A Lovely Autumn Weekend, Pilnyak, and Thou...

Leaving for an autumn getaway with my darling wife to the northwoods to see the fall colors: What book to bring? I got lucky at the library and chanced upon a copy of Gary Browning’s literary biography, Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter (Ardis, 1985)! I remember when the book was first published, but having just graduated from college at the time, I had no spare change to buy a copy; now it’s a valuable rarity. Still, I’m pretty certain I was the first and only one to ever check out the Minneapolis Public Library’s sole, lonely copy. And what a read! Part mystery, part detective story, Browning details Pilnyak’s amazing story and his stunning works.

Socialist realism page-turner

Boris Pilnyak is largely dismissed as a Soviet apologist, primarily based on his late social realist novel The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea (translated and published in the USA by Cosmopolitan Press, 1931). It’s easy to see things in black and white when viewing Stalinist Russia from the remove of fifty-plus years and the easy freedom of the United States, but Pilnyak’s life and times were much more complicated and shadowy, as Browning describes.

Pilnyak’s early works, such as The Naked Year, published in 1921, made him a literary star and was a prime influence on other Russian writers of the day, including Evgeny Zamyatin, Andrei Bely, and more. Everyone wanted to write like him at the time, Browning explains. To me, Pilnyak’s prose in The Naked Year is like an Eisenstein film with its short, clipped sentences that create a montage of dramatic images. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin didn’t screen until 1925, and I wonder if he was inspired in part by Pilnyak’s writing?

Never judge a book just by it's cover...

Pilnyak’s prose also reminds me of Mayakovsky’s graphic design of the time, with its incredible use of sans-serif fonts and dizzying cubist angles that shout out the author’s message. I have an early translation of The Naked Year, published by Payson & Clarke Ltd of New York in 1928 that features cover and title-page typography reminiscent of Mayakovsky’s graphics, albeit in a much tamer fashion. It’s a gorgeous publication, and this is the only copy I’ve ever seen.

Mayakovskian graphic typography, circa 1928

With the layering of multiple voices as well documents, news reports, and such, The Naked Year is a novel of sounds as well as images. The cacophony of voices reminds me of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922, Faulkner and Dos Passos, or from decades later, William Gaddis’ The Recognitions and JR.

I dream of reading Pilnyak’s Machines & Wolves from 1924, but as far as I know the novel has not be translated into English. Alas. 

My favorite work by Pilnyak, however, is the novella, Mother Earth. It’s a much easier read than The Naked Year, and succinctly captures his great theme of the wild heart of Russia that he viewed as untamable by revolution or progress.

Gary Browning’s biography was excellent. He explains aspects of Pilnyak’s personality—as well as his writings—that played a role in his fall from favor in Stalin’s eyes. Pilnyak was arrested on October 28, 1937 on charges of  spying for the Chinese and was tried in 15 minutes on April 21, 1938. Sent to Siberia, he disappeared. According to Browning, a small yellow slip of paper was found decades later in his file that read: “Sentence carried out.”