dance the lezginka. In his memoirs, Khrushchev tells of being made to dance the gopak. This incident is directly incorporated by Voinovich in his story. Such anecdotal fidelity is in general characteristic of critical portrayals of Stalin.

The Stalin who emerges from these literary works is often a synthesis of traits antithetical to those in orthodox writings of the Stalinist era and of details, largely unflattering, culled from historical and memoiristic literature and, presumably, word of mouth. Such syntheses are generally remarkably consistent in physical, verbal, and psychological terms. Taken together, they point towards shared and stereotyped assumptions about Stalin's malevolent personality.

The similarities in the various depictions of Stalin begin with the delineation of his physical characteristics, appurtenances, and mannerisms. Suslov captures much of the essence of this portrait in one of his anecdotes: "Comrade Stalin never presided over the Politburo. He would walk softly around the table in his soft, box-calf boots and smoke his little pipe."¹⁹ The boots, the pipe, and the catlike walk are recurrent motifs in the portrayal of Stalin. Other common motifs include his short stature, mustache, low forehead, pockmarked skin, and disturbing eyes. A characteristic description appears early in Utro v mae 1947 goda: "The door opens. Out comes a rather short old man in a light tussore jacket . . . and wide trousers . . . tucked into soft calf-skin boots. Gray, wiry hair over a low, yellow forehead and dark, intent eyes . . . , a heavy pockmarked nose, a gray mustache."²⁰ Another common motif is Stalin's handicapped arm, which Sandro notices with great interest in "Piry Valtasara." Sandro feels that "this little disablement somehow lowered the image of the leader."²¹ In "Diadia Sandro i ego liubimets," the phrase, usykhaiushchaia ruka, occurs so many times that it becomes nearly formulaic.²²

References to Stalin's boots perform a different function, serving as a physical reminder of the easily ignited violence in his personality. In V kruge pervom, for example, on Stalin's first appearance, he is lying down "with his feet raised a little in soft Caucasian boots which were like thick stockings" (p. 115). Later Stalin thinks of the Yugoslav Communist Traicho Kostov: "Rage flooded his head, and he struck out hard with his boot—into Traicho's snout, into his bloody snout" (p. 147). References to the oppressive quality of Stalin's gaze also serve to underscore how dangerous he was to those around him. In the 1968 text of V kruge pervom, his eyes betray his viciousness: "Stalin was terrifying because he did not listen to excuses, he didn't even make accusations; his yellow tiger eyes only brightened balefully and his lower lids narrowed a bit—and there, inside, sentence had been passed."²³ A similar menace characterizes Stalin's glance in Gladilin's "Repetitsiia v piatnitsu." When confronted by the resurrected, previously innocuousseeming old man, a guard initially cannot understand why the familiar face seems so different. Then he realizes: "The eyes! The eyes had lit up—and at once the harmless little old man had disappeared, and HE, the real Master, had risen."²⁴

These motifs may not all appear simultaneously but often several occur in the initial description of Stalin in a given work. When Onisimov, the protagonist of Novoe naznachenie, remembers meeting Stalin in 1938, he recalls his first glimpse of the leader "walking up and down in his soft boots."²⁵ More details emerge from Onisimov's memory: Stalin "still retained the undemanding clothing of a front-line soldier—... his pants of military cut, tucked into his boots,... —but he had already acquired a seemingly deliberately unhurried habit, a slowness of step" (p. 34). The deliberate quality of Stalin's gait enhances its ominousness. When Stalin finally turns toward Onisimov, the oppressive sensation increases: "A rather heavy stare . . . measured Onisimov. .. . At that moment nothing changed in his motionless ... face, well-known from many canvases and photographs, in which of course, however, no one had dared to reproduce the prominent pockmarks noticeable on his cheeks and beneath his . . . mustache" (pp. 34-35). The allusion to artistic and photographic renditions of Stalin points to the gap between the myth and the reality perceived by Onisimov in spite of his devotion to the leader. Other literary characters strive actively to ignore this reality. In Kovcheg dlia nezvanykh, the ambitious young bureaucrat Zolotarev, watching a slowmoving Stalin, attempts a conscious selection of observation and tries to force himself to ignore physical defects he has heard mentioned, like the leader's pockmarks, and instead "to remember other traits and details more essential for himself and his future."²⁶

In V kruge pervom, physical characteristics that undercut Stalin's grandeur are also emphasized. For example, the narrator speaks of Stalin's "brownish-gray, smallpox-pitted face, with its large plow of a nose" (p. 175). He also describes him as "a little yellow-eyed old man with reddish, . .. thinning hair (represented [in portraits] as thick); with traces of smallpox here and there on his gray face [and] a desiccated double chin (they were not pictured at all)" (p. 116). As do Kovcheg dlia nezvanykh and numerous other works, V kruge pervom adduces such details to demonstrate the falsehood of Stalin's official portraits, both artistic and literary. . . .

The remarkable coincidence of physical details employed in literary depictions of Stalin achieves an unusually high level of predictability in Deti Arbata. When the plant director Mark Riazanov first visits Stalin, he sees a familiar sight:

Stalin was walking up and down the study and stopped when the door opened. He was wearing a service jacket of khaki, almost brown, material and pants of the same material tucked into his boots. He seemed shorter than average height, thickset, somewhat pockmarked, with slightly Mongolian eyes. In the thick hair over a low forehead grey hairs were showing.²⁷

Almost immediately, mention of another, disliked plant director evokes a characteristic reaction: "His eyes suddenly became yellowish, heavy, tiger-like, malice flashed in them" (4: 13). Describing how Stalin listens to Riazanov, the narrator writes: "Stalin listened carefully, clasping his left arm to his chest with his pipe gripped in his fist; it seemed that his arm straightened out badly" (4: 13). Physical imperfections and flashes of malevolence again undermine the received image of the leader.

Cumulatively, these descriptions show a remarkably formulaic quality in the use of physical detail in literary portrayals of Stalin. The repetition evokes medieval iconographical handbooks. While some recent Russian authors appear to engage in this practice without selfconsciousness, others assume a deliberately ironic stance. Voinovich, for example, mocks the necessity for including the famed mustache and pipe when he writes that Stalin "smoked a pipe only in company, and he wore a false mustache."²⁸

A similar, if less mechanical, consistency informs recent critical literary treatments of Stalin's verbal manner and intellectual ability. A favorite source of ridicule is Stalin's purported verbal and intellectual facility. This attitude is in direct opposition to the mainstream authors' descriptions of Stalin's remarkable mental powers and simple yet powerful oratorical manner. Widespread assertions about Stalin's astounding intellect and rhetorical flair appear at times to have had an almost hypnotic effect on his contemporaries. Milovan Djilas effectively captures the essence of this phenomenon:

we waxed enthusiastic not only over Stalin's views but also over the "perfection" of their formulation. I myself referred many times in discussions to the crystal clarity of his style, the penetration of his logic, . . . But it would not have been difficult for me, even then, to detect in any other author of the same qualities that his style was colorless, meager, and an unblended jumble of vulgar journalism and the Bible.²⁹

Some, like Konstantin Simonov, remained positive in their appraisal of Stalin's style.³⁰ Others are more reserved. Volkogonov writes: "[Stalin] was a mediocre publicist from the point of view of literary style. But there was no denying that he had consistency, precision, and an immutable categoricality in his conclusions."³¹

Volkogonov may be evenhanded in his assessment of Stalin's style and implicit appraisal of his intellect, but others are scathing in their criticism. Antonov-Ovseenko refuses to grant Stalin the least trace of rhetorical sophistication, although he grudgingly acknowledges the dictator's ability to win over some listeners. He dismisses Stalin's use of the question and answer method as a seminary device: "a ready-made answer followed a ready-made question."³² He later reiterates this popular notion of the seminary roots of Stalin's style, speaking of his "childishly bombastic style and grammar on the level of a half-educated seminarian" (p. 170) and of how "the seminary's imprint lies on all of Stalin's actions . . . his question-and-answer style of exposition, and his use of expressions like 'the mere wafting of a hand,' 'would fain do,' and 'brothers and sisters.'"³³

The kinds of accusations leveled against Stalin's style by Antonov-Ovseenko and like-minded others form the basis for negative literary appraisals of Stalin's linguistic and intellectual talents. Typically, the two are related, for, as Susan Layton points out in regard to V kruge pervom, "the parody of Stalin's language seeks to unmask the utter mediocrity of the mind and spirit of the dictator."³⁴ Touching on Stalin's forays into linguistic theory, Solzhenitsyn singles out certain of the leader's stylistic foibles—his weakness for enumeration and repetition, for example—as well as his poor grasp of the existence or absence of causal relationships. "Language was created in order to . . . ," Stalin writes in V kruge pervom, for example (p. 175).

In Kovcheg dlia nezvanykh, Maksimov also casts aspersions on Stalin's intellect, and notes that "he did not like details, which prevented him from seeing things as a whole without the ballast of circumstances and circumlocutions" (p. 69). Maksimov's Stalin is ignorant but vain; learning inadvertently that he has omitted a comma in an inscription on one of Maksim Gor'kii's manuscripts, he later has the manuscript retrieved from a museum so that he can correct his mistake. Such vanity may degenerate into smug self-satisfaction. "The Kuriles," he says, "are our far eastern underbelly." "The word obviously pleased him," (p. 35) observes the narrator, pointing simultaneously to Stalin's fondness for crude, even vulgar, language (often mentioned in memoir accounts) and to his exaggerated enjoyment of his own speech. The implication is that such vanity regarding his verbal talents hampers meaningful attention to issues.

In "Repetitsiia v piatnitsu," Gladilin's resurrected old man delivers a speech larded with the trite expressions typical of the worst Soviet officialese. Ironically, much of his rank and file party audience responds enthusiastically. Anonimov also portrays the leader as an orator dependent on unsophisticated listeners in Utro v mae 1947 goda. When he speaks to his immediate entourage, the narrator observes: "Every word solidly, weightily sinks into the guarded, but now also admiring attention. He knows, they like it when he thinks aloud" (p. 100). Here, too, there is a keen sense of smug self-satisfaction. Elsewhere in Anonimov's work, Stalin revels in a belief in his own intelligence. Constant expressions of gushing approval by his subordinates foster the development of an unbridled vanity.

The truly pernicious aspect of Stalin's verbal manner is perhaps best illustrated by Bek, who in Novoe naznachenie exceeds even Maksimov in depicting a Stalin infatuated with his own intellect. Unwilling to acknowledge the advice of metallurgical experts, Stalin reacts with irritation when pet projects do not appear feasible. Later, when he finds a suitable aphorism to use in combating the experts, he is complacent and self-assured: '"Experience is a good thing. . . . But new conditions demand a new technology as well, new experience, isn't that so?' Satisfied by his speech, its clarity, logic, he pronounced the last words without any irritation" (pp. 54-55). He reacts in similar fashion on another occasion. '"Why substitute trifles for the main thing? Can something significant really be born without tribulations?' Satisfied by his formula, he was silent for a while" (p. 100). One of the characters thinks to himself, "Every means is trifles, subtleties, details" (p. 100). Yet Bek's Stalin is so filled with a consciousness of his own rhetorical self-importance that this trait is apparent, even to someone unversed in Georgian, when the dictator is overheard speaking only in his native language.

As with physical details, the portrayal of Stalin's verbal manner in Deti Arbata adheres to time-honored critical tradition. The assessment of Budiagin, one of his old acquaintances from exile, is characteristic: "A heavy Georgian accent and ponderous turns of speech did not make him a good orator" (4:98), thinks Budiagin, but he concedes Stalin a certain effectiveness: "In his straightforwardness, his seminary penchant for commentary, his unshakeable confidence that his learning was the limit of wisdom, there was a persuasiveness that impressed Budiagin at the time [in exile] more than the erudite eloquence of others" (4:98). Sergei Kirov later concurs in this assessment: "[Stalin's] simplified seminary logic, his seminary dogmatism, are comprehensible and impress people" (6:123).

The ability of Rybakov's Stalin to make an impression on some listeners is only a screen for ineptitude, however. Budiagin finds certain of Stalin's verbal and intellectual tendencies downright dangerous: "all complicated problems are simple: on the one hand—England, France, Japan, on the other—the USSR, USA, Germany. To reduce the complex to the simple Stalin considered his great talent. [Budiagin] considered Stalin's conception . . . obsolete, and Stalin's ability to simplify everything—a catastrophe" (4:105). While Budiagin fears terrible consequences because of Stalin's simplistic misunderstanding of Hitler's Germany, Stalin himself remains confident of his talent for generalization: "He always attached importance to trifles, . . . he was proud of his ability to generalize [on the basis of] trifles, to draw conclusions from them" (4:109). These "trifles" are implicitly very different from the significant details willfully ignored by Bek's and Maksimov's Stalins. Indeed, on one level, Rybakov's entire novel is an illustration of the frightening results of Stalin's misplaced obsession with trivialities. Rybakov's Stalin does generalize, but his generalizations are severely flawed.

When Stalin actually speaks in Deti Arbata, he reveals a fondness for the hackneyed devices that elicit admiration from orthodox writers and scorn from his detractors. These devices purportedly stem from his seminary days, the use of the question and answer method, for example (5:123):

Pacing up and down the office, Stalin said:

"To what does your report attest? Your report attests to the fact that comrade Zaporozhets is not coping with his responsibilities. . . . "

Slowly and inaudibly Stalin paced up and down the carpet.

"What is the peculiarity of this situation? . . . The peculiarity of the situation in Leningrad consists not only of the fact that many Zinov'evites have been retained in the Leningrad party organization."

In this same passage, Rybakov's Stalin also reveals a predilection for tired metaphors. "Kirov is harboring a Trotskyite snake in his bosom against Stalin," he tells Iagoda, "but might it not bite comrade Kirov himself?" (5:124). That this observation is less a question than a directive is confirmed by Stalin's final statement to Iagoda: "The party needs deeds, not scraps of paper" (5:124). The use of a trite aphorism to express a desire for Kirov's destruction is typical of the verbal mediocrity of many literary Stalins.

In addition to common presumptions about Stalin's unattractive appearance, ominous physical habits, hackneyed manner of speech, and smug intellectual mediocrity, critical portraits of the dictator also often share additional assumptions about his psychology—about, for example, his suspiciousness, even paranoia, his capriciousness, sadism, anti-Semitism, and hostility toward Lenin. Often most attention is given to his suspiciousness. Far from being depicted as the courageous mountain eagle of Soviet mythology, Stalin emerges as the thrall of an intense paranoia, particularly in his later years. This perception reflects an assumption prevalent in both western historical literature and memoir accounts.

In some fictional portraits Stalin's purportedly extreme suspiciousness acquires truly epic proportions. Commenting on Stalin's unique attitude toward Hitler, Voinovich observes: "The most suspicious person on earth, in his relations with Dolph [Hitler] he was credulous as a child" (169-170). In V kruge pervom, Solzhenitsyn makes a similar observation: "He had trusted only one person—the only one in his entire unerringly mistrustful life. . . . That man was Adolf Hitler" (p. 155). In both cases, Stalin's attitude toward Hitler is the exception to the rule of complete lack of trust. "Distrust of people was the determining trait of Iosif Djugashvili's character. Distrust of people was his world view" (p. 96), asserts Solzhenitsyn's narrator in the 1968 text. In Deti Arbata Rybakov describes Stalin's suspiciousness as a pathological state: "Puny and weak since childhood, he was morbidly sensitive to everything that put his physical strength and bravery into doubt,—a spiritual condition from which later grew his suspiciousness" (4:106).

Several writers link the leader's notorious insomnia to his paranoia and describe this combination in hyperbolic terms. "On odin, a emu nemozhetsia, / . . . Sto postelei emu posteleno,/ Ne usnut' emu ni v odnoi" (p. 273), writes Galich in "Poema o Staline." In Maksimov's "Preobrazhenie tikhogo seminarista" the ecclesiastical narrator describes how "fear ensnares his soul with oppressive alarm, fear tightens his chest with suffocating cold, fear deprives him of sleep and peace."³⁵ Anonimov speaks of "evil, disquieting thought. . . . The sudden nauseating cold of nocturnal fear" (p. 24).

Wracked by fear, the Stalin described in such works keeps not only supposed enemies, but also doctors, family, admirers, and subordinates at bay. In Kovcheg dlia nezvanykh, he locks up a diary in a wall safe and has a recurrent fear of being robbed while lying helpless and paralyzed. In V kruge pervom, he feels ill when he must attend a large banquet, and his favorite office is small and virtually windowless. In Deti Arbata, Stalin feels completely isolated even in apparent moments of success and thinks to himself: "They stand and applaud, but they don't like him, they are afraid of him, that is why they stand and applaud" (5:77). The cumulative portrait that emerges from these representations is of a man baleful in his distrustfulness and utterly isolated from real human contact.

An ironic consequence of Stalin's alienation as described in Kovcheg dlia nezvanykh and V kruge pervom, for example, is his regret and fantasies about the true friend he has never had. In the former, he imagines meeting a friendly stranger on the Kuriles and revealing his identity "with his characteristic modest dignity" (p. 60). He finds his secret watching of an encounter between the Cossack commanders Petr Krasnov and Andrei Shkuro intolerable largely because he bitterly envies the pair's ability to speak openly and frankly to each other. In V kruge pervom he longs for a friend like the one given him in the screenplay of The Battle of Stalingrad, a friend he cannot have "because of the constant insincerity and perfidy of people" (p. 119). In these literary portraits, paranoia and isolation are inextricably linked.

The works mentioned here can be categorized in various ways. One obvious way is to consider the times they cover. "Preobrazhenie tikhogo seminarista" provides an overview of Stalin's entire life, but most of these works are more temporally limited. Rybakov has thus far focused on the mid-1930s. Iskander also concentrates on this period, with flashbacks to the prerevolutionary period. Voinovich describes the eve of World War II, while Bek deals primarily with the 1930s with some reference to the postwar period. Grossman and Bondarev portray the war years, while Solzhenitsyn, Anonimov, and Maksimov in Kovcheg dlia nezvanykh all treat the late 1940s. Galich describes an unspecified time but also one that is clearly the postwar period, while Suslov's anecdotes refer to various eras. Gladilin portrays a resurrected Stalin, but one who embodies the leader as he was in old age.

Several of these works focus on the last few years of the dictator's life. Why is this period highlighted, rather than the Great Terror, which tends to be the focal point of much critical memoiristic and historical literature? Doubtless each writer has an individual reason for choosing this period, but a general rationale may be at work as well. The satirical mode may be best suited to the later period for reasons that lie within popular psychology. Writers like Solzhenitsyn, Maksimov, Galich, Bek, and others seem to share the implicit assumption, a psychological truism, that personality traits become more rigid and exaggerated with age. The dictator of the postwar years, their accounts suggest, did evolve from the young Stalin, but his essential personality crystallized, as it were, in the 1940s. From this point of view, the old man is indeed the quintessential Stalin. Moreover, the perceived hyperbolic quality of his negative features in old age renders them even more ready targets of mockery and sarcasm.

The most important generalization about these literary portrayals of Stalin, however, is in the remarkable coincidences in their physical, verbal, and psychological depictions of the leader. Solzhenitsyn's Stalin and Dante's Satan have been compared before,³⁷ and other authors' portrayals permit further generalization. The accumulation of recurrent negative imagery in recent works points toward a coherent demonology that is directly opposite to the hagiographical perspective long typical of a wide variety of portraits of Stalin. Commenting on Stalin as a personification of socialism, the historian Iurii Borisov observes that after 1956 Stalin "remained as before a symbol, however no longer of the victories of socialism, but of deviations from it. This is a kind of Dorian Gray phenomenon."³⁸ A character in Galich's poem expresses a similar idea in much cruder terms, when he says: "Okazalsia nash Otets / Ne otsam, a sukoiu" (p. 276). Both observations point toward the frequent pattern of complete reversal that dominates revisionist thinking about Stalin. Literature repeatedly exhibits literary Stalins who are the mirror images of their 1930s and 1940s predecessors and carbon copies of their contemporaries. It becomes difficult to speak of realism, although some portrayals, for example, Bek's, have been praised for their greater realism.³⁹ The tendency toward stylization that often dominates hagiography in general is also characteristic of demonological portraits of Stalin. In delineating the contours of evil these portraits often resort to evocative topoi that may appear to be realistic detail but are stock motifs. Readers who are unaware of the literary tradition connected with the portrayal of Stalin and its recurrent patterns of imagery may be convinced by the patina of realism that distinguishes a novel like Deti Arbata. Such failure to identify the stereotype can occur as easily in the Soviet Union as in the west. Yet analysis of fictional writings devoted to the dictator leads to the conclusion that, at least for the present, in literature Stalin remains a predominantly abstract, symbolic figure.

NOTES

¹ See Dmitrii Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia [Politicheskii portret I. V. Statina], 2 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Agentstva pechati Novosti, 1989).

² Moskovskii rabochii is planning to publish Anton Antonov-Ovseenko's harshly critical portrait of Stalin, Portret tirana (New York: Khronika, 1980), in the Soviet Union.

³ Adam Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: Viking, 1973); Robert Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York: Norton, 1973); Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, ed. David Joravsky and Georges Haupt, trans. Colleen Taylor (New York: Knopf, 1971), and Roy A. Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism, trans. Ellen de Kadt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism (London: Alliance, Longmans, Green, 1939); Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, The Time of Stalin, trans. George Saunders (New York: Harper and Row, 1981).

⁴ Irving Howe describes Rybakov's Stalin as being "pretty much the same monster we have come to know from [various] biographers and historians" (The New York Times Book Review, 22 May 1988, 7).

⁵Znamia, 1986, nos. 10-11.

⁶Znamia, 1988, no. 9.

⁷Oktiabr', 1988, nos. 1-4.

⁸Druzhba narodov, 1988, nos. 9-10. Other works that appeared too recently to be incorporated here are Ales' Adamovich's "Dubler: Snys otkrytymi glazami," Druzhba narodov, 1988, no. 11, and Vladimir Uspenskii's Tainyi sovetnik vozhdia, Prostor, 1988, nos. 7-9. An important critical study that also appeared too recently to be incorporated into my discussion is Rosalind Marsh's images of Dictatorship: Stalin in Literature (London: Routledge, 1989).

⁹ See, for example, Iuz Aleshkovskii's "Pesnia o Staline," quoted in Iurii Mal'tsev, Vol'naia russkaia literatura 1955-1975 (Frankfurt a. M.: Possev, 1976), 320, and Vladimir Gornyi's [pseud.] "Palach i ego master," Novyi zhurnal, no. 114, 1974. Also noteworthy is Andrei Siniavskii's Sud idet (1960), which contains brief sections in which the "Master," easily recognizable as a stylized Stalin, appears. See Fantasticheskii mir Abrama Tertsa (New York: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1967), 199-276.

¹⁰ "O Lenine," in I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, 13 vols. (Moscow: OGIZ / Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1946-1951) 6:52-64. Page of exact quotation is indicated in parentheses in the text.

¹¹ Bertram D. Wolfe, Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost: Text, Background and Meaning of Khrushchev's Secret Report to the Twentieth Congress on the Night of February 24-25, 1956 (New York: Praeger, 1957), 214.

¹² Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (kratkaia biografila) (Moscow: OGIZ / Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1945), 74.

¹³ G. S. Cheremin, Obroz I. V. Stalina v sovetskoi khudozhestvennoi literature (Moscow: Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo po rasprostraneniiu politicheskikh i nauchnykh znanii, 1950). Cheremin quotes here from Stalin's "O Lenine."

¹⁴ Iakov II'in, Bol'shoi konveier (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1934), 161.

¹⁵ Petr Pavlenko, Schast'e (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo detskoi literatury, 1950), 165.

¹⁶ On the underground dissemination of some of these writings, see, for example, Peter Reddaway, ed., Uncensored Russia: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union (New York: American Heritage, 1972), 377, 417, and Robert M. Slusser, "History and the Democratic Opposition," in Dissent in the USSR: Politics, Ideology, and People, ed. Rudolf L. Tökés (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 334, 343, 345, 346. Most of this material has either recently become or will soon be officially available to the Soviet reading public.

¹⁷ Lenin's "Testament," a letter addressed to the Twelfth Party Congress, is found in V.I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., 55 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958-1965) 45:344-346.

¹⁸ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Sobranie sochinenii (Paris: YMCA Press, 1978-), vol. 1, V kruge pervom, 1:116. Bednyi's observation is in Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Vospominaniia (New York: Chekhov, 1970), 29-30.

¹⁹ Il'ia Suslov, Rasskazy o tovarishche Staline i drugikh tovarishchakh (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Hermitage, 1981), 9.

²⁰ P. N. Anonimov, Une matinée de Joseph Staline (Utro v mae 1947 goda), bilingual edition (n.p.: L'Herne, 1969), 18.

²¹ Fazil' Iskander, "Piry Valtasara," in Sandro iz Chegema (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979), 187-229, quotation on 206.

²² Fazil' Iskander, "Diadia Sandro i ego liubimets," in ibid., 285-319.

²³ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, V kruge pervom (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 93. In the 1978 text, reference to Stalin's eyes has been replaced by mention of his mustache, ibid., 150.

²⁴ Anatolii Gladilin, "Repetitsiia v piatnitsu," Kontinent 12 (1977):47-84, and 13 (1977):91-131; quotation on 12:55.

²⁵ Aleksandr Bek, Novoe naznachenie (Frankfurt a. M.: Possev, 1971), 30.

²⁶ Vladimir Maksimov, Kovcheg dlia nezvanykh (Frankfurt a. M.: Possev, 1979), 36.

²⁷ Anatolii Rybakov, Deti Arbata, Druzhba narodov, 1987, no. 4: 3-133; no. 5: 67-161; no. 6: 23-151; quotation on 4: 13.

²⁸ Vladimir Voinovich, "V krugu druzei," in his Putem vzaimnoi perepiski (Paris: YMCA Press, 1979), 166.

²⁹ Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael B. Petrovich (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 12.

³⁰ See Konstantin Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia, Znamia, 1988, no. 3, 33.

³¹ Dmitrii Volkogonov, "Fenomen Stalina," Literaturnaia gazeta, 9 December 1987, 13.

³² Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret tirana, 73.

³³ Antonov-Ovseenko, The Time of Stalin, 234. The chapter from which this quotation is taken is not included in the Russian edition. In much the same vein as Antonov-Ovseenko, Edward J. Brown observes that "Stalin the orthodox seminarian, as Trockij long ago pointed out, developed a style which is a weird miscegenation of content and form: communist ideas couched in quasi-religious, catechetical style. The drearily repetitive questions and answers come readily to mind" ("Solzenicyn's Cast of Characters," Slavic and East European Journal 15 [1971]: 162).

³⁴ Susan Layton, "The Mind of the Tyrant: Tolstoj's Nicholas and Solzenicyn's Stalin," Slavic and East European Journal 23 (1979): 488.

³⁵ Vladimir Maksimov, Karantin (Frankfurt a. M.: Possev, 1973), 83-90, quotation on 88.

³⁶ See, for example, Gary Kern, "Solzhenitsyn's Portrait of Stalin," Slavic Review 33 (March 1974): 16-17; and Vladimir Grebenschikov, "Les cercles infernaux chez Soljénitsyne et Dante," Canadian Slavonic Papers 13 (1971): 154-58.

³⁷ Iurii Borisov, "Chelovek i simvol," Nauka i zhizn', 1987, no. 9, 63.

³⁸ Mal'tsev, Vol'naia russkaia literatura, 213; and Rosalind J. Marsh, Soviet Fiction since Stalin: Science, Politics and Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 33. Josephine Woll argues that Rybakov is "relentlessly realistic" (The Atlantic, June 1988, 103).