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Chapter Five Pereval: “Organic Creativity”; or, Hands for the Hourglass 75 PROBABLY THE MOST DRAMATIC aspect of the 1920s literary groups was the striking blindness of their ideologues. Proletkult continued to work at creating its collectivist homunculus, not only while understanding full well (judging from Bogdanov’s opinions) the character of the revolution that had taken place, but also while knowing the uncompromising attitude of the leader of this revolution toward Proletkultism, his personal hostility to the leaders of the movement, and his apprehension that this movement would slip out from under Party control. Could the Proletkult activists (all “ardent revolutionaries”) really not have known how the political struggle would end after the Revolution, this game without rules? The Smiths, who elected to remain with the “class” when power during the Revolution went not to the classes but to the Party, who left the Party and proclaimed the end of the Revolution in NEP, and who continued to feed on their own Cosmist fantasies—were they not really members of the Bolshevist Party? Could they really not have known what the “new type of party” was? The result: the Young Guard, “October,” and RAPP. The “scrapheap of history.” The RAPPists, these professional Party functionaries who assumed a monopolistic position in literature toward the end of the 1920s, absorbing or demoralizing all the literary groups, continued to battle for their own “dialectical -materialist method” and—at the very peak of their power—were themselves “liquidated” as the result of the “restructuring of literary-artistic organizations” that seemed to burst from the heavens. The result: the “scrap-heap of history.” The LEFists—who demanded a “literature of fact” and asserted their own status as “specialists” in literature even in the early 1930s, when the authorities demanded not “facts” and not “cinematic truth” but “Party-minded evaluation” of events, and at precisely this time demonstrated their attitude toward the Party-less “specialists” by the “Shakhty trial”—did not understand , failed to see. . . . The result: self-dispersal. The “scrap-heap of history.” The Perevalists, continuing to search for Galatea, to demand “Mozartianism ,” “sincerity,” “aesthetic culture,” and “a new humanism,” and to argue about freedom of creation, incorrectly evaluated the “historical situation,” did not understand the “requirements of the current moment,” did not see or learn. . . . The result: the “scrap-heap of history.” We are talking now only about the most signiWcant literary groups, disregarding the smaller ones (from the “Serapion Brothers” to the ephemeral groups within the avant-garde, which are impossible to count). What kind of tragic mass blinding was this? Could no one really have seen “which millennium it is”? After all, almost all the ideologues of these groups were experienced politicians. They had all studied Party history—and not by the “Short Course”—and knew that the “dispersal of the Constituent Assembly” had been at the beginning, which meant that ultimately the sailor Zhelezniak could not fail to appear on the scene. And when a certain “man with a riXe” unknown to all—Ivan Gronskii— emerged from Stalin’s ofWce, proclaimed “Socialist Realism,” and took up the head post of the Organizational Committee of the Union of Soviet Writers, apparently even then not everyone understood that this was again a case of “the watchmen are tired.” Why did the ideologues of the literary groups not understand this? Why had they not foreseen it? Partly because they themselves were also “Zhelezniaks” that had in their time dispersed the Constituent Assembly. And the “sailor” always thinks that his own “watch” is the last one. The “sailor” has a short memory. But Kronstadt inevitably arrives—such is the “sailor’s lot.” And the “ship of contemporaneity” is no exception. And even the “sailor” Gronskii turned up (in a few years) in the gulag alongside the “little brothers” from the Wrst call—Smiths, LEFists, RAPPists. Toward the end or denouement of these various plays with the repeating plot, one observes the repetition of one and the same course of events—radicalization of ideas, and correspondingly of actions. Thus the RAPPists engage in suicidal debates with “the comrades in charge at the Central Committee” and even Pravda cannot reason with them; the LEFists agree to “self-liquidation” (a completely logical step after they had proclaimed the “liquidation of art”); the Perevalists begin to speak of “selfcontained freedom.” It is as if each wished to say the most sacred thing just before its death. It goes without saying that this “sacred” thing related not to the sphere...

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