The Life and Death of the Thick Journal

In the first pages of the legendary novel Master and Margarita, author Mikhail Bulgakov introduces the reader to two seemingly harmless Soviet citizens and in short order has one of them run over by a streetcar and the other taking up residence in a psychiatric hospital.

Why was Bulgakov so hard on these two characters? What was their sin? Simple: both worked for the sort of publication that, in Russia, falls into the category of “thick journal” (толстый журнал).

The pompous, portly, and bald editor, who holds in his hand a “respectable” hat, is lecturing his companion, a neurasthenic young poet with the revolutionary pseudonym “Bezdomny” (“homeless”). The poet has been commissioned to write a long anti-religious poem, which he has dutifully written “in a very short time,” but the editor feels he has made a fundamental mistake in his depiction of Jesus. While He has been cast in a markedly negative light, He comes across as “utterly true to life.” The whole point was for the reader to realize that Christ never existed. The poem has to be completely redone.

Bulgakov’s biting satire illustrates the modus operandi of Soviet literary journals: a topic was assigned to a writer from above, and the writer was supposed to fulfill the order, adhering to the dictates of ideology (идеологический заказ). Talented and free-thinking writers were not capable of serving as cogs in this machine. The novel’s “Master” is a true demiurge, far removed from the bureaucratized world of the thick journal, and disdainful of mediocre art-to-order. But here’s the paradox: the time would come when it would be just such a thick journal that first published Master and Margarita!

The thick journal phenomenon is much more multifaceted than Bulgakov’s novel makes it out to be. These journals have been a cornerstone of Russia’s cultural life since the nineteenth century. To fully qualify as “thick,” a journal had to have not just an impressive number of pages and feature prose, poetry, and criticism. Experts on thick-journal culture tell us that what made these publications unique was that they were always more than just a collection of beautifully written works. Like Russian literature itself, Russia’s literary journals took on the special burden of leading a spiritual quest and cultivating society. Each thick journal had its own ideological and political orientation and provided a sort of refuge for the like-minded. Fyodor Dostoyevsky published his own Slavophilically inclined Time and Epoch (Время and Эпоха), while the leftist poet Nikolai Nekrasov curated The Contemporary (Современник), originally the brainchild of Alexander Pushkin.

After 1917, the Bolsheviks coopted the thick-journal tradition and came up with a number of their own – Red Virgin Soil, October, The New World, The Young Guard (Красная новь, Октябрь, Новый мир, Молодая гвардия), among others. Soviet-era thick journals were, of course, under tight state control and designed to mold the proletarian reader into a totally new type of person, as illustrated by the conversation from Master and Margarita cited above.

Master and Margarita also offers a glimpse at the financial rewards enjoyed by the successful Soviet writer. The novel shows Margarita, after acquiring witchly powers, furiously trashing the lavish apartment of the critic who had written a devastating review of the Master’s novel. Even run-of-the-mill authors who fulfilled the dictates of the state joined the elite and enjoyed luxuries unthinkable for the average Soviet person: a private apartment, a car, and quality furniture. This system, which began operating when the Soviet state was in its infancy, persevered.

“In the absolutely illogical Soviet economy, which was devoid of natural market proportionality, literary fees – both for journals and books – were approximately 100 times any sensible norm,” explained poet and critic Leonid Kostyukov. “A reasonable norm might be a fair share of the profits. But a Soviet fee for a book, for example, would come to ten times the price of all the books printed together. This can be traced back to the idea of writers as ‘soldiers of the ideological front,’ like hardship pay for soldiers, but that was automatically paid as well to those writing about violets and first kisses. In twenty-first-century Russia, it’s pretty hard to understand the plot twist, for example, from Trifonov’s Time and Place (Время и место), where whether or not a story is published in The New World determines whether a pregnancy will be kept or aborted.”

In the sixties, with the onset of the Thaw, the thick-journal phenomenon went through a true renaissance, imbued with a renewed spirit of resistance. Old publications were reorganized, new, progressive editors weakened censorship, and a number of new journals appeared. The journal Youth (Юность) provided a platform to young, previously unknown authors and let them write frankly about their generation.  The best-known work in this vein is Vasily Aksyonov’s novel Ticket to the Stars (Звездный билет), which became a huge hit after appearing in Youth in 1961. Suddenly it turned out that Soviet young people were not the unyielding builders of communism they were made out to be; they were no stranger to doubts, bourgeois dreams about a beautiful life, and a longing for freedom.

However, the main event for intellectual life during those years was issue No. 11 of The New World in 1962. The publication was headed by the writer Alexander Tvardovsky, who gave it a reputation as the boldest of the thick journals. After several months of correspondence between the editor-in-chief and party officials, as well as direct communication with Secretary Khrushchev, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Один день Ивана Денисовича) came out, transforming how Soviet citizens saw their country. The book was the first to talk about the Gulag. All across the country, people stood in line at libraries for a chance to read it. From then on, the Soviet intelligentsia greeted every issue of The New World like a breath of fresh air.

And then, in 1967, Master and Margarita was finally published in another new thick journal, Moscow.*Almost 30 years had passed since Bulgakov wrote it. Even though it came out in an abridged version, it was a sensation. Homemade books, consisting of the two issues it appeared in bound together, were passed around and reproduced on typewriters or kept as family heirlooms.

“My husband came home from some literary association at the teachers’ institute we were attending,” said former librarian and member of the sixties generation, Svetlana Lif. “He told me: that’s it, we have to read it, everyone has read it but us, we must get it somewhere, urgently! And then, as luck would have it, someone told him that one of his former classmates, who on top of that had had a crush on him, had the journal! First he read it himself, and then he gave it to me, and we had to return it really quickly, so I read it in a terrible hurry – at night in bed, during the day in lectures – everywhere.”

That period of illusory freedom did not last long. Pressure on the journals increased, and daring editors were plunged into disgrace. For example, in the late sixties, a campaign was launched against Alexander Tvardovsky that ended in the firing of the entire editorial staff and Tvardovsky’s sudden death.

The last hurrah for Soviet periodicals came around the time the country was collapsing.

“For me, perestroika began with the publication of [Nikolai] Gumilyov’s poetry in Little Flame (Огонёк),” commented a respondent interviewed by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak for his renowned book about the final days of the Soviet Union, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Это было навсегда, пока не кончилось).

What is interesting here is that these poems could already be read in manuscripts being passed around (samizdat), but the very fact that they were now being officially published was emblematic.

“As soon as the journal arrived, everybody wanted it,” Lif said, describing her work in a provincial library. “At first the staff would all read it themselves, and then it was sent to people whose palms the director wanted to grease – doctors, teachers, and other useful people. I remember how Tsvetaeva’s ‘The Tale of Sonechka’ came out in The New World and immediately became extremely popular. Readers were coming and asking for it, and I’d say: we don’t have it now, and I’d take down their number. I would open a special notebook and put people on a waiting list. When their turn came, I’d call and tell them, but with the provision that they had to come that very day, and if they didn’t, I’d give it to the next person, since there were too many people waiting for it.”

According to Svetlana, in those days, only the most sophisticated understood that the story was about lesbian love – most Soviet readers were too naive to pick up on the cues. The reason it was so popular was that Tsvetaeva had barely been published before, and in general, Lif said, “in those years, there wasn’t anything decent, just rah-rah patriotic literature.”

Thick journals also began to offer a window onto the world, transporting Soviet citizens beyond the Iron Curtain. Eventually, prose by Russian émigrés began to appear. One of the most popular journals was Foreign Literature (Иностранная литература), which, as the name would suggest, published foreign authors. And works started to come out that 1960s editors were unable to get through: exactly 30 years after Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for literature, The New World finally published Doctor Zhivago. The journal Friendship of Peoples (Дружба народов) published the top literary sensation of perestroika, Anatoly Rybakov’s anti-Stalinist trilogy Children of the Arbat (Дети Арбата), which Tvardovsky had been unable to “push through” during his tenure at The New World. The novel tells the tragic tale of a generation sacrificed to the “building of communism,” of promising and naive Soviet dreamers caught up in the Stalinist meat grinder, only to suffer the trials of World War II.

It is hard to imagine a situation where there could be more pent-up literary energy than in the thick-journal world of those days. But soon after that energy began to be released, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and soon thereafter the pent-up thick-journal energy petered out. The changing political situation obviously played a role in this, but the gradual emergence of the digital age and the appearance of new modes of communication, plus a general loss of interest (in our most recent decade) in reading anything longer than a social media comment or a text message, may have played an even greater one.

So it is that today this grand tradition seems to have reached its final days.

In October 2018, the electronic thick-journal archive Magazine Reading Room (Журнальный зал; magazines.russ.ru), founded in 1995 with the goal of putting the renowned publications of the past into a virtual space, ceased operations (although efforts to save the site are still underway). The once great October and several other journals stopped publishing, while The New World continues to limp along. The illustrious St. Petersburg journal Star (Звезда), which published Akhmatova, Pasternak, Brodsky and so many others, has announced it will run out of money in May.

The overall economic situation also seems to be playing a role in the thick journal’s demise. After all, the print editions of thick journals survived largely thanks to state support. As the editor-in-chief of The New World, Andrei Vasilyevsky, put it: “New World, like other literary journals of this format, are hopelessly unprofitable. Grants from Rospechat [the Federal Agency for the Press] are exceptionally important to us, but they don’t cover our red ink. Library subscriptions to thick literary journals have fallen to a critical minimum. Individual subscriptions to the print edition are, over time, becoming a thing of the past, in fact they already are. The New World does not publish advertising (and that’s a separate problem). There are almost no retail sales (and that’s a separate problem). Today’s New World readers are on the internet, and, naturally, they are not paying. I hope that The New World will continue to come out regularly through the end of this year, and then we’ll see...”

Within the context of contemporary media, thick journals seem almost quaint. It is amazing not only that the steam of their former glory has propelled them into the twenty-first century, but that, twenty years on, they remain virtually unchanged. They are still printed on cheap paper, have kept their revolutionary titles and no-frills Soviet-era designs, and, to some extent, their conservative ways of doing things. Looking at that same old gray cover emblazoned with “Novy Mir” in lilac letters, it is hard to imagine that today’s New World contains poetry unfettered by classical conventions, experimental prose, and truly “new” literature – but that is often how it is.

However, despite the fact that the editors try to publish what is interesting and new, many young authors are biased against the old-fashioned thick-journal machine, which they associate with a Soviet aesthetic and authoritarianism. Publication in thick journals signifies a certain standing and ties to the literary community, something undoubtedly useful for emerging writers, but nothing more. Long gone are the days when these journals were dominant forces, offering access to huge audiences.

Of course, the editors are aware of the need to change, but their attempts at rebranding are more symbolic than effective. For example October, obviously named in honor of the October Revolution, tried to distance itself from that allusion and pretend that its title references a time of year so often extolled in lyric poetry. To celebrate its ninetieth anniversary, October released an issue entirely devoted to autumn. No publications have worked up the courage to take more radical steps toward changing their appearance or names, since that would mean sacrificing their reputational capital and starting from square one, likely losing all hope of receiving the grants that have kept them afloat.

“The way it turned out, thick journals of the Soviet model never developed the fortitude to survive on their own,” said Valeria Pustovaya, who headed the criticism department for the now-defunct October. “The idea that keeps them going today has to do with that unique quality: the desire to support serious, not-for-profit literature that isn’t written to serve someone’s ideological interests or generate profits.

“Without a doubt, there is still a need for a platform where writers can publish their new things without worrying about what the market, the series, or a rigid publication format demands. This is particularly important for authors of poetry and short prose. Internet forums are not suitable for them: a work has to go through expert assessment, a professional selection process, and on a forum or blog, all texts are equal.

“Maybe people will emerge who can figure out how to make such a platform more modern and successful, while still being nonprofit, but so far no such geniuses have been found. Current conditions have eroded the model of the thick-journal and, possibly, will force it to be reborn – but that is just one part of the global transformation of culture and the way people perceive the world today.

“There is a huge wave that you may be able to swim out from under, but that is too strong to resist. As the contemporary philosopher of culture and composer Vladimir Martynov says, the point at which art ends is the point at which it begins; it is impossible to start something without something else coming to an end. And for me, the end of journals does not mean the disappearance of their very idea – it just means the beginning of a search for that idea’s new form.”