CHILDHOOD IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE: FROM TOLSTOY TO THE "QUEEN OF HORROR"

It is said that when Tolstoy sent, anonymously, his first novel Childhood (1852) ― written during the Caucasus War and under the influence of Rousseau, Dickens and Sterne ― to The Contemporary magazine, his editor changed the title to History of My Childhood and that this change greatly angered the Russian writer. Later, Tolstoy recognized that his book indeed recounted his own experiences and those lived by his relatives.

          However surprising, Tolstoy was in fact the first major Russian author to combine autobiography with fiction in his depiction of his early years.

          A long list of writers of all styles, including Gorky, Belyi, Kataev, Bunin, Marina Tsvetaeva and Nabokov, to name just a few, subsequently recalled and wrote about their childhoods following Tolstoy's literary technique and his mythology of childhood in their autobiographies.

          The child depicted by Tolstoy has much in common with the child described by Rousseau. Life in the city leaves only negative images in the boy's consciousness. It is the countryside that remains in his soul and thus his memories and memoirs. His relation with nature plays an essential role in the idea that childhood innocence is a paradise lost. "Happy, happy unforgettable time of childhood! How can one not love, not cherish its memories?" wrote Tolstoy.

           Aleksey Peshok, the character of Maxim Gorky’s ‘My Childhood’ (1913-1914), the first part of an autobiographical trilogy, doesn't live in a Tolstoyan paradise. His infancy is deeply troubled by a virulent argument between the boy's uncles over their patrimony, the harsh beatings meted out by his grandfather and the complex and difficult life of his own mother, all elements in a brutalizing environment that might have destroyed the boy's spirit had it not been for the influence of his grandmother, a compassionate woman who cared for the unfortunate and had a great fondness for folk-tales and literature generally.

          During Stalin’s reign, literature about childhood was used as a means to propagate socialism and its ideals. One of the most accomplished prose writers of this era was Valentin Kataev. In his writing, the narrative became epic and the transformation of the fairy tale hero from immature child to adult is part of the process of socialization and integration into the collective.  Kataev’s ‘Son of the Regiment’ (1945), the story of an orphan boy adopted by an artillery regiment during the war, was an immense success, almost immediately made into a film.

          Before and later, other authors, like Bunin in The Life of Arseniev (1930) and Nabokov in Speak Memory (1966), wrote about their childhood from exile. For both, infancy belonged to a pre-Bolshevik chapter where they lived as privileged children, a golden time stolen by the Russian Revolution of 1917. In his autobiography, Nabokov recounts that he learned English before Russian. The Nabokovs were an aristocratic Russian family with European tastes, keen on English goods like Pears soap, Golden Syrup, bath salts and puzzles, products they would buy at the famous English Shop on Nevsky Avenue in St. Petersburg where they lived.

          In our own times, Russian literature about childhood has largely taken a new somber tone.  In his hugely successful, autobiographical ‘Bury Me Behind the Baseboard’ (first published in a magazine in 1996, then in book form in 2003, then filmed in 2009), Pavel Sanaev recounts the agonizing years of terror of a boy wrested away from his mother and brought up by a fierce tyrannical grandmother. 

          The myth of childhood in Russian culture in the 21^st century indeed has little if anything to do with paradise or with politics, if we think, in addition, of the terrifying images of fictional childhood portrayed by bestseller Anna Starobinets in An Awkward Age (published in 2005).  For her – often dubbed the ‘Queen of Horror’ - Russian children, like many children in the world, live in the hostile environment of big cities, in conflict with their parents, often separated, and struggling for fictitious lands in which they can escape reality.  A far cry from Tolstoy indeed!

This article was published in RBTH http://rbth.com/arts/2015/06/01/from_tolstoy_to_the_queen_of_horror_childhood_in_russian_literature_46529.html

BUNIN V. GORKY AND STALIN: DID THE NOBEL FAMILY INFLUENCE THE CHOICE?

On 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, Stockholm and Oslo become the world’s most important scientific and literary stages.  This year, it will be 81 years since the first award of Nobel Prize for Literature to a Russian, Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) – also, and not incidentally, the first writer in exile to receive the award.

Ivan Bunin, 1937.

Little has been written about the support for the Nobel Literature Prize that Ivan Bunin received from Emanuel Nobel, the founder’s nephew, despite the award’s rules excluding family intervention.  Was this revenge for the Bolshevik despoliation of the riches of the Nobel family?

The important chapter that Alfred Nobel and his family wrote in Russian history is not well known. The head of the family, Immanuel Nobel, had moved from Sweden to Saint Petersburg in 1838. With his three sons, Robert, Ludwig and Alfred (the inventor of dynamite) accomplished astonishing work in developing the Russian oil industry. One of Ludwig's sons, Emanuel Nobel, managed the family’s Russian oil business – Branobel, the world’s largest at the time - for 30 years. His sister, Marta, married the Russian doctor George Oleinikoff.

By 1916, the ‘Russian Rockefellers’ owned, controlled, or had substantial interest in companies producing a third of all Russian crude oil, which provided almost two-thirds of the country’s domestic consumption.

But two years later, when the Bolshevik Revolution triumphed,  Emanuel had to flee Russia disguised as a peasant, while his two brothers were imprisoned by the Cheka secret police. The Nobel empire vanished overnight as the refinery fires were extinguished, hundreds of wells were filled with water and the factories in St. Petersburg closed down.

In exile for the next ten years, first in Paris and then in Stockholm, the Nobel family fought to recover what had been seized by the Bolsheviks until they gradually realized it could never be possible.

Since then the Nobel family, Emanuel Nobel above all, became dedicated to fulfilling the will and testament of Alfred Nobel to establish the famous Nobel Prizes.

Thus the scene was set for the intrigue that developed over many years around the Nobel Prize for Literature that confronted two polarized groups: those in favour of Stalin’s favourite Gorky, who had remained in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution, and those in favour of the émigré "white" writer, Ivan A. Bunin, who fled Russia to France in 1921.

At the end of 20s and the beginning of the 30s, Western authors were engaged in a war of words to see which Russian writer would be first to get the Nobel Prize. The rupture (for a conflict of egos, but also for political views) between Gorky and Bunin, friends in other times, was well known.

Gorky had an international reputation and was supported by influential personalities in the literary world, among them Rolland Romain, George Bernard Shaw, Malraux, Gide,  H. G. Wells, Stefan Zweig.  And he was, before Bunin, a clear favourite for the Swedish prize when he was first nominated in 1918.

Over the years, however, Bunin and his writing provoked a positive reaction from the democratic West, especially in France, with its strong Russian exile community. But perhaps the key factor in the race to become the first Russian literatura Nobel was the crucial backing of three persons: Emanuel Nobel himself, the writer Romain Rolland and the Czechoslovak President Thomas Masaryk.

More in Russia Beyond The Headlines: http://rbth.com/literature/2014/12/10/bunin_vs_gorky_the_nobel_familys_russian_connection_42091.html