Fedor Gladkov’s Cement
So far, so formulaic (the Party trumps sex every time, and individual happiness means nothing beside the work of reconstruction, comrade!), but Gladkov shows a real concern for the situation of women caught between the demands of family life and those of the Revolution, and in a powerful chapter later in the book he has Dasha reveal how she was tortured and raped by the Whites and how torn she feels about Nyurka. And it is not only the enemy who are portrayed as capable of such behavior: the Party chairman, Badin, is a serial rapist, and one of his victims, Polya Mekhova, tells Gleb: “There’s something frightful in men. It seems to me now that there’s a Badin in everyone of you.” (I quote the translation by Arthur and Ashleigh; I haven’t found a Russian text online, which probably is an indication of how the novel has fallen from popularity since its heyday in the Stalin era—it was a favorite of Uncle Joe’s, and reprinted often, with emendations by the author, who was happy to follow the twists and turns of the Party line.) In the opening scene Dasha is seen reading Bebel‘s Woman and Socialism, with its insistence on the equality of women, and it’s a real pleasure to see feminist principles upheld in a Russian novel of the masculinist 1920s, when far greater writers like Babel and Platonov basically saw women as distractions from the manly, important things in life. [I am reminded by a commenter that I have neglected to explain the title: the plot of the novel is driven by Gleb’s attempt to get the cement factory he used to work at in operation again, despite opposition by Party bureaucrats and attacks by bandits.]
As for matters of linguistic interest, Gladkov was criticized by Gorky for overuse of dialect, and after the first edition “Gladkov replaced the regionalisms of Novorossiysk (a southern Russian port near Krasnodar) with standard-literary language” (Thomas Lahusen in V. Y. Mudimbe, ed., Nations, Identities, Cultures
They had carried all the books from the houses of the vanished officials into the director’s library. They were beautiful books, with shining gilt covers, but mysterious: they were written in German.
Gromada was elected club manager, and when he was reporting on the library, at a meeting of the workers, he said, “Comrades, we have a wonderful library, whose books have been confiscated and nationalised from the bourgeoisie and the capitalists — but they’re all of German origin. Now, according to proletarian discipline we must read them, because we must remember that, as workers, we belong to the international masses and therefore, must command every language.”
There are some excerpts from the translation here, and if you’re wondering what it’s like in Russian you can get a pretty good idea from the parody by A. G. Arkhangelsky (1889-1938), which you can read here (scroll down a bit). Here’s the first section:
Ф. Гладков
ГЛАВЦЕМЕНТ
1 БРАЧНАЯ НЕУВЯЗКА
Как и тогда булькотело и дышало нутряными вздохами море, голубели заводские трубы, в недрах дымились горы, но не грохотали цилиндры печей, не барахолили бремсберги и в каменоломнях и железобетонных корпусах шлендрали свиньи, куры, козы и прочая мелкобуржуазная живность.
Глеб Чумалов вернулся к своему опустевшему гнезду, на приступочках которого стояла жена Даша и шкарабала себя книгой “Женщина и социализм” сочинения Августа Бебеля.
У Глеба задрожали поджилки и сердце застукотело дизелем. Рванулся к ней.
— Даша! Жена моя!
Обхватил могучей обхваткой так, что у нее хрустнули позвонки, и с изумлением воскликнул:
— Дашок! Шмара я красноголовая! Да ты никак дышишь не той ноздрей?
Ответила строго, организованно:
— Да, товарищ Глеб. Ты же видишь, я — раскрепощенная женщина-работница и завтра чуть свет командируюсь лицом к деревне по женской части. Успокой свои нервы. Не тачай горячку. Заткнись.
Глеб вздохнул тяжелым нутряным вздохом. Натужливо хмыкнул от удивления.
— Шуганула ты меня, Дашок, на высокий градус, так, что и крыть нечем. Ну что ж, займусь восстановлением завода на полный ход.
I seem to recall (from fifty years ago) only a passage in which a character gazes down at a mass of workers and is exalted by the dissolution of their individual identities in the collective task. I found it pretty repellent then and the memory has kept me from rereading the book ever since.
It sounds like a bit of a mixed bag. What is the cement, the party?
I admire your tenacity, reading ‘Cement’ was like a joke in my student years even though it was on the list. Couldn’t find the text online too, curious isn’t it? Here is a summary in English for those, as the web-site says, who are ‘unable or too lazy to read them in the original’ with what looks like ‘period’ illustrations. From the Russian wiki article on Gladkov I followed a link to the communist party web-site which laments Cement’s falling off the Russians’ book-shelf and hails the American publication you refer to as a recognition of its importance.
The moral confusion connected to the NEP was a source for many writers. I’ve just reread ‘The Blue Cities’, a 1925 short story by Alexey Tolstoy where a former red army volunteer burns down the whole provincial town, so angry he was with its bourgeois mentality.
I seem to recall (from fifty years ago) only a passage in which a character gazes down at a mass of workers and is exalted by the dissolution of their individual identities in the collective task. I found it pretty repellent
Yes, that’s the kind of thing I was remembering, but you can just skim over all that crap.
What is the cement, the party?
Sorry, I should have mentioned that the main plot element is Gleb’s furious attempt to get the cement factory working again despite the opposition of corrupt Party bureaucrats (he issues lots of threats to paste people in the mug and put people against the wall) and the attacks of Cossacks and bandits. (I was proud of myself for figuring out from my knowledge of Russian history and geography that the unnamed city with the factory must be in the southern Kuban/northern Caucasus region even before Google told me it was Novorossisk, whose first cement factory opened in 1882.)
This is rather peripheral, but Jaroslav Hasek’s “The Red Commissar” is a collection of stories based on his own time in the Red Army (after he deserted from a Czech unit in WWI). He actually seems to have been a pretty good, teetotalling commissar who ended up far in the east in minority regions. He even has a place in Mongolian history as Sukhbataar’s Russian teacher.
He was back in Czechoslovakia (and off the wagon) by 1920 so his stories really are only relevant to the earliest stages of Communism, during the Civil War. They’re satirical, tongue-in-cheek, and goofy like most of Hasek’s stuff.
One of the things about Hasek was that his non-fiction has to be regarded as partly fictional, whereas his fiction sometimes can be suspected of being autobiographical. He was already being compared to Mark Twain when he was in high school.
Peripheral too: am just reading Black Sea, which tells us that Novorossisk is the port from which the White armies commanded by General Denikin were evacuated on Saturday, 27 March 1920.
Yes, and the evacuation is mentioned in the novel. (Black Sea is excellent, and I really should reread it one of these days.)
yes, and the cement factory features in another great (really) socrealism classic ‘Iron Flood’ by Alexander Serafimovich.
Incidentally, Hat, have you been following the Figes scandal? Everyone around here is indulging in some well-deserved schadenfreude at his expense.
Oh, you bet! I actually enjoy his books, but what a jerk he is.
How dare you say that! Orlando Figes is the finest scholar of our time. My lawyer will be contacting you.
Oops, I mean his lawyer.
Er, actually my wife wrote those comments. Please ignore them, she’s been under a strain.
Oh come off it, you silly prat. When are you going to learn your lesson?
Please, get counseling, all of you.
no, please, let’s have some more, it’s just unbelievable – best-selling, well-respected and really good books, and then – this. he got a stalin bug.
I wrote a comment about him in the LRB blog and they immediately shut down the comments. Someone had asked why he might have been doing this, and I explained using a few phrases like “hitting your enemies in their pocketbooks”. Even at this stage, they’re worried he might try and sue them. So much for the British legal system, the whole spineless literary community is terrified of one little twitty man and imposes self-censorship rather than risk offending him. I don’t think this could happen in the USA.
Maybe a club can be formed. 1000 people each chip in $100 and proceed to slander Figes (in the British sense of “tell the truth about”). He can’t sue all of them, and the first one he does sue gets the pot.
I’ve also been enjoying the Figes dust up. It makes me all the more curious to see that Rachel Polonsky’s review of Natasha’s Dance.
And thank you, Sashura, for mentioning the Serafimovich book!
Did someone say “libel“? I thought I heard someone say “libel”.
Emerson’s got the right idea. You can all send your $100 to my blog and I’ll set up some sort of account. Cash would be best. Then everyone should tell ten more people.
Probably a neutral party without goats should hold the money for this pool.
Yeah, we’d all be waiting for the “Sorry, my goats ate the funds” story.
There is a summary of the Polonsky review and some others here.
I’m surprised we haven’t heard from the goats’ lawyers, after the libellous insinuatons that they would allow themselves to be involved in dodgy money laundering.
Laundering is exactly the wrong word for the process of passing something through a goat’s innards.
Interestingly, the crucial part of this passage is missing from the Russian original in all the editions I can find online:
И там, где раньше была строгая тишина, где рабочие не могли проходить по бетонным дорожкам мимо дворца (строжайше воспрещалось дирекцией), по вечерам, когда зеркальные стекла пылали пожарным пламенем заходящего солнца, клубные музыканты ревели в медные трубы и грохотали барабанами.
Из домов бежавших инженеров свезли все книги в библиотеку клуба и расставили в шкафы. Книги блестели позолотой, но были непонятны и чужды: на разноцветных корешках искрились готические надписи.
Рабочие продолжали жить в своих конурах и казармах. Дома инженеров стонали пустотами и пугали жутью своих анфилад.
Civil engineeres can’t accept that kind of uncivil slander.
(I proposed for GT to replace its current translation with a sweet little story of fairies and blue flowers.)
Interestingly, the crucial part of this passage is missing from the Russian original in all the editions I can find online
You’re right. I wish somebody would digitize and put online the original edition, before Gladkov was forced to chop and change. Here’s Gromada’s speech as far as I can piece it together from Google Books snippet view:
Then it continues with “Рабочий клуб „Коминтерн”. Не директорский дом, а комячейка. Рабочие продолжали жить в своих конурах …”
-повинны читать
That phrase is Ukrainian, certainly not standard literary Russian.
So the heavy use of dialect by Gladkov must have been use of Ukrainian dialects, not Russian dialects. Krasnodar region (formerly Kuban oblast, territory of the Kuban Cossack Host) used to have very large Ukrainian speaking population. They switched to Russian after WWII, I believe.
Yeah, and it would be a lot more fun reading the novel with the original dialect stuff.
Somewhere I have (or used to have) a pre-1991 language map with the Russian-Ukrainian divide extending eastwards across southern Russia and even into (or maybe north of) Kazakhstan. I’ve been thinking that it makes sense as a map of Slavic migration patterns but not of the current linguistic facts. Or that they’ve ceased upon some isogloss as the defining property. Anyway, I remember being told (quite likely here) that there were some Ukrainian features in Mr. Gorbachev’s southern accent.
In Russia, all Russian dialects (including Ukrainian dialects) disappeared after introduction of universal schooling in literary Russian.
In the Ukraine, decline of Ukrainian dialects was stopped, because schools there taught both literary Russian and literary Ukrainian.
In Krasnodar region where literary Russian was taught, but no literary Ukrainian, the old Ukrainian dialects disappeared* within two generations. Same thing happened to Ukrainian dialects in the Far East, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, large parts of Siberia, southern Russia, etc.
* Kuban Ukrainian dialect is no longer spoken, but it survives in form of traditional songs which are still proudly performed by various folklore bands (very often, state and military-sponsored). Since the songs are performed in sort of Ukrainian, their lyrics need to be written down. But the Ukrainian language is not taught in Krasnodar! People simply don’t know how to write in Ukrainian!
So what they do is just transcribe Ukrainian text in Russian as they hear it, with total disregard of Ukrainian orthography. Results are pretty shocking to anyone who is familiar with literary Ukrainian.
А я хлопцив нэ любыла, тилькы Пэтра, та Даныла,
Тилькы Грыця, та Ивана, кучерявого Романа.
Гай, гай, гай, гай, гай зэлэнэнькый,
За то тэбэ полюбыла шо ты молодэнькый.
Очэрэт осока чорни бровы козака
На то маты родыла шоб дивчина любыла.
А дивчина горлыця, до козака горныться,
А козак як орэл, дэ побачив – там и вмэр.
Well, Google detects it as Ukrainian, but GT renders it thus:
And I am a boys who are not boys, tears Petra, Danila,
Tilka Hrytsa, and Ivan, a curly Roman.
Guy, Guy, Guy, Guy, Guy Zelenne,
That’s why she loved you, young.
Ocheret sedge black Eyebrows Cossack
For that mother gave birth to shob a whim everywhere.
And the blizzard of the throat, to the Cossack, grieve,
And the Cossack was like an o’el, he saw – there is also a mum.
Pretty much all Dylan Thomas to me.
@Trond Engen (belatedly): Do you mean this one? It’s from 1941, and shows Ukrainians in the Kuban, in northern Kazakhstan, and all the way to the Pacific in small pockets. I can’t recall seeing anything similar in a post-war Soviet map, though.
Thanks, Lazar! Not that one, no. Similiar, but, IIRC, cruder, and with the Russian-Ukrainian line drawn all the way through Kazakhstan. And in Latin letters. I doubt it was based on Post-WW2 data, maybe not even post-revolutionary data.
Jonathan Morse sent me this piece on Cement, its changing text and the striking 1933 movie poster. I was inspired to see if the issues of Красная новь in which it was first published (1925, #1-6) had been put on line, and I was excited to discover they had … but page 66, the first page of Цемент, is missing! It goes from p. 65 to p. 67. WTF?!