Vsevolod Ivanov

Born 12 February 1895

Vsevolod Ivanov’s books have long since been largely forgotten, and today it is hard to decide whether or not his current obscurity is deserved.

He was not considered worthy of inclusion in school syllabi, and was remembered by older Soviet generations mostly as the author of The Armored Train («Бронепоезд 14-69»). This 1922 short story, a sensation in its time, was brought to the stage by the Moscow Art Theater and performed by top actors, but it no longer holds interest for the reading public. In the late 1920s, however, it was extolled for its candid portrayal of the Civil War and the partisan movement in the Far East.

So why should we care about this man, born in 1895, if nobody reads him anymore? Probably because he led a life that would be excellent fodder for any biographer, filmmaker, playwright, or novelist.

The village of Lebyazhye in Semipalatinsk District, where Ivanov was born, is just over the border from Kazakhstan. This may be why Ivanov was so drawn to Russia’s Asian east all his life – the Kazakh steppe, Siberia, the Urals, Tashkent, and Bukhara are where he spent his tumultuous and nomadic youth, first traveling across the steppe on foot before joining the circus as a fakir and sword swallower. He practiced yoga and dreamed of reaching India (he did eventually make it there, but only toward the end of his life) and was a student of Buddhist philosophy. Despite having only a fourth-grade education, as an adult, he studied math and physics and became fascinated with the Theory of Relativity.

Once he became a recognized writer, he could only make limited use of his amazing adventures in his works and share what he witnessed during the Civil War. By then, Soviet Russia was neither the time nor the place to tell the story of the Red Army commander who forgot to relieve a young soldier from his post guarding an explosives depot when their forces withdrew from Omsk, forcing him to flee hurriedly from the Whites. Nor was it a time when a chronicler of heroic feats by Red Partisans could let out that he had worked for a newspaper produced by Kolchak’s anti-communist government, where he produced stories exposing Red misdeeds.

After the Civil War, Ivanov spent the 1920s as a member of the Serapion Brothers literary group, which included many better-remembered writers. This group’s name was taken from E.T.A. Hoffman, a trailblazer of fantasy literature who belonged to a German group with an analogous name (which Hoffman used to title a collection of his tales). Ivanov fit right in, penning fantastical tales stylized as “Eastern prose.” Together with the famous Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, he wrote Mustard Gas, in which the sailor Slovokhotov and a bear named Rocambole are taken through improbable intrigues as they work to thwart devious imperialist schemes involving the gas of the work’s title. Ivanov’s early career produced formally complex, genre-bending novels and parodies of various literary styles.

Then came the 1930s. Parody, irony, and hijinks were out and grandiloquent socialist realism and Stalinist “grand style” were in. Ivanov kept his irony in the drawer, which was just as well. Nobody wanted to publish it.

Ivanov knew Stalin long before his ascent to power. In an interview in the late 1990s, his son, the renowned linguist Vyacheslav Ivanov, said:

My father knew the Vozhd back when he was young, and he even described him in an early novel, The Return of Buddha, back when [Stalin] was still narkomnats [People’s Commissar for Nationalities]. They even drank together. And my father understood who he was dealing with. And Stalin understood that my father understood! So his relationship with Stalin was always tense, and father paid a big price for that – it’s no coincidence that they stopped publishing him. There was a story “The Child” [«Дитё»], the beginning of which Stalin learned by heart, and remembered 20 years later and told Fyodor Panferov: “That’s how Vsevolod Ivanov used to write!” This story was banned throughout the entire Stalin era.

But Ivanov found his place in the new Stalinist world, becoming secretary of the Writers’ Union, a powerful post that allowed him to live comfortably in a large apartment in a special building for writers and enjoy all the benefits of a classic, a realist, and a bard of the revolution. He traveled with other writers to witness the White Sea Canal being built and tainted himself by writing books glorifying this horrific slave-labor project. During World War II he served as a war correspondent.

But he was never able to be the kind of writer he set out to be. In 1955, when Vsevolod Ivanov celebrated his 60th birthday, Shklovsky wrote to him:

I have lost many of the gifts that fate bestowed on me, Vsevolod. I believe in you, and I still understand your powers. How can it be, my friend, that we have achieved so little?... You are a man of our time. It gave birth to you. I am very sad, Vsevolod. Birthdays make me wistful. Life has rolled on by. You still stand tall. You will yet manage to do a great deal.

At the time, Ivanov only had a few years to live, so he did not manage to do much, although he was constantly working.

But Ivanov’s story is not just that of a writer prevented from producing parodic, ironic books and testing the boundaries of literary form who wound up being remembered as the author of some idiotic play about an armored train and a “representative of Socialist Realism.” His was also the story of a good man who walked the razor’s edge of Russia’s cruel history and Stalinism.

We know that in 1917, when he was working as a typesetter in the Siberian city of Kurgan, into which many desperate, hungry people streamed, fleeing war and revolution, he relinquished his job so that the father of a large family could have it.

We also know that this literary “boss” was friends with Boris Pasternak for many years and was the first to congratulate him on winning the Nobel Prize. When the Writers’ Union unleashed a venomous campaign against Pasternak, Ivanov was, of course, asked to join in, but he could not make himself do it: he sat at his desk and tried to imagine what he would say, understanding full well that he was expected to defame his friend and condemn a great writer. He collapsed under the strain and suffered a lengthy illness. When he did not show up at the meeting where Pasternak was to be denounced, he was listed in a report to the Central Committee as having “claimed illness,” although it seems he was indeed brought down by the clash between expediency and a conscience that all those years of Stalinism had not silenced.

But apparently his experiments with form and language did not go to waste and were passed on. His son Vyacheslav Ivanov became a brilliant linguist and a much bolder defender of Pasternak than his father.

Perhaps that legacy is enough.