Leery as we are about the suppression of
ideas, arguably a worse form of censorship is seeing your work raised to
prominence, only to propagate a travesty of your vision. Think Nietzsche in the
hands of the Nazis; Christ and Saint Paul in those of roman emperors, popes and
puritans (okay, I know Christ wasn’t a writer, but you get my point); Voltaire
and Rousseau twisted by Robespierre and pals.
Tsarist
Russia’s Guantanamo Bay, the Alekseyevsky Wing of the Peter and Paul Fortress,
St Petersburg, 1863; radical journalist and social-critic Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky
ponders the present, and dreams of the future. Between interrogations and a
nine day hunger strike, he manages to write a novel and smuggle the manuscript
to the office of his journal, Contemporary
(Sovremennik).
The
novel passes the censors. The first chapters, appearing to be no more than a
pot-boiler romance with a mystery twist, raise no alarm. By the time the later
chapters, with their radical vision of sex-equality and socialist nirvana, are serialised
the genie is out. The authorities close down Sovremennik, but the novel has spread throughout reformist Europe.
Just
how much, and when, Chernyshevsky himself knows of all this is open to
question: after months of interrogation he is exiled to Siberia. He remains
there twenty years, returning home a few years before his death. His
maltreatment isn’t over.
Less
than three decades after his passing, the social order Chernyshevsky despised
implodes. The Tsar is deposed, and for a brief moment a democratic Russia
struggles toward life. It’s a stillbirth. The Bolsheviks storm the new
parliament and, in the “Glorious October Revolution”, usher in their own brand
of tyranny. The rule of monsters like Lenin and Stalin gives way over time to that
of their grey progeny in the Politburo.
Among
their sacred canon, next to Marx and Engels, sits Chernyshevsky.
His
dangerous little book was Shto Delat’?, published
in english as A Vital Question, or What Is To Be Done? (I’m reliably
informed this is better rendered What To
Do? A cursory acquaintance with the
book will cause you to question that punctuation mark as well. Picky readers
take note: these are accepted english translations, not my own).
In it, he
sets forth his practical – if somewhat utopian – ideas for social
transformation. He decries the ignorance of the mass of the people, but
acknowledges that it’s not their fault – they’re only surviving the best way
they can. His scorn is for the elites, those who should know better, and could
change things, if their immediate interest wasn’t served by preserving the
status quo.
Chernyshevsky
never loses his faith in the basic goodness of evolving human nature. By
changing those few minds ready to listen to reason, the word will slowly spread
– words and example, not bullets and gulags. At its most seductive, his vision
combines the best of socialism and capitalism in a way that makes you think of
pragmatists like the factory owner, Ricardo Semler, in Brazil. But he knows it
will take time – a long time.
His
emphasis is always on individual freedom; free individuals with a social
conscience working toward a better and more free world.
Compare
this with the Bolshevik ideology, which states that because the common man is
slow to catch on, he must be dragged to the light by those who know better. And
if he still won’t play along, well, that’s what Siberia’s for (sound
familiar?). The Bolsheviks want it to happen yesterday.
My
copy of Shto Delat’? was printed in the Soviet Union in the early
eighties. Realising their economy would inevitably collapse under the weight of
competing with the US Military Budget and trying to spread socialism with
tanks, thinkers in Moscow returned to an old standard: putting the soft-sell on
western intellectuals.
Toward
the end of the book – the business end, that is – a strange thing happens. In a
long sequence Vera, the heroine, is shown Chernyshevsky’s ideal future in a
dream. It all goes along quite well; passages numbered 1, 2, 3, and so on until 6, then
this:
7
.....................................................................................................................
.....................................................................................................................
At which point we continue to section 8.
Now,
given the genesis of the book – written in prison with an eye to fooling the censors,
heavily symbolic and circumscribed; circulated for years in Russia, where it
was banned, in hand-copied editions; edited and re-edited – it’s feasible that
something just got lost along the way.
However,
you can’t escape the feeling that here, in the middle of one of the most
powerful passages in the book, something just didn’t sit right with the
bureaucrat assigned to publish it. For all the faulty syntax and malapropisms
of a work produced quickly under pressure, this is the only glaring, complete,
and unexplained gap.
(Don’t
think for a minute that I’m picking on Russia and ignoring the west. In the US,
Hollywood producers collected Academy Awards and millions of dollars off the
backs of men like Dalton Trumbo and Howard Fast, while the authors themselves
languished, blacklisted and penurious.
Here
in Australia, we lionise men like Henry Lawson – ignoring the fact he was not
only a Republican and out and out socialist but, at the turn of the twentieth
century, already decrying our largely urban population’s identification with an
outback ideal whose reality he knew to be lonely, pitiless and miserable.
The
difference – small but not insignificant – is that you won't find a copy of Spartacus, Johnny Got His Gun or The Collected Works of Henry Lawson with
politically embarrassing passages unaccountably expunged.)
It’s
hard not to think that Chernyshevsky – celebrated as a “forerunner of Lenin” –
would, were he born a century later, have lived almost exactly the same life.
There
will always be tyrants or potential tyrants. Great artists – Chernyshevsky;
Shakespeare under the Tudors and Stuarts – find a way to get their point
across; often under the noses, even on the dime, of those they’re excoriating.
And
personally, I’d like to think Nikolai was right about our evolving nature.
