On Reading Soviet Memoirs:A History of the“Contemporaries” Genre asan Institution of RussianIntelligentsia Culture fromthe 1790s to the 1970sBBBBBARBARBARBARBARBARA ARA ARA ARA ARA WWWWWALKERALKERALKERALKERALKER

As eloquent eyewitness accounts, Soviet Russian memoirs offer us some extraordinaryglimpses into the Soviet experience. Ilya Erenburg and Nadezhda Mandelshtam depict inbrilliant detail the lives and culture of the intellectual elite in the first half of the twentiethcentury, while Eugenia Ginzburg describes the experience of being sucked into the prisoncamp system in the 1930s. Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin, offers aninside view of Stalin’s Kremlin court, Alexander Solzhenitsyn of the literary bureaucracy ofthe 1950s and 1960s, and Dmitry Shostakovich of Soviet music politics.1 Powerful, vivid,and detailed, such documents would seem to be remarkable sources for the study of Soviethistory.

I would like to thank Jane Burbank, Michael David-Fox, Laura Engelstein, Irina Paperno, Walter Pintner, DavidRansel, Andrew Shryock, Patricia Turner, Mack Walker, Douglas Weiner, two anonymous reviewers for The Rus-sian Review, and participants in the 1997 Indiana University conference “Inventing the Soviet Union: Language,Power, and Representation, 1917–1945,” for their stimulating and helpful comments on this project. Thanks alsoto the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Hoover Institution, and the University of Nevada, Reno,for financial and other support of my research.

1Ilya Ehrenburg, People and Life, 1891–1921, trans. Anna Bostock and Yvonne Kapp (New York, 1962); idem,Memoirs, 1921–1941, trans. Tatania Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp (Cleveland, 1963); idem, The War, 1941–1945,trans. Tatania Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp (Cleveland, 1965); idem, Post-War Years, 1945–1954, trans. TataniaShebunina and Yvonne Kapp (Cleveland, 1965); Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope Against Hope, trans. Max Hay-ward (New York, 1970); idem, Hope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward (New York, 1974); Eugenia Ginzburg,Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York, 1967); Svetlana Alliluyeva,Twenty Letters to a Friend, trans. Priscilla Johnson MacMillan (New York, 1967); Alexander Solzhenitsyn, TheOak and the Calf, trans. Harry Willetts (New York, 1975); Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony, The Memoirs of DmitriShostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York, 1979). This articlewill touch on the debate over the veracity of the Shostakovich memoir in its final section.

The Russian Review 59 (July 2000): 327–52Copyright 2000 The Russian Review

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Yet memoirs have played an ambiguous role in the scholarly exploration of modernRussian history and culture. Many biographers, for example, engaged in sorting out theintimate specifics of individual lives, use them cautiously and at times with implicit orexplicit reservations.2 Among historians, especially historians of the Soviet era, discussionof the memoir as a historical source has become entangled in some of the most contentiousdisputes of the field. It played an especially awkward role in the emergence of the revision-ist Soviet historians who advocate “history from below,” despite its seeming value to suchan approach.3 J. Arch Getty has expressed strong distrust of such works, largely in responseto earlier use of memoirs in the study of Stalinism and the Stalinist terror.4 While the post-Soviet opening of the archives has begun to redraw the contours of numerous debates overSoviet history, the question of the value of the Soviet memoir to historians of the period isin many ways still open.

Preliminary textual exploration of the Soviet memoirs listed above reveals that thosewho object to their use as historical sources have reason for uneasiness. Several of thempresent numerous assertions, sometimes demonstrably inaccurate, which are based on gos-sip rather than on eyewitness experience.5 Furthermore, they are at times notably partisan,offering almost hagiographic treatment of certain individuals on the one hand (Alliluyevaof her mother, Mandelshtam of her husband, Osip, and Erenburg, to a lesser degree, ofseveral figures) and bitter denunciations on the other (Mandelshtam, Solzhenitsyn, andShostakovich of numerous participants in cultural life, Alliluyeva of Beria, and Ginzburg ofStalin).6 While the casual reader may not be fully aware of each example of gossip or ofpartisanship in these documents, an impression that their authors are not always guided bythe desire for objective accuracy is at times difficult to avoid.

Yet even those professional Western historians who distrust Soviet memoirs most in-tensely cannot afford to ignore these lively and intriguing sources for understanding of the

2See, for example, David Magarshack, Dostoyevsky (New York, 1961), 80; Avril Pyman, The Life of AlexanderBlok, vol. 1, The Distant Thunder, 1880–1908 (Oxford, 1979), 17; Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 1,The Strengths of Contradiction (London, 1985), 47, 205n.102; and John Malmstad and Vladimir Markov, M. A.Kuzmin, Sobranie stikhotvorenii (Munich, 1977), 9.

3For the impact of the revisionists on Soviet historiography see Jane Burbank, “Controversies over Stalinism:Searching for a Soviet Society,” Politics and Society 19, no. 3 (1991): 325–40.

4See J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Ox-ford, 1985), 4–5, 211–20. Getty is particularly concerned about the reliance on gossip by many memoirists of theSoviet era. To support his argument for rejecting the memoir as a historical source he cites Louis Gottschalk,Clyde Kluckholn, and Robert Angell, The Use of Personal Documents in History, Anthropology, and Sociology(New York, 1945), 20–21; and Paul Fussel, The Great War in Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975), 310; actually,Gottschalk argues that falsehoods and inaccuracies may themselves be significant historical phenomena.

5Some memoirs rely more on gossip than others; authors sometimes cite specific oral sources, at other timesreferring to a nebulous “they” or merging gossip seamlessly with the eyewitness narrative. See, for example,Alliluyeva’s description of the “family legend” that Stalin saved her mother’s life when she was two years old(Twenty Letters to a Friend, 47). Solzhenitsyn’s memoir is laced with descriptions of political maneuvering in theliterary community which he did not personally witness, sometimes attributing the information to specific sourcesbut more often not (for example, The Oak and the Calf, 19–23). Mandelshtam relies often on gossip. For example,she passes on several undocumented tales of how justice, injustice, and trousers were meted out to individualwriters by Bryusov and Gorky in the early days of Soviet power (Hope Abandoned, 95).

6See the final section of this article for more extensive discussion of both positive and negative partisanship inthese memoirs.

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human experience in twentieth-century Russia. Teachers assign them to undergraduatesand recommend them to nonspecialists, while journalists such as Hedrick Smith, DavidRemnick, and Adam Hochschild use or refer to them in their popular works, and script-writers in Hollywood turn to them as sources for their historical films on the period.7 Allthese influential laymen are not wrong. Soviet memoirs are far too rich in historical nu-ance, far too valuable to our understanding of the period, to be dismissed; professionalhistorians need rather to consider how best to understand them.

The argument of this article is that while such memoirs are indeed sometimes untrust-worthy as historical sources in the simplest sense of providing objective factual evidence,they are nevertheless of considerable worth not only despite their failings but also some-times precisely because of them. To grasp the full value of these documents we need at lastto take a direct look at those qualities which can make us uncomfortable: at their tenden-tiousness and unfounded claims and inaccuracies. We need to do this because the value ofthese documents lies at certain key moments less in their accurate reflection of what actu-ally happened in the past, and more in how they reflect the ways that their authors, asparticipants in Russian culture, view the world: how they think of their past, and how theyconnect it to their present; how they believe that society should work, and what they see asappropriate or ideal social, economic, and political behavior. These memoirs offer invalu-able insights into some of the twists and turns of Soviet Russian culture, as well as into theinternal cultural logic of Russian discourse about Soviet history.

This cultural approach yields several principles essential to a fuller understanding ofthe Soviet memoirs listed above and their peculiarities. The first is that these memoirspartake extensively (although not exclusively) in a very distinctive genre and tradition ofmodern Russian memoir-writing which can be traced back to the late eighteenth century.This genre of self-narrative might be called the “contemporaries” memoir, because it showsup so frequently on Russian bookshelves under such titles as “The Memoirs (vospominaniia)of Contemporaries (sovremennikov) about so-and-so,” or “So-and-so in the Memoirs (vvospominaniiakh) of Contemporaries (sovremennikov).” The quality which most distin-guishes such a memoir is that its author seeks self-understanding and self-explanation notby looking inward, in the Romantic tradition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but rather byfocusing outward with an intense gaze on one particular community as it is located in time:that highly complex and divided social group which is often called the Russian intelligen-tsia.8 The writers who have taken part in this particular tradition have been—like theauthors of the above-mentioned Soviet memoirs—intellectuals, and the “contemporaries”genre is inextricably entwined with the historical emergence and development of the

7Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York, 1976); David Remnik, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the SovietEmpire (London, 1993); Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (New York, 1994).The movie Stalin, with a screenplay written by Paul Monash, appears to draw heavily on the memoirs of SvetlanaAlliluyeva, as well as on those of other members of the Alliluyev family.

8See Lidiia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, ed. and trans. Judson Rosengrant (Princeton, 1991), 107–217,for a pertinent typology of memoirs and/or autobiographies. The “contemporaries” memoir genre exhibits ele-ments of both St. Simon’s Memoires, with its seventeenth century-style literary portraiture, moral judgement, andfascination with community intrigue, and Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts, with its historicist attentionto “the relationship of the individual personality to society and to shared interests” (ibid., 196).

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intelligentsia. This is not to say that all Russian intellectuals writing memoirs partake inthe “contemporaries” tradition. But the “contemporaries” memoir genre can be understoodonly in terms of its place in the social, cultural, and economic history of Russian intellec-tual life. Above all it must be viewed in terms of that central social, cultural, and economicinstitution of intelligentsia history: the intelligentsia circle, or kruzhok.

The vitality of circle formation to Russian intellectual life, especially given the com-parative sparseness and weakness of other institutions of educated life in modern Russia, isclear from much scholarship on the intelligentsia.9 Circle membership fostered the self-development and self-advancement of Russian intellectuals by providing the institutionalfoundations for intellectual and ideological argumentation, for the proliferation of pub-lished and unpublished works through semipublic or public readings, for the founding ofjournals, and for the plotting of revolutions, among other things. What is perhaps less clear,however, is the degree of calculation and effort involved in creating successful circles. Theintelligentsia circle can appear to be almost effortless, the happy product of a natural attrac-tion among like-minded thinkers and friends. But as this article will reveal, the process ofcircle formation could very arduous indeed. It involved an ongoing discourse about howcircles should be formed and should function, a strenuous jockeying for status and for placeon the part of individuals who sought to maneuver themselves into, among, or within circles,and a concentrated endeavor to define and control not only the behavior appropriate tocircle membership but even what it meant to be an intellectual. The issues of individualstatus and of cultural control were of particular concern in a social group that was so muchthe product of social change, as numerous individuals from a variety of backgrounds pressedtheir way into an originally gentry culture from the mid-nineteenth century onward.10

The strains of this process left their mark on history in part through the emergence ofthe “contemporaries” memoir genre, which, so this article will argue, played a vital role incircle formation in a number of ways. For one thing, it served as a forum for discussing theformation and function of circles and circle life; for another, it was an actual tool for intel-lectuals and would-be intellectuals in the process of jockeying for status and place; and,finally, it was a tool also for those who wanted to control the culture of circle life and indeedthe culture of intellectual life. In a sense, the “contemporaries” memoir was itself an insti-tution of intelligentsia life. Because of this historical role, the “contemporaries” memoirgenre also offers intriguing insight into that plague of scholars working on the history ofRussian intellectual life: the problem of intelligentsia identity. Scholars have at length

9Marc Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia (Boulder, 1994), 42–64; Martin Malia, AlexanderHerzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (New York, 1965); Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy:History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, trans. Hilda Andrews Rusiecka (Ox-ford, 1975); Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York, 1978); Edward Brown,Stankevich and His Moscow Circle, 1830–1840 (Stanford, 1966); Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History ofthe Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (New York, 1960); Kendall Bailes, Scienceand Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V. I. Vernadsky and his Scientific School, 1863–1945 (Bloomington,1990); Douglas Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berke-ley, 1999); and Barbara Walker, “Maximilian Voloshin’s ‘House of the Poet’: Intelligentsia Social Organization andCulture in Early Twentieth-Century Russia” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1994), 1–22.

10On upward mobility and the “outsider” in Imperial Russian intelligentsia history see Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter,Structures of Society: Imperial Russia’s “People of Various Ranks” (DeKalb, 1994), esp. chaps. 5–6.

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debated what it meant to be an intelligent, and who could actually be described as one.Some have argued against the very sociological validity of the term, while others continuestubbornly to use it.11 Because of the importance of the circle to intelligentsia life, andbecause of the role of the “contemporaries” memoir in circle formation, the history of the“contemporaries” genre reveals some of the ways in which members of the Russian intel-lectual elite have themselves struggled with the problem of intelligentsia identity.

And in that struggle lie the peculiarities of this historical document as a source. Theintense outward focus, the easy repetition of gossip, and the partisanship, all are the symp-toms and the artifacts of a long and sometimes painful negotiation over what it means to bean intelligent in the context of a culture of circle or network formation. Deeply influencedby the “contemporaries” memoir tradition that will be described in the following pages,those Soviet self-narratives best known in the West are in no sense merely neutral, objectivedocumentations of the past—nor have they been intended as such. Shaped by generationsof intelligentsia history, such memoirs have generally been aimed less at the West than at aninternal Soviet, primarily intelligentsia audience who understand its genre terms and theinternal social and political stakes.

PRE-INTELLIGENTSIA ORIGINSPRE-INTELLIGENTSIA ORIGINSPRE-INTELLIGENTSIA ORIGINSPRE-INTELLIGENTSIA ORIGINSPRE-INTELLIGENTSIA ORIGINS

The most immediate ancestors of the intelligentsia “contemporaries” memoir are certaingentry memoirs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Until the mid-eigh-teenth century in Russia, the recorded personal recollection scarcely existed except aschronicle or travelogue; only in the last decades of the eighteenth century do we see theemergence of what one scholar calls the “autobiographical” memoir.12 Primarily gentryfolk,with a smattering of merchants and religious figures, began at this point to write about theirlife experiences.13 Publication was not yet an issue, except in one notable case which willbe discussed further on. These memoirs were written primarily as communication withinthe circle of one’s relatives and friends; their purpose was in large part to strengthen domes-tic and family self-consciousness through a description of the past adventures and associa-tions of its members. Another significant purpose was to focus attention on the intersectionof private family life with the life of the state and even of the nation. Wrote one author,

11Daniel Brower questions the value of the concept in “The Problem of the Russian Intelligentsia,” SlavicReview 26 (Winter 1967): 638–39. I agree, however, with Wirtschafter’s argument that although “it is difficult toformulate scientifically neutral terms of analysis that adequately describe the group’s historical existence,” therereally was a “self-conscious intelligentsia” which may be recognized through its attempt to “secure its identitythrough staged and ritualized displays of cultural values” (Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia [DeKalb,1997], 90–91). The “contemporaries” genre might be seen as one such “ritualized display” by which this complexsocial group attempted to “secure its identity.” Other discussions of the concept of the intelligentsia include MartinMalia, “What is the Intelligentsia,” in The Russian Intelligentsia, ed. Richard Pipes (New York, 1961), 1–18; OttoMueller, Intelligencija: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte eines politischen Schlagwortes (Frankfurt, 1971); MichaelConfino, “On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Daedalus101 (1972); and Jane Burbank, “Were the Russian Intelligenty Organic Intellectuals?” in Intellectuals and PoliticalLife, ed. Judith Farquhar et al. (Ithaca, 1994), chap. 6.

12A. G. Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika XVIII–pervoi poloviny XIX v. (Moscow, 1991), 38.13Ibid., 24–37.

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addressing his children: “In describing my life I consider it necessary to touch upon thecharacteristics of the century in which I lived, and also on the former government, for it isuseful for you as sons of the fatherland to know about all that, and also to know about theorigins of your family and about how much its antiquity and distinction demand that youstrive more than others to be useful to your country.”14

Thus many of these gentry memoirs are devoted to tales of state service, and by thenineteenth century they reveal an increasing consciousness of national history. But theseare tales of state service and national history as they were shaped by experience of theeighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian state: a state that has been described byBrenda Meehan-Waters, David Ransel, John Alexander, and others as institutionally weakand dominated by personal relations.15 Politicking in the Russian state involved carefulcultivation and dispersion of patronage, and a cautious attention to personal ties and net-works, as well as to the dynamics of clan power and factional alliance. Thus, shaped bytheir purpose of passing on politically useful clan and circle information, many of thesememoirs focus on high society, personalities, patronage ties, and on historical events asdriven by an ever-changing kaleidoscope of court politics.

Descriptions of social life in general were common: “In the good old days it was notdifficult to become acquainted with the ancient aristocratic families in Moscow. Hospital-ity was widespread, and within a few days [of our arrival in Moscow] we received numerousinvitations to dinner and to evening parties, or simply to drop by any time, or at somespecific time, so that with all the will in the world it was not possible to accept them all.”16

Who knew whom and who spent time with whom was of importance, and thus lists ofnames are not infrequent: “The usual company of Derzhavin was: I. F. Bogdanovich, AlekseiNikolaevich Olenin, Nikolai Aleksandrovich and Fedor Petrovich L’vovy, I. L. Vel’iaminov,and Vasilii Vasil’evich Kapnist.”17 Power relations were also of considerable concern, al-most always in connection with the court or with state service: “[At that time] AleksandrDmitrievich Lanskoi began to wield great influence in court.”18 Of particular interest washow contacts were made and how influence was put to use in one’s own interest: “While inSt. Petersburg I met with I. S. Zakharov, making brief acquaintance with him due to the factthat he was a neighbor of my father. When I explained to him the reason for my visit, he toldme that he was a good friend of Pankratiev, who ran the chancellery of Prince Repin, and [I]entrusted him with my testimonial to show [Pankratiev] with a request for advice as to howto approach him.”19 And, in a straightforward reference to direct patronage: “In 1782 his

14Ibid., 78. The author of these words is N. Ia. Tregubov.15Brenda Meehan-Waters, Autocracy and Aristocracy: The Russian Service Elite of 1730 (New Brunswick,

1982); David Ransel, The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (New Haven, 1975); John Alexander,“Favorites, Favoritism and Female Rule in Russia, 1725–1796,” in Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment: Essaysfor Isabel de Madariaga, ed. Roger Bartlett and Janet Hartley (New York, 1990), 106-24.

16Igor Fedorovich Von Bradke, “Avtobiograficheskie zapiski,” in Russkie memuary: Izbrannye stranitsy, 1800–1825 gg., comp. I. I. Podol’skaia (Moscow, 1989), 192.

17Mikhail Aleksandrovich Dmitriev, “Melochi iz zapasa moei pamiati,” in Russkie memuary: Izbrannye stranitsy,XVIII vek, comp. I. I. Podol’skaia (Moscow, 1988), 438.

18Lev Nikolaevich Engel’gardt, “Vremia do pribytiia moego na sluzhbu v Preobrazhenskii polk i nekotoryeanekdoty,” in Russkie memuary XVIII vek, 221.

19Ibid., 288.

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Highness Prince Potemkin, traveling through Mogilev, promised my father that he wouldtake me as an adjutant.”20

There was a particular fascination with the character of patrons and leaders. Von Bradke’sanalysis of the character of his military commander and patron Arakcheev is detailed andthoughtful:

I am obliged to refer to the internal life of this undoubtedly delightful person, inorder to explain his unusual government situation. ... It seemed to him that hestood alone, that his level of intelligence was unattainable, and from that fanciedheight he looked down on pitiable humanity and made use of its weaknesses andpassions in order to attain his own goals and to strengthen his unboundedly grow-ing pride. ... His relations with Emperor Alexander distinguished themselves bytheir ease and subtle calculation, but it is impossible to describe them as honest.21

Analysis of the character of a leader or patron could have very considerable historicalimplications, as it did in case of Leontii Leont’evich Bennigsen’s description of EmperorPaul, whom he had helped to murder. Rewriting his memoirs repeatedly, Bennigsen tried toexplain and to justify himself through an explanation of Paul’s character and his behavior asa tsar-patron: “Paul’s deeply suspicious personality forced him, from the moment that hetook the throne, to remove or exclude from court, military, and civil service all those whobeen attached to [that is, patronized by] Catherine.”22 “Paul was superstitious,” he explainedin another version, setting the scene for a series of irrational actions which eventually causedthe monarch to alienate many powerful aristocratic families from his reign.23 What charac-terized a good leader and what a bad was a very serious matter in a society where institu-tions were so weak and personalities therefore so significant, and those writing memoirspaid notable attention to the problem.24

THE FIRST INTELLIGENTSIA MEMOIRTHE FIRST INTELLIGENTSIA MEMOIRTHE FIRST INTELLIGENTSIA MEMOIRTHE FIRST INTELLIGENTSIA MEMOIRTHE FIRST INTELLIGENTSIA MEMOIR

Standing out in relief against the background of these late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gentry memoirs we find what might well be called the first intelligentsia memoir.This memoir already demonstrates a remarkable number of the traits of the intelligentsia“contemporaries” memoir which will remain common into the late twentieth century.

20Ibid., 229.21Von Bradke, “Avtobiograficheskie zapiski,” in Russkie memuary 1800–1825, 202–3.22Leontii Leont’evich Bennigsen, “Zapiski,” in ibid., 22.23Ibid., 30.24Whether or not the emergence of character description in Russian memoirs is due to the influence of Jean-

Jacques Rousseau and other Romantics is a matter for debate. The problem of the character of political leadersgoes back as far as the medieval period in Russian history to such tales of personality as Sviatopolk. See, forexample, Samuel H. Cross, “The Russian Primary Chronicle,” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Litera-ture 12 (1930): 212–32. Even so, it can certainly be argued that there is a more modern Romantic concept ofcharacter and of the individual emerging here which will have its impact on the development of Russian self-narratives in general, as well as on the Russian conception of the individual and of human character. Scholars whohave explored such a tendency in depth include Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia, 42–64;and Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, 27–106.

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Fittingly, it was written by the man who has often been described as the first Russian intel-ligent, though he was at the same time a member of the Russian gentry: Alexander Radishchev.In 1789, about a year before he brought out his politically suicidal tale of serfdom andRussian backwardness, Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Radishchev published thememoir Life of Fedor Vasil’evich Ushakov.25

In certain ways, the Life of Ushakov resembles the gentry and court memoir of theperiod, but with instructive differences. Though written for publication as the first biogra-phy of its sort in Russian history, the Life nevertheless represents a stylized version of theintimate domestic gentry memoir, as Radishchev addressed it in very personal terms to amember of his circle. But in this case the circle was not a family or clan circle, but rather asmall group of students sent by Empress Catherine the Great to study in Leipzig, of whomRadishchev, Ushakov, and Alexei Kutuzov, the addressee, were all members. Shaping thespirit of his tale, Radishchev addresses Kutuzov in intimate and emotional terms: “I repeat,my friend, is it not pleasant to remember the days of the renaissance of our friendship, of theblessed union of our souls (dush). ... I seek in [this description of the life of Ushakov] myown satisfaction; but to you, my dearest friend, I want to unfold the innermost recesses ofmy heart.”26 Despite the Rousseauian quality of this language and the promise of self-revelation, however, nothing of the sort follows. This book is a tale of alliances, anti-alliances, and the group politics among those joined together on the adventure of a trip toGermany. Radishchev’s self is to be found not in self-examination but in the revelation ofassociation and partisanship.27

Like many of the gentry memoirs, the Life focuses on personality, leadership, andpatronage; but the terms are slightly different. Radishchev is writing about a man he sees ashis teacher as well as mentor: a patron not only in the economic and political sense but alsointellectual and spiritual. He immediately sets about delineating the qualities which in hisview made Ushakov such an effective leader within the small circle of Russian students: thecharm and charisma that drew people around him and established the basis for an allianceamong the young men; the sensitivity that he displayed to their intellectual, emotional, andfinancial concerns; the previous experience in court and patronage politics that made himparticularly bold and skilled at political combat; the (Helvetian antidespotic) political ide-als that he developed and revealed, which were directly connected to the moral drama of thememoir; and the willingness to stand up for his ideals and for his friends, which laid thefoundations of the political drama.28

25A. N. Radishchev, “Zhitie Fedora Vasil’evicha Ushakova s priobshcheniem nekotorykh ego sochinenii,” in hisPolnoe sobranie sochinenii (PSS) (Moscow, 1938), 1:155–212.

26Ibid., 155.27For a discussion of the Russian concept of the individual as it is encapsulated in the word “dusha” (which

Radishchev used repeatedly) see Anna Wierzbicka, “Soul and Mind: Linguistic Evidence for Ethnopsychology andCultural History,” American Anthropologist 91, no. 1 (1989): 41–58. Wierzbicka argues that the Russian conceptof “dusha” embodies a far more socially determined understanding of the individual than does the English conceptof the “soul.”

28A theme of obvious relevance, which due to lack of space is not pursued here, is that of traditional Russianhagiography as a model for Radishchev’s Life of Ushakov and for the “contemporaries” genre. On the role ofhagiography in modern Russian letters in general see Margaret Ziolkowski, Hagiography and Modern RussianLiterature (Princeton, 1988). See also Evgeny Dobrenko, “(Auto/Bio/Hagio)graphy: Or, Life as Genre: AleshaPeshkov—Maksim Gor’kii—Mark Donskoi,” a/b Auto/Biography Studies 11 (Fall 1996): 43–67.

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Posed against the charismatic virtues of Fedor Ushakov, however, was a villain: theofficial leader of the group, Baltic German Major Gerhard Georg von Alten Bokum. Bokumwas all that a teacher and mentor should not be: despotic, corrupt, and uncaring toward hissubjects, the students. Bokum had been hired by the Russian state to keep track of theliving conditions, studies, and financial affairs of these pupils, yet proved increasingly ob-noxious as he took for himself the money given him for the support of the students, andlived high on the hog while forcing his students to suffer conditions of deplorable physicaldeprivation. If Ushakov had drawn people around him through his kindness and charisma,Bokum repelled them through his lack of those qualities. In Radishchev’s tale, Ushakovchallenges Bokum’s leadership through a series of complex negotiations (which ultimatelyare not entirely successful, though glowing with moral virtue) with the autocracy that hadhired him to take care of them.

But Radishchev’s memoir was not merely a description of past individuals and pastalliances, to be smiled or frowned over and dismissed as irrelevant history: it had signifi-cant contemporary and future application. This is evident in the hagiographic language andin the moral logic of his narrative. First of all, in his descriptions of Ushakov and Bokum,Radishchev is offering an example of saint-like selfless virtue to be admired and imitatedby his readers, as opposed to an image of ugly selfish sin to be despised and avoided. He isbuilding a cult around the personality of Ushakov, and a kind of anticult around the pettydespot Bokum. Second, he is glorifying a defiant alliance (among the students) in termswhich may well exceed the reality. That the addressee Alexei Kutuzov in fact proved non-plused at the way in which this memoir was addressed to him, and that he “found themajority of [Radishchev’s] propositions concerning religion and Government completelyopposed to [Kutuzov’s] own system” indicates that Radishchev was deliberately exaggerat-ing the terms of a past alliance, perhaps in the hopes of building or inspiring future alliancesof this ideal sort.29 Radishchev’s repeated use of the words “living” and “alive” in thisdocument to describe the qualities of virtue and the virtues of alliance offer us a vital key tothe meaning of his work.30 To use his own terminology, figures of virtue “lived on” in thehearts of those allied to them, never losing their relevance, and so did the alliances that wereformed around them.

Seizing upon the gentry memoir genre, Radishchev had wrenched it into a new frame-work and altered its social and political implications in a way that would have resonance forthe next two centuries. In so doing, Radishchev, with his gentry background inflected bythe experience of education and intellectual comradeship, laid the groundwork for the fu-ture intelligentsia “contemporaries” memoir. Like the gentry memoirs, the new memoirswould be formed by their purpose of addressing the personal and group concerns that com-pelled their writing. Dominant among these concerns would be the formation of personalassociations and factions (which would within decades take the form of the intelligentsiacircles, or kruzhki) and the networking for social, intellectual, and also economic support ina world that was sometimes cold and inhospitable. Past alliances and networks would be

29Aleksandr Radishchev, Sochineniia, ed. V. V. Kallash (Moscow, 1907), 180–81. The quote is from DavidMarshall Lang, The First Russian Radical. Alexander Radishchev, 1749–1802 (London, 1959), 125.

30Radishchev, Sochineniia, 174, 186.

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depicted with fervor and care: what worked, what didn’t, who was responsible for theirworking or not working? And who admired whom, and who was loyal to whom, and whocould be trusted? The intense concern with such questions would lead again and again tothe formation of such cult and anticult figures as Ushakov and Bokum. This was “living”narrative that would help to establish contemporary partisanship and alliances among theRussian intelligentsia at the same time that it depicted past ones, in a social group that kepttrack of these things for generations.

THE THE THE THE THE ANEKDOANEKDOANEKDOANEKDOANEKDOTTTTT

If the focus on networking and leadership was integral to the early formation of the intelli-gentsia “contemporaries” memoir, so was another very distinctive quality which also hadits roots in pre-intelligentsia political culture: the tendency to intertwine the written insider’snarrative with a powerful oral tradition of intelligentsia gossip. The Russian memoirist ofthe Soviet era who was so quick to pass on second- or third-hand information was notmerely playing the role of idle scandal-monger. Rather, he or she was participating in anold and honorable intelligentsia tradition, that of integrating into the written memoir narra-tive a particular type of gossipy tale called the anekdot.

The anekdot is a spicy little story about personalities and their interactions, with adistinct moral which is not always obvious to the outsider, but which refers clearly to thesocial characteristics of the individual(s) in question. It was a significant element of courtlife in the late eighteenth century, as tales about the autocrat and his or her associates wouldcirculate among courtiers all snooping around for the main networking chance.31 That theanekdot played a significant role in the formation of intelligentsia discourse is made evi-dent in memoirist Pavel Annenkov’s tales of intelligentsia society in the mid-1840s. De-scribing the intelligentsia circle summer gatherings in the village of Sokolovo in 1845, hewrote: “Almost no political conversations, in the strict sense of the word, ever occurred atthese improvised academes. Public life of the period equipped people only with humorousanecdotes and provided nothing more for the time being.”32 To Annenkov, the anekdot wasa lesser form of discourse than the high-flown political debate that would develop later inintelligentsia history, but it was evidently a significant component of the political dis-course of his time, as intellectuals passed on vital (and often funny) personal and factionalgossip.33

The absorption of the anekdot and in general of an oral tradition of gossip into thewritten intelligentsia memoir is not entirely easy to trace. Radishchev’s Life, like numerous

31See, for example, “Rasskazy, zametki, i anekdoty iz zapisok Elizavety Nikolaevny L’vovoi,” in Russkie memuaryXVIII vek, 403–13. See also Memoirs of Catherine II and the Historic Court of St.Petersburg, by one of hercourtiers (Boston, 1900); M. G. Krivoshlyk, Istoricheskie anekdoty iz zhizni russkikh zamechatel’nykh liudei: Sportretami i kratkimi biografiami (1897; reprint ed. Moscow, 1991), and Sally Kux, “On the Boundary of Life andLiterature: The Anecdote in Early 19th-century Russia” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1994).

32P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade, Literary Memoirs, ed. Arthur Mendel, trans. Irwin Titunik (AnnArbor, 1968), 137.

33For an anthropological discussion of the important role of gossip in network and small group social organiza-tion see Max Gluckman, “Gossip and Scandal,” Current Anthropology 4, no. 3 (1963): 307–15.

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gentry memoirs of the period, often offers information in chronicle fashion to which itsauthor has not had eyewitness access: details, for example, about the background, parent-age, and estate of his friend Ushakov. Perhaps more to the point, Radishchev also passes onthe tales of Ushakov’s racy adventures with female seekers of his patronage back in hiscourt days.34 Like innumerable later intelligentsia memoirists, Radishchev fails entirely tooffer a source for these stories.

Some members of early gentry/intelligentsia society were particularly renowned fortheir mastery of the gossipy anekdot, and such figures were expected to write especiallyentertaining memoirs. Thus Ivan Dmitriev (1760–1837), known for his skill in the oralnarrative tradition, was pressed repeatedly to write his memoirs in the same style. As itturned out, the oral skill did not always translate into the written, and Dmitriev’s memoirstook years to write and proved a disappointment in the end.35 But this is an indication thattranslation of the oral tradition into the written was not only acceptable but indeed receivedwith great enthusiasm. Another indication that the oral was easily drawn into the writtentradition came when a concerted effort was made in the 1850s and 1860s to shape thatgreatest Russian intelligentsia cult of all, the cult of poet Alexander Pushkin. In the processof gathering up every possible scrap of “contemporaries”-type information about Pushkin,his personality, his surroundings, and his associations, researchers made great efforts tointerview those who had known him personally, and apparently recorded much of that in-formation as fact.36 The anekdot rapidly became a highly respected element in the “con-temporaries” tradition, for the role that it played in intelligentsia culture—that of passingalong network gossip about personalities and alliances—merged in a significant way withthe role played by the memoir genre itself.37

SECOND SECOND SECOND SECOND SECOND WINDWINDWINDWINDWIND

The second major formative moment in the history of the intelligentsia “contemporaries”memoir genre appears to have been about the middle of the nineteenth century, when chang-ing social and economic circumstances infused the early focus on networks and on cultfigures with new significance and meaning. Central to this development was the suddenand rapid expansion of education under Nicholas I; it led to considerable growth in thenumber of those who could read, who could write, and who knew of and sought access tothe increasingly prestigious gentry/intelligentsia identity—as well as to an increase in thenumber and variety of people writing memoirs.

34Radishchev, PSS 1:159–60.35Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika, 160–61.36V. E. Vatsuro, ed., A. S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1985), 1:25.37Anthropological studies of the interface between the written and the oral generally focus on what distinguishes

the two types of communication from one another. One rare study of the integration of an oral tradition into awritten one is Andrew Shryock, Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Author-ity in Tribal Jordan (Berkeley, 1997).

338 Barbara Walker

Early, “proto”-intelligentsia memoirists had continued to write in private circle-fash-ion in the early part of the nineteenth century.38 But toward midcentury an expanding mar-ket for tales of the gentry/intelligentsia past led to a sudden outpouring of memoir materialin the form both of books and of shorter essays.39 According to A. G. Tartakovsky, this iswhen we first see the long books of memoirs, such as Alexander Herzen’s My Past andThoughts and Pavel Annenkov’s The Extraordinary Decade, which describe in dazzlingarray some of the circles of the 1830s and 1840s.40 This is also the age in which a new breedof journal editors began to look for shorter memoirs to put into their new journals. Promi-nent among such editors was, for example, Mikhail Pogodin, who not only published mem-oirs that were sent to his journal Moskvitianin but actually solicited them.41 Near the turn ofthe century, a new form began to emerge: the vospominaniia sovremennikov collections,which gathered together numerous journal articles, extracts from longer memoirs, and some-times correspondence, all focused on specific individuals.42

Early contributors to this flood of memoir material often sought to preserve and trans-mit older gentry intelligentsia values to a younger, rougher generation: a concern that be-came especially acute with the rise of the radical generation of the 1860s.43 Almost alwaysevident in the work of such memoirists is a strong desire to give the taste of a milieu and anera; to describe the look and feel of place as well as of personalities; to catch hold of van-ished times as a means of self-explanation, self-defense, and self-advertisement in a groupexperiencing rapid transition and generational change. To no small extent these qualitiesare intimately bound up with the description and process of networking, which by naturedepends on a shared familiarity of time, place, culture, and milieu. Some of these memoir-ists cast a moral glow over the past, much as had Radishchev; and they did a great deal topopularize the gentry image of the intellectual, as well as to bring to bear the influence ofgentry values on developing intelligentsia culture.44

38For example, memoirs by and about members of the Friendly Literary Society after its demise in 1801 almostall took the form of letters to be circulated among themselves (Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions in ImperialRussia, 57–64 [notes]).

39Ginzburg describes this as taking place at the end of the 1840s and the beginning of the 1850s especially (OnPsychological Prose, 197).

40Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. ed. Humphrey Higgins (Berkeley,1982); Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade; Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika, 157.

41Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika, 154.42The editor who may have done most to establish the actual traditional “contemporaries” format of a collection

of memoirs about a specific person was the publisher I. D. Sytin, renowned for his upward mobility to prominenceamong the intelligentsia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Books he published included F. M.Dostoevskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, N. V. Gogol v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, A. S. Pushkin vvosponinaiikh sovremennikov, and others, all of which came out in the first decade or so of the twentieth century.

43See, for example, Turgenev’s advocacy of the values of his own generation in I. S. Turgenev, Sobranie sochinenii(Moscow, 1962), 10:67.

44Memoirs about the Decembrists, who, though not generally described as intelligentsia, were vital intelligen-tsia role models, and about Pushkin, whose circle offered a standard of gracious gentry intellectual life and culture,are prominent among such narratives. See V. A. Fedorov, ed., Dekabristi v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov(Moscow, 1988); and V. V. Grigorenko, ed., A. S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1974).

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The spell cast by those seeking to propagate gentry/intelligentsia culture and valueshad some influence over the simultaneous emergence of a new type of memoirist, one whoplayed the primary role in giving the “contemporaries” genre new life and impetus as itdeveloped into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tartakovskii argues thataround the mid-1800s the memoir began to move out of the exclusive hands of those whoconceived of themselves as engaged in literary activity and into the hands of “people ofvarious social and professional situations ... not attracted, as a rule, to literary labor,” butwho nevertheless believed that they had a story of the past to tell.45 To such individuals,writing memoirs offered one means of access to intelligentsia identity as it was being adver-tised by those speaking and writing of the glamorous gentry/intelligentsia past.

For aspiring intellectuals, writing memoirs served a multitude of purposes. First ofall, it was a means of earning some money, often desperately needed by those who fre-quently had little enough of their own, and yet who had the wealth of the gentry intellectu-als ever before their eyes.46 The memoir also offered the ambitious an opportunity to getinto print because they had been in the proximity of a reasonably renowned person. At thesame time, writing about the famous people that one had met was a way of establishingone’s circle legitimacy and identity in a tightly ingrown circle culture: one could demon-strate (indeed exaggerate) proximity to and intimacy with prominent individuals and circles.Use of the anekdot was a part of this process as well; the ability to pass on such “insider”tales was an indication of access to circle gossip. In a curious way, the writing of suchmemoirs both reflected and reinforced a significant emerging characteristic of intelligentsiaidentity in a growing, unstable, and insecure social group: that this identity depended uponwhom you knew.

The forces that drove the writing of such memoirs also operated to strengthen thatcharacteristic early established in the intelligentsia memoir tradition of the “living” docu-ment: in the process of celebrating one’s ties of the past, it did one a great deal more goodthan harm to glorify those individuals or alliances. This was a means of raising contempo-rary social stock, as well as of establishing contemporary partisanship. By adding to theprestige of those with whom you had been associated, you added to your own prestige.That some such reminiscences, both written (as in the case of those collected by Pogodin)and oral (as in the case of some about Pushkin), were solicited after the death of the indi-viduals depicted may have added to the tendency toward glorification: it is not generallydeemed suitable to speak or write ill of the dead.

One striking subgroup of the growing population of educated, ambitious people forwhom the “contemporaries” memoir offered a means of social advancement was educatedwomen. There are a number of reasons why this was the case. Above all, certain women

45Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika, 147.46Not that all were comfortable with the idea that memoirs could be paid for; one author complained that “now

memoirs (zapiski) are a form of money speculation” (Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika, 14, quoting an anony-mous source in Biblioteka dlia chteniia 8 [1835]). For a description of the poverty of some of the upwardly mobilesee Rose Glickman, “An Alternative View of the Peasantry: The Raznochintsy Writers of the 1860’s,” SlavicReview 32 (Winter 1973): 693–707.

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had intimate access to the growing intelligentsia alliances, the kruzhki, of the nineteenthcentury; this was because those alliances, hidden way from the public realm that was sorigidly controlled by the autocracy, almost always developed and flourished in the contextof the domestic sphere. Even a cursory reading on life among the intellectuals of the nine-teenth century reveals the considerable importance of women in the lives and circles ofintellectuals: if they did not always participate in the intellectual debates of the period(though many did), then they often served as a focal point of passion and love interest forthose emotional young men, or at least they served the refreshments (not at all unimpor-tant).47 For those women who sought publication, and who lacked the political or adventur-ous prominence of such rare figures as eighteenth-century aristocrat Princess Dashkova,“cavalry maiden” Nadezhda Durova, or such female revolutionaries as Vera Figner and VeraZasulich, their circle encounters with figures better known than themselves offered an ex-cellent opportunity to do so.48 And the same condition applied to their writings that appliedto the memoir work of other intellectuals seeking advancement: by describing in glowingterms the people with whom they had been associated, they added to their own prestige.

An early example of one woman who made good social and financial use of her expe-rience in intellectual life was memoirist Anna Kern, who in her youth spent considerabletime in the company of Pushkin, Del’vig, Glinka, and their circle. Later in life the diminu-tion of her economic fortunes led her to search for every possible means of supporting herfamily. She soon discovered that exploiting her past access to that circle was a way ofbringing in some money as well as recognition.49 In so doing, she too came to glorify notonly the circle but also certain of its participants, and thus early contributed to the growth ofthe budding Pushkin cult, as well as to the growth of another cult which will be describedbelow.

In general, the growing role of women in the writing of such memoirs nourished thetendency in these memoirs toward the formation of intelligentsia personality cults. Thecloser the association with the cult figure, the greater the prestige to be gained; thus towardthe end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, a number of women intimatelyassociated with prominent male figures as wives, sisters, aunts, and others came to writememoirs based on their lives with prominent male intelligentsia figures. Such womenincluded, for example, Anna Dostoevskaya, the first really great wife-memoirist, M. A.Beketova, aunt of Alexander Blok, and Alexandra Tolstaya, daughter of Leo Tolstoy.50 Allthese women contributed to the evolution not only of the “contemporaries” memoir genrebut also of the intelligentsia cult phenomenon.

47See, for example, Ginzburg on romantic relations in the Stankevich circle and others (On Psychological Prose,27–57).

48E. R. Dashkova, The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova (Durham, 1995); Nadezhda Durova, The Cavalry Maiden:Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars (Bloomington, 1988); Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolution-ist (DeKalb, 1995); Barbara Alpern Engel and Clifford Rosenthal, eds. and trans., Five Sisters: Women Against theTsar (New York, 1975).

49See Kern’s “Vospominaniia o Pushkine,” “Vospominaniia o Pushkine, Del’vige i Glinke,” and “Del’vig iPushkin,” in A. P. Kern, Vospominaniia, Dnevniki, Perepiska (Moscow, 1989).

50A. G. Dostoevskaia, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1925); M. A. Beketova, Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke(Moscow, 1990); Aleksandra Tolstaia, Otets: Zhizn’ L’va Tolstogo v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1989).

On Reading Soviet Memoirs 341

CONSOLIDCONSOLIDCONSOLIDCONSOLIDCONSOLIDAAAAATION OF TION OF TION OF TION OF TION OF THE INTELLIGENTSIA PERSONTHE INTELLIGENTSIA PERSONTHE INTELLIGENTSIA PERSONTHE INTELLIGENTSIA PERSONTHE INTELLIGENTSIA PERSON ALITY CULALITY CULALITY CULALITY CULALITY CUL TTTTT

The intelligentsia cult phenomenon as it had been established by Radishchev was givennew vitality beginning in midcentury and grew with increasing vigor into the early Sovietera, due again to the constellation of social, political, and historical forces that impinged onthe evolving Russian intelligentsia. This was an era of uncertainty and anxiety for theintelligentsia. Its members felt insecure in the face of more highly developed West Euro-pean intellectual traditions. Moreover, because the autocracy continued to frustrate theirpolitical concerns and endeavors, their ideas became increasingly extreme and politicallyunfeasible, which in turn led to increasingly divisive internal quarreling. The growinginflux of those seeking social advancement exacerbated this problem, as they added newideas and new networks to the mix. If the primary dispute among the intelligentsia beforethe 1850s had been between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers, there was by the end ofthe century a vast constellation of ideas and also of networks, or circles, that were dividednot only from one another but also among themselves. This fostered a heightened sensitiv-ity to the potential for social and political fragmentation of the intelligentsia. The forma-tion of several very distinctive types of cult figures may be seen as a response to thesetensions.

One such type or model was the national intellectual hero like Pushkin, who put Rus-sian high culture on the European map and eased Russian intelligentsia anxiety about itsrole in the European intellectual tradition; another type was the intellectual so dedicated tohis ideals that he would take them to enormous lengths (sometimes at considerable expenseto his personal associations), like Vissarion Belinsky.51 But a careful reading of some of themany memoirs of the period reveals the emergence of yet another type of cult figure quitethe opposite of Belinsky. This was the sort of individual who, due to certain personalcharacteristics, stood out as a beacon of unity and harmony in an ever more fragmented andquarrelsome world.

Several qualities went into the making of such a figure. Above all there was charm.“I’ve never known another person as attractive as Ryleev,” wrote A. V. Nikitenko about theDecembrist. “Of middle height, well-built, with an intelligent, serious face, from the firstglance he inspired in you something like a premonition of that charm to which, with closeracquaintance, you had to submit.”52 Another Decembrist combined the qualities of charmwith peacemaking skills and also a quality of paternalism which had its own reverberationsin the domestically based circle: “In his family they all adored him, and called him a geniebienfaisance, he always reconciled everything and everyone, gave good advice; his youngersisters called him their second father.”53 Charm had serious circle and network implica-tions. Of his friend Ogarev, center of a circle formed in the 1840s, Alexander Herzen wrotethat he “was endowed with a peculiar magnetism, a feminine quality of attraction. For no

51For a discussion of Belinsky’s commitment to his ideals at the expense of his friendships see Isaiah Berlin,“Vissarion Belinsky,” in Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York, 1948), 166–69.

52“Iz vospominanii Professora A. V. Nikitenko o K. F. Ryleeve,” in Dekabristy v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov,87.

53“Iz vospominanii S. V. Kapnist-Skalon o Dekabristakh,” in ibid., 115.

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apparent reason others are drawn to such people and cling to them; they warm, unite, andsoothe them, they are like an open table at which everyone sits down, renews his powers,rests, grows calmer and more stout-hearted, and goes away a friend.”54 The ability to createharmony and unity was recognized as essential to the smooth functioning of intelligentsianetwork life, and the sort of person who could offer that skill was valuable indeed in theexcitable, unstable intelligentsia world.55

The focal figure of a circle, or the individual who was later made out to be such a focalfigure, often turned out to be someone who could act as circle patron not only in the emo-tional sense, but also the economic.56 Thus the aristocratic host Del’vig emerges from thememoir literature as a figure who possessed both the social skills and the economic meansto host a very successful circle of highly talented individuals. In her Reminiscences ofPushkin, Del’vig, and Glinka, Anna Kern remarked that “the whole circle of talented writersand friends who grouped themselves around Pushkin had the character of carefree revelry-loving Russian gentleman, to a greater degree, perhaps, than does contemporary society. Inthat young circle kindness and playful, free gaiety reigned, inexhaustible cleverness shone,the highest practitioner of which was Pushkin. But the soul (dushoiu) of that happy familyof poets was Del’vig, in whose house they generally gathered.”57 What made Del’vig the“soul” of his circle, and such a good host, Kern explains, was his kindness and delicacy, hisability to joke without hurting anyone’s feelings (something Pushkin, with his scathingsense of humor, was less skillful at doing)—and his excellent table, with good food andwine.58 It is notable that those who were later turned into cult figures had often served ashosts.

There was also a fourth type of cult figure: the personal mentor and intellectual patron,often urgently needed by the young, ambitious, and sometimes poverty-stricken intellectu-als of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Such an individual offered not onlyintellectual sustenance but also concrete economic support by inviting “students” and “dis-ciples” into his home, feeding them, and helping them to build intellectual, economic, andpersonal network ties. Needless to say, the social and economic ability to host a successfulcircle added considerably to the value and prestige of such a mentor, and many memorial-ized patron figures are placed in the context of such a circle of followers.

This last cult-figure type grew increasingly prevalent in the late Imperial years—andthen emerged with particular power in the early Soviet period, as the cultural impetus of aprevious era (and the time lapse between experience and memoir-writing) pushed intelli-gentsia history according to a logic of its own across the Revolutionary divide. One famousmemoir which served to build such a mentor cult was that of the upwardly mobile artisan

54Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 230.55Marcus Levitt sees even the Pushkin cult in terms of the creation of a “cultural neutral zone” as an “alternative

model of Russian society to those extremely polarized schemes that the zealots of autocracy and of revolution hadadvanced.” See his Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca, 1989), 8–9.

56There is evidence that the centrality of such figures was often in fact the creation of a nostalgic memory. See,for example, Brown, Stankevich and his Moscow Circle.

57Note the comparison between earlier gentry social behavior and “contemporary,” which was another attemptto show the relationship between changing intelligentsia generations and to praise old gentry intelligentsia values.Note too the encomium to Pushkin—yet another contribution to his cult.

58Kern, Vospominaniia, Dnevniki, Perepiska, 47–49.

On Reading Soviet Memoirs 343

and wanderer Maxim Gorky about Leo Tolstoy; another was Ivan Bunin’s memoir aboutAnton Chekhov, in whose home and domestic circle he spent much time.59 Perhaps themost effective and revealing memoir of this type, however, is by a twentieth-century authorwho became a veritable master of the “contemporaries” genre: Marina Tsvetaeva. Thiswork is a memorial to her own mentor, Maximilian Voloshin, a modernist poet and the firstreal mentor of Russian female poets at a time when women were struggling for, and justbeginning to achieve, acceptance and publication. Written in 1932, at the time of Voloshin’sdeath, Tsvetaeva’s memoir, “A Living Word about a Living Man”—to bring us back to thetheme of the “living” ideal—creates a figure who possesses characteristics of almost all thecult-figure types listed above. It also demonstrates the convergence of the roles of femaleadmirer and appreciative mentee as women sought publication of their work ever moreenergetically early in the twentieth century.

Writing this memoir out of deep gratitude for the “first self-awareness as a poet” whichshe believed that Voloshin had given her, Tsvetaeva describes him as an extraordinary sup-porter of female endeavor: “Max in women’s and poet’s lives was providentiel, and when ...they merged, when the woman proved to be a poet, or what is more accurate, the poet awoman, there was no end to his friendship, care, patience, attention, admiration, and co-creation.” A significant aspect of Voloshin’s value in her life was his ability to facilitateintelligentsia networking in general (“One of Max’s vocations in life was to bring peopletogether, to create encounters and destinies.”) as well as to draw people around him in aninspired and inspiring intellectual circle, which he hosted in his Crimean summer dacha.“Max belonged to another set of laws than the human ones, and when we fell into his orbitwe inevitably fell under his set of laws. Max himself was the planet. And when we revolvedaround him we were revolving in some other large circle together with him around a lumi-nary that we did not know,” she wrote, expressing the voluble adulation that could be of-fered the mentor figure in a world where his role was vital to the successful functioning ofintelligentsia life in a number of ways.60

THE SOTHE SOTHE SOTHE SOTHE SOVIET STVIET STVIET STVIET STVIET STAAAAATE TE TE TE TE TTTTTAKES AKES AKES AKES AKES A HANDA HANDA HANDA HANDA HAND

The young Soviet state was extremely cautious about the “contemporaries” memoir. Them-selves members of the intelligentsia, the Bolsheviks had their own ideas about whom tocanonize, and “Lenin Lives” was the motto of the day for them in the early Soviet period.61

Yet the “contemporaries” genre continued to flourish, not only outside the Soviet Union,where such authors as Tsvetaeva, Bunin, Georgy Ivanov, and others were writing of thepast, but also inside, where, for example, Ilya Erenburg, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and even

59Maksim Gor’kii, “Lev Tolstoi,” in O literature: Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i (Moscow, 1955) 175–215; IvanBunin, “Chekhov,” in Memories and Portraits (New York, 1968), 31–58.

60Marina Tsvetaeva, “Zhivoe o zhivom,” translation in Tsvetaeva, A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose of MarinaTsvetaeva, trans. J. Marin King (Ann Arbor, 1994), 42, 48, 64..

61For extensive discussion of the Lenin cult see Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia(Cambridge, MA, 1983).

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Leon Trotsky were giving their versions.62 The potential for such accounts to have a politi-cal impact was significant at many levels, from internal Futurist relations to Trotsky’s strugglefor political survival through his memorial canonization of Lenin, which not so coinciden-tally also served to demonstrate his favored status in Lenin’s eyes.63

One particularly disconcerting way (from the Bolshevik point of view) in which the“contemporaries” memoir genre had the potential for political impact inside the SovietUnion was directly related to its prerevolutionary integration into the processes of social,professional, and economic advancement among Russian intellectuals. The economic col-lapse of the early Soviet years left many intellectuals in a dangerously precarious economiccondition, and if mentors had been important in the prerevolutionary era, they were nowsometimes desperately needed. This led to a revitalization of the mentor or patron figure, aphenomenon which would soon have its impact on the “contemporaries” genre. Some ofthese new mentors operated with relative independence from the new state. MikhailGershenzon, for example, was an intellectual who struggled mightily to organize economicsupport for writers in the darkest days of the early Soviet period. “Those who lived inMoscow through the hardest years—eighteen, nineteen, twenty—will never forget what agood comrade Gershenzon turned out to be,” wrote Vladislav Khodasevich in his hagiographicmemoir of Gershenzon. “Many owe him a great deal. ... Speaking for myself ... Gershenzonobtained work and money for me.”64

But the young Soviet state was for ideological reasons deeply committed to the sei-zure and bureaucratization of a wide range of material resources, as well as to controllingaccess to those resources. Thus, those who wished to aid intellectuals in their struggle forphysical survival soon had to work through the state to accomplish that goal. This in turnled to the rapid emergence of new state-based patrons of intellectual life, including Gorky,Lunacharsky, and others, who selectively funneled resources to their impoverished clientsin the style of eighteenth-century state patrons. They also occasionally could offer politicalprotection in a world where intellectuals at times found themselves in real physicaldanger.65

The “contemporaries” genre with its tendencies toward canonization was quickly in-tertwined with this new system of state-based economic and political patronage relations.A number of early Soviet memoirs focused on certain of these new Soviet power-brokers,often very specifically lauding them for their economic support. In 1928 several membersof the Serapion Brothers literary circle, for example, gratefully hailed Gorky for his eco-nomic activities, which included obtaining for them food, housing, boots, protection fromthe military draft, and other bureaucratically controlled benefits.66 These hagiographic

62Bunin, Vospominaniia; Tsvetaeva, “Zhivoe o zhivom”; Georgii Ivanov, Peterburgskie zimy (Paris, 1928); Il’iaErenburg, Portrety russkikh poetov (Berlin, 1922); A. V. Lunacharskii, Revoliutsionnye siluetty (Moscow, 1923);Lev Trotskii, O Lenine: Materialy dlia biografii (Moscow, 1924).

63Walter Comins-Richmond, “The Polemics of Recollection: Three Russian Futurists Struggle over the Past,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 12, no. 1 (1997): 22–36.

64Vladimir Khodasevich, “Nekropol’” i drugie vospominaniia (Moscow, 1992), 121–22.65On this topic see my “Maximilian Voloshin’s ‘House of the Poet,’” 228–59.66Two such memoirs appeared in Gor’kii: Sbornik statei i vospominanii o M. Gor’kom, ed. I. Gruzdeva (a

Serapion Brother) (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928). Also, two Serapion Brothers contributed to “Pisateli o Gor’kom,”Uchitel’skaia gazeta, 30 March 1928.

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memoirs were published just as Gorky’s political stock was again rising in the Soviet Union,and that of the Serapion Brothers happened to be falling due to the battles of the CulturalRevolution; making such a public point of Gorky’s patronage may well have served as aform of political self-protection. Lunacharsky, too, with his access to the extraordinaryresources of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, and a pronounced fondness for personalpatronage and protection of intellectuals,67 became the object of a grateful memoir cultamong those whom he had aided. But because of his fall from favor under Stalin during theCultural Revolution, that cult has never seen the light of day and lies in unpublished form inthe archives of the State Literary Museum.68

Another development in the early Soviet history of the “contemporaries” memoir genrewas the revitalization of the original anticult tradition as it had been initiated long before byRadishchev in his descriptions of the self-serving Bokum. Strikingly, the new anticultmemoir appears to have been directed largely against those who possessed, like Bokum, thestate-based power to provide vital mentorship, but had failed to do so. Perhaps the mosteloquent of the early Soviet era anticult memoirists was Tsvetaeva (as described above, alsoone of the most effective cult-builders of her time); another passionate anticult builder wasZinaida Gippius, a Silver Age figure unable to find foothold in Soviet Russia. Tsvetaeva’smost famous denunciation was of prominent poet, editor, mentor, and minor Soviet-stylepatron Valery Bryusov. Bryusov had written negative reviews about her work in theprerevolutionary era. In the Soviet era, despite his access to state resources as a member ofthe Literary Division of the Commissariat of Education, he turned her work down on ideo-logical grounds at a moment when she desperately needed the money and the support.“And my heart, unjust but thirsting for justice,” she bitterly concluded this memoir, “willnot rest until there is in Moscow, in its most prominent square, a granite statue, larger thanlife, with the inscription: To a Hero of Labor in the USSR.”69 Gippius’s rage was directedagainst (among others) Gorky, whom she viewed as having the state-based power but notthe will to help her and her friends. She described with particular distress a scene in whichGorky, feasting on cutlets and cucumbers in a time of want, threw out a hungry petitionerwho had come for aid in rescuing his brother from arrest.70

The potential political implications of the “contemporaries” genre in the early Sovietera may help to explain why relatively few of these memoirs were ultimately published bythe new generation of upwardly mobile intellectuals. This was the time during which Stalin,that most effective of all early Soviet manipulators of patronage and the person for whomthe term “cult of personality” was indeed to be coined, rose to ever greater power in aprocess that involved the attrition, co-optation, or elimination of all other major patrons andcult figures. The genre survived, but primarily as a means of recalling those of the moredistant past, who had relatively little contemporary influence either as individuals or asrallying points for alliance-building. Subjects of memoirs of contemporaries in book form

67Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts underLunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge, England, 1970), 19.

68Gosudarstvennyi literaturnyi muzei, f. 123, op. 1, d. 107.69Tsvetaeva, “Geroi truda (zapisi o Valerii Briusove),” translation in Joan Delaney Grossman, The Diary of

Valery Bryusov (1893–1905) (Berkeley, 1980), 173.70Zinaida Gippius, Zhivye litsa (Tbilisi, 1991), 1:181.

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during this period included the nineteenth-century revolutionary Petrashevstsy and thePeoples’ Will (1926), nineteenth-century revolutionary Sofia Perovskaya (by her sister, 1927),nineteenth-century thinkers and writers Alexander Griboedov, Alexander Ostrovsky, andVissarion Belinsky, Valery Bryusov (1929), and Lenin himself (by his wife NadezhdaKrupskaya, 1930), and in one of the last major such publications until after World War II,Pushkin in the year of his centennial (1937).

There is a resurgence of the form at the end of the war with memoirs about artistValentin Serov (1945) and Anton Chekhov (1947). Then, beginning around 1950, the num-ber of “contemporaries” memoirs begins to swell, peaking once in the early 1960s andsubsiding again for a few years, and then slowly snowballing from the late 1960s throughthe 1980s. These Soviet publications include memoirs not only about writers and revolu-tionaries, but in increasing numbers about artists, musicians, physicists, and even a doctoror two; by the late 1960s we see also publications about local heroes coming out of theprovinces and the non-Russian republics.71 Officially sanctioned and censored, these docu-ments revealed little that might have threatened the Soviet status quo.

SOSOSOSOSOVIET MEMOIRS IN VIET MEMOIRS IN VIET MEMOIRS IN VIET MEMOIRS IN VIET MEMOIRS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE CONTEXT OF THE CONTEXT OF THE CONTEXT OF THE CONTEXT OF THETHETHETHETHE“CONTEMPORARIES”“CONTEMPORARIES”“CONTEMPORARIES”“CONTEMPORARIES”“CONTEMPORARIES” TRADITIONTRADITIONTRADITIONTRADITIONTRADITION

The passion and the partisanship of the Soviet memoirs described at the beginning of thisarticle, as well as their frequent reliance on gossip, are rooted in the tradition of the “con-temporaries” memoir as it has been laid out in the preceding pages. These memoirs are byno means entirely bounded by the “contemporaries” genre; several are powerful works ofself-expression which expand or go well beyond its boundaries. Yet it is impossible tounderstand their full significance and historical meaning without reference to the genre andits history, and indeed there is a way in which they are a part of that history. In order tounderstand how this was the case it is necessary to continue to trace the specific social,economic, and political circumstances shaping intelligentsia identity in the Soviet era.

The intelligentsia circle, or network, structure continued to survive during the 1920seven as specific networks or organizations were being drawn into the Soviet system ofeconomic and political control.72 In the early 1930s, however, Stalin (with the heartfeltacquiescence of many of the intelligentsia, who were worn out by the vicious battles of theCultural Revolution) put an official end to the circle structure in 1932 and established aseries of official Unions (of Writers, of Musicians, of Artists, and so on).73 This facilitatedan ever increasing intimacy of Russian intellectuals with the state, which continued tostrengthen its control of intellectual production as well as of the funneling of resources tointellectuals. The nonstate networks and identity of the Russian intelligentsia were thenfurther damaged in the Great Purges of the late 1930s through the physical elimination of

71I am here looking at book publication alone, and have obtained this information through examination of theWorldcat data base.

72Walker, “Maximilian Voloshin’s ‘House of the Poet,’” 183–259, 291–95.73“O perestroike literaturno-khudozhesvennykh organizatsii,” party resolution of 23 April 1932, in Osnovnye

direktivy i zakonodatel’stvo o pechati: Sistematicheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1936), 50.

On Reading Soviet Memoirs 347

many key members. To some extent the Purges seemed to put an end to the intelligentsiaitself as an entity independent of the state. But it was not the end, as the death of Stalin in1953 and the rise of the Thaw generation in the 1950s were to prove.

Though some of the Thaw generation were offspring of the old intelligentsia, a greatmany of them represented yet another wave of upwardly mobile intellectuals new to theintelligentsia tradition. These were the children of the peasants, workers, and petty bureau-crats of the 1930s who had survived the Purges to move upward into the positions vacatedby their intelligentsia predecessors. Better prepared for higher education than their parentshad been, and taking advantage of the great expansion of the Soviet system of higher educa-tion under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, these young people poured into the burgeoningschools and institutes of the period. In the process of discovering one another and of form-ing their distinctive generational identity, they became fascinated by the intelligentsia iden-tity and prestige, which, for reasons which lie beyond the scope of this article, still had notbeen tarnished despite all of Stalin’s efforts. Ludmilla Alexeyeva’s memoir, The ThawGeneration, offers a vivid picture of this generation in the 1950s. Gathering in the newcircles of the era, the kompanii as they called them, they sought a new vision of history thatwas an alternative to the Stalinist vision, and a new intelligentsia identity that was rooted ina prerevolutionary tradition. “The old intelligentsia no longer existed, but we wanted tobelieve that we would be able to recapture its intellectual and spiritual exaltation. Our goalwas to lay claim to the values left by the social stratum that had been persecuted by the czarsand destroyed by the revolution.”74

All of them in one way or another intelligentsia survivors of the Stalinist depredations,such memoirists as Erenburg, Mandelshtam, Ginzburg, Alliluyeva, and Solzhenitsyn re-sponded to this new and growing interest in rebuilding the intelligentsia identity in wayswhich drew directly on several crucial elements of the “contemporaries” tradition. Oneresponse was to reconstruct on paper the tattered web of the pre-Stalinist intelligentsianetworks, and several of them did this in such a way, like the upwardly mobile intellectualsof the past, as to consolidate or advance their own statuses within this newly popular socialgroup. This involved advertising, justifying, and sometimes perhaps exaggerating theirown alliances—or anti-alliances—of the past. Intertwined with this highly political pro-cess was also the desire to shape intelligentsia culture by offering models—or antimodels—for appropriate intelligentsia values and behavior. Both processes led in turn to a renewedmanifestation of the cult tradition, as particular individuals came to be hailed as particularlyvirtuous or inspiring. Certain memoirists were also endeavoring to free themselves andtheir allies of the state-based economic patronage networks which had become extraordi-narily powerful by the 1950s. This contributed to a resurgence of the anticult tradition as,like Radishchev in his depiction of Bokum, Tsvetaeva in hers of Bryusov, and Gippius inher tale of Gorky, Russian intellectuals attacked those they felt had abused their access tostate resources and failed as potential patrons. The most prominent anticult figure wasJoseph Stalin.

74Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Pitts-burgh, 1993), 97.

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Novelist and journalist Ilya Erenburg’s vast work, People, Life, Years, was the first ofthe great Thaw memoirs, and represents an early moment in this new development in “con-temporaries” history. Erenburg had risen to fame as a journalist under Stalin, but his intel-lectual roots lay in the prerevolutionary intelligentsia scene, and he had had many friendsamong those Soviet intellectuals who had fallen out of state favor. In these memoirs Erenburgintroduced his Thaw readers to a whole world of pre- and postrevolutionary Russian intel-ligentsia personalities and networks unfamiliar to them due to Soviet censorship, includinghis own journalistic mentor, the purged Nikolai Bukharin.75 In the process, he not onlyadvertised his own past alliances with numerous figures little loved by the Soviet state butalso promoted or canonized them as figures worthy of imitation as teachers or mentors fromthe past. Thus Erenburg makes positive mention of Bukharin for possibly the first time inSoviet print since his show trial, using his first name and patronymic. Of Bryusov (not atall popular with Soviet power despite his attempts to work within the system in the earlySoviet period), Erenburg wrote: “He helped dozens of young poets ... this impassionedbuilder, this tireless sower was of far more use to the young Soviet Union than many asweet-voiced singer ... even his reproaches helped me live.” Of Tsvetaeva’s mentorMaximilian Voloshin (also unpopular with the Stalinist state), Erenburg wrote that “heproved more intelligent, more mature, yes, more human than many other writers of hisgeneration.” Erenburg could also make positive mention of those who had enjoyed statesupport, albeit with reservations: of author Alexei Tolstoy he wrote that “he did not teachme, but he gave me pleasure—by his art; his inner sensibility, often concealed by a mask ofgaiety; his appetite for life; his loyalty to his friends, his people, his work.”76 And Erenburgcautiously distances himself from the man under whom he had risen to his greatest fame: “Itwould be too much to say that I liked Stalin, but for a long time I believed in him and Ifeared him.”77

Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s memoirs offer us a brilliant analysis of elite life in the So-viet Union the 1920s and 1930s, as well as an intriguing narrative of the self in Westernintrospective terms.78 But they may also be considered as part of an endeavor to gain recog-nition and power in a world of networks from which she had been exiled by Stalin’s regime.This helps to explain both the cult and the anticult figures of her memoir. Her single cultfigure is her husband, the dazzling poet Osip Mandelshtam, to whose name and story shefirmly attaches her own in the “contemporaries” tradition of the female relative seeking toenhance her own prestige through the canonization of her husband.79 And the primaryanticult figure is Stalin, whom she (with good reason) held responsible for her husband’sdeath in a prison camp during the Purges. But there are some instructive minor negativefigures as well, who reveal her desire to cast aspersions on those individuals or networks

75Nadezhda Mandelshtam wrote later that “his readers—mostly from the minor technical intelligentsia—firstlearned dozens of names quite new to them from this book” (Hope Abandoned, 16).

76Ehrenburg, People and Life, 46, 251, 130, 142.77Ehrenburg, Post-War Years, 302.78Beth Holmgren, Women’s Work in Stalin’s Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelshtam

(Bloomington, 1993).79See also Sarah Pratt, “Angels in the House: Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Lidiia Chukovskaia, Lidiia Ginzburg,

and Russian Women’s Autobiography,” a/b Auto/Biography Studies 11 (Fall 1996): 68–86.

On Reading Soviet Memoirs 349

she sees as bound up with the state. One such figure is the politically well-connected AlexeiTolstoy, who, she implies, used his state connections to get Mandelshtam arrested for stateoffenses after Mandelshtam had slapped him in the face.80 Another is Tsvetaeva’s idol,Voloshin, who had been particularly adept working the state-based networking and patron-age system under both the Reds and the Whites during the Civil War and the early Sovietperiod; although it may not have been her only reason for disliking him, Mandelshtambelieved that he had used that influence to harm her husband.81 (It is noteworthy thatMandelshtam bases her accusations against these men entirely on second-hand informationand anekdot-style gossip.) Mandelshtam ultimately succeeded in gaining her own circle ofadmirers among the intelligentsia of the 1960s and early 1970s. Yet her memoirs arousedconsiderable controversy among her contemporaries as well. “Especially after [Hope Aban-doned] was published in the West,” wrote Hedrick Smith, “we knew several free-spiritedintellectuals who so resented her having dismissed people as weak-willed toadies, inform-ers or the like, that they would no longer join her coterie or visit her apartment.”82 Some ofthose about whom Mandelshtam had written negatively still had their own strong support-ers; or they were even, like Voloshin (note Erenburg’s reference to him above), themselvesbecoming the objects of new intelligentsia personality cults as a part of the re-formation ofintelligentsia identity and of a variety of competing intelligentsia networks.

Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, is at first glance quite another sort of figurecompared to the intelligentsia giants Erenburg and Mandelshtam, yet Twenty Letters to aFriend is a classic of the “contemporaries” memoir genre. A fundamental purpose of thismemoir (reflected in her decision to publish under her mother’s maiden name) is to adver-tise her alliance not to her dead and dishonored father but rather to her mother’s side of thefamily: the highly self-conscious prerevolutionary intelligentsia Alliluyevs, who, until theirranks were thinned by the Purges, were a real presence in Stalin’s Kremlin court. (Notewor-thy are the Alliluyev family legends or anekdoty to which she refers extensively in order toilluminate the relationship between her mother and father.) This goal leads Alliluyeva togive an instructive twist to the cult-building formula. Though it is her identity as her father’sdaughter that advances her status as a significant memoirist, she does not present him as hercult figure. Instead, in a delicate shading of the anticult tradition, Stalin appears as aninadequate mentor and patriarch, unable to maintain family and circle cohesion in his house-hold. Alliluyeva’s positive cult figure is her mother, whom she describes as “very muchloved by everyone. She was intelligent, beautiful, extraordinarily gentle and considerate inevery relationship. At the same time she could be firm, stubborn and unyielding when shefelt that a principle should not be compromised. No one but she could have brought aboutunity, even harmony, in a family of such strikingly varied personalities.”83 In her mother’sfigure Alliluyeva combines the charm of Ryleev and Ogarev, the firm principle of Belinsky,

80Mandel’shtam, Hope Against Hope, 11.81Mandel’shtam, Hope Abandoned, 84–87.82Smith, The Russians, 540.83Alliluyeva’s assertion of these qualities in her mother is all the more striking in the face of a contradictory

subtext revealing her mother as personally divorced from her children’s lives (“I cannot recall her kissing orcaressing me ever”; Twenty Letters to a Friend, 29).

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and the capacity to bring harmony and unity of Del’vig and Voloshin. The true anticultdemon of her memoir is “Beria, who seems to have had a diabolical link with all our familyand who wiped out a good half of its members.” This demonization of Beria serves todefend Stalin from the most terrible accusations against him, thereby alleviating some ofher guilt by association with her father: “My father was astonishingly helpless before Beria’smachinations.”84 Alliluyeva’s memoir reveals perhaps the most intimate moment in thedeadly flirtation of the intelligentsia with the state in the twentieth century. It also recallsfor us the origins of the “contemporaries” genre in the gentry and court memoirs of the lateeighteenth century through its exploration of the relationship of the family to the state.85

The least committed to the “contemporaries” tradition among the memoirists underdiscussion here is Eugenia Ginzburg. Yet even her prison camp tale, Journey into the Whirl-wind, contains instructive elements of the genre. Ginzburg’s anticult fervor is aimed againstStalin, the great father and mentor of all the Soviet people who failed them so terribly. LikeAlliluyeva using the language of demonization, she writes: “Evidently some sixth sensetold me that [Stalin] was to be the evil genius in my life and that of my children.”86 Andattentive to Khrushchev’s pro-Leninist line, she proclaims her allegiance in ringinghagiographic tones: “How wonderful that ... the great Leninist truths have again come intotheir own in our country and our party!”87

Solzhenitsyn’s The Oak and the Calf also belongs to the anticult tradition of the disap-pointed disciple and client of a mentor with access to state power. Emerging onto theintelligentsia scene far later than the others, however, he directs his rage not against Stalin,but Alexander Tvardovsky, a prominent figure among the state-bound intellectual networksof the Thaw era and editor of the predominant literary journal, Novyi mir. As Solzhenitsyn’spatron in the most concrete sense of the word, Tvardovsky had first published his work inthat journal. Yet in the end Solzhenitsyn turned against Tvardovsky and wrote his memoirin order to expose Tvardovsky’s weaknesses, especially those of cowardice, drunkenness,and pride. “Perhaps out of consideration for Tvardovsky it would have been better notbring all of these details under the spotlight,” he writes, not altogether convincingly, “But ifI didn’t the reader would not understand how unsteady, and how helplessly limp at timeswere the hands that managed Novy Mir” 88 His memoir is also a biting examination of theliterary world of the time, as Solzhenitsyn passes on many gossipy anecdotes about theprocesses by which his work gained or lost supporters in that world. Like Mandelshtam’ssecond volume of memoirs, The Oak and the Calf aroused a storm of protest among Rus-sian intellectuals, in this case among Tvardovsky’s followers, which found its publishedexpression in Vladimir Lakshin’s spirited defense of the man—and of course attack onSolzhenitsyn.89

84Ibid., 34–35, 58, 79.85Alliluyeva also is drawing on another very important Russian memoir genre: the family memoir, which seems

to gain influence in the intelligentsia “contemporaries” tradition during this period. For a discussion of this genresee Andrew Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford, 1990).

86Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, 26 (note again the contiguity of family and state).87Ibid., 417.88Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, 78.89Vladimir Lakshin, Solzhenitsyn, Tvardovsky, and Novy Mir, trans. Michael Glenny (Cambridge, MA, 1980).

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On a slightly different but related note, Dmitry Shostakovich’s rambling memoir ofthe Soviet music scene, Testimony, has come under scrutiny in recent years because of adebate over its authenticity.90 Some have argued that editor and translator Solomon Volkov,who describes these memoirs as based on his oral interviews with Shostakovich, may infact have falsified them. While this article cannot presume to resolve such an issue, it ispossible to point out that, whatever its origins, this document also reveals the influence ofthe “contemporaries” tradition. Testimony operates at two levels: first, it is, or purports tobe, Shostakovich’s own moral evaluation of his era and of his associates, sometimes favor-able and more often disparaging: “Prokofiev had the soul of a goose”; or “Many of today’s[Soviet, state-supported] composers can show a bill of health proving that they don’t haveVD, but they are rotten from within. Their souls stink.” But at a deeper level, this memoiris the perfect example of a disciple—Volkov himself—building up a cult figure for thepurpose of enhancing his own standing. He introduces this book with an essay intended toprove his own intimacy and high standing with his subject: “‘This is the most intelligentman of the new generation,’ was [Shostakovich’s] final evaluation” of Volkov, Volkov tellsus. Volkov’s introduction to Testimony also implies that this was more than just a spontane-ous expression of Shostakovich’s own feelings, but actually an intriguing collaborationbetween the two men in “contemporaries” terms: “I found a successful formula to helpShostakovich to speak more freely: ‘Don’t reminisce about yourself; talk about others.’ Ofcourse, Shostakovich reminisced about himself, but he reached himself by talking aboutothers, finding the reflection of himself in them.”91 Whether or not Volkov is reporting withstrict accuracy, this is as self-conscious an expression of the creed of the “contemporaries”genre as is to be found anywhere.

Cultural history over some two centuries is of necessity a matter of something like patch-work. A thread or a pattern shows up here, can be traced for a generation or two, thenvanishes, only to reappear there, in circumstances hauntingly reminiscent of the past, butalso radically new and changed. The historian stirs, and what seemed so clear has slippedbeyond his vision, somewhere back there, he knows, but where? Yet in this case the projectis justified, as it is impossible to understand what many Soviet memoirists have intendedwithout examining the broad outlines of the tradition which has so deeply influenced them.Those qualities which render Soviet memoirs popular in the West but suspect to manyWestern scholars, such as the tendency to repeat gossip and to express vehement partisan-ship by canonizing some figures while demonizing others, have their origins in the gentryculture and concerns of the late eighteenth century. They have repeatedly been given newlife and substance by the painful, contradictory, and controversial historical development ofthe intelligentsia identity in the context of a culture of networking and circle-formation

90Fundamental to the attack on the authenticity of Testimony is the argument of Laurel E. Fay, “Shostakovichversus Volkov: Whose Testimony?” Russian Review 39 (October 1980): 484–93. A recent defense of its authentic-ity comes from Allen B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, authors and editors of Shostakovich Reconsidered (London,1998).

91Shostakovich, Testimony, 36, 172, xvi, xvi.

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among Russian intellectuals. Those to whom these memoirs were originally primarilyaddressed understood their terms, intuitively if not explicitly, and therefore read them in afashion not immediately evident to Western outsiders. As outsiders we must seek to under-stand the genre from within; and in the search we find a whole new way of looking atintelligentsia history.