Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin's Russia

By Frank Westerman

A “fascinating” account of how Gorky, Pasternak, and other great writers were coerced to create propaganda for Stalin (Cleveland Plain Dealer).

Sunday Times Best Travel Book of the Year

In the Soviet Union, writers of renown, described by Stalin as “engineers of the soul,” were encouraged to sing the praises of canal and dam construction under titles such as Energy: The Hydraulic Power Station and Onward, Time! But their enthusiasm—spontaneous and idealistic at first—soon became obligatory, and as these colossal waterworks led to slavery and destruction, Soviet writers such as Maxim Gorky, Isaak Babel, Konstantin Paustovsky, and Boris Pasternak were forced to labor on in the service of a deluded totalitarian society.

Combining investigative journalism with literary history, Engineers of the Soul is a journey through contemporary Russia and Soviet-era literature. Frank Westerman, a correspondent living in post-Communist Moscow, examines both the culture landscape under Stalin’s rule and the books—and lives—of writers caught in the wheels of the Soviet system as art and reality were bent to radically new purposes.

“Engagingly written and extensively researched, the book covers compelling historical and literary ground.” —Financial Times

“A detailed and enthralling account of his journey through Soviet literature including discovering the revolution’s best kept secrets while trying to appreciate the talented writers who created a web of deceit in the name of success.” —Publishers Weekly 

“A literary travelogue revealing a remarkable geography and a strange, fraught alliance when the pen was not as mighty as the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union . . . insightful.” —Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468305333

Frank Westerman

Frank Westerman is a highly acclaimed Dutch non-fiction writer. His work has been translated into sixteen languages and has received numerous awards, including the Kapuscinski Prize (Poland), the Premio Terzani (Italy) and the Prix du Livre du Réel (France).

Book preview

PROLOGUE

A surveyor, that’s what I wanted to be. I was fascinated by the men who worked on our street in their orange jackets with reflective stripes. Peering through their spyglasses they checked everything within sight, just to make sure things were indeed as they seemed.

How old was I? Ten? At school we were using an outline map to learn the capitals of Europe.

Whenever Mr Hulzebos unfurled that continent of oilcloth, it was time to buckle down. With his habitual shrug and his bumbling movements, our teacher would take his pointer from its hook – a slender billiard cue with a brass strip around the end. Then, turning to face the class, he would call one of us up to the front.

The idea was to move the pointer to a dot on the map and call on a pupil. If he or she didn’t know the answer, it was your turn and you could shout out ‘Athens’ or ‘Reykjavik’ or ‘Helsinki’. Whenever that happened I felt a tingling in my fingertips. To touch dots and have them turn into strange sounds was pure magic.

The map of Europe was flecked with red symbols circled by black lines. Cities of fewer than a million inhabitants were indicated by circles the size of a shirt button. Cities of millions were the size of a bus token. And then you had the real metropolises – Paris, Rome, Berlin – so packed with people that Mr Hulzebos said you could easily get lost there if no one showed you the way. Metropolises were marked by squares: they had more than a million and a half inhabitants.

Of all the squares, there were only two – way out at the map’s edge – that we didn’t have to memorise.

‘Those are not in Europe,’ was Mr Hulzebos’s explanation.

‘But what’s that one called?’ I asked.

‘That’s Moscow.’

I had heard of Moscow. What I couldn’t work out was why the city wasn’t allowed in with the rest of Europe.

‘And this one?’ I tapped the pointer against the lonely little square even further away than Moscow. The possibility of there being another city of a million and a half people so far away was too terrifying to contemplate.

‘Gorky,’ the teacher said. The class sniggered. Gorky! It sounded like a place in a fairy tale, or the name of a planet. Jupiter, Venus, Gorky. I tried to imagine a postcard with the caption ‘Greetings from Gorky’, but it wasn’t easy. What would it say on the back?

‘Gorky is a closed city,’ Mr Hulzebos said. ‘People are sometimes sent to Gorky to be punished, and they never come back.’

I love books with no pictures, just a map at the front. Show me a photo, and the magic is gone. No, unfold before me, if you will, the map of a cloister where murder has been done, or sketch the fatal route of an Antarctic expedition. Dotted lines along the front at Gallipoli? A bird’s-eye view of the Gulag Archipelago? Normally speaking, the map at the front works like a vaccination: by administering a minuscule dose of geographical hallucinogen to the reader before departure, you preserve him from tropical madness en route.

That, at a first glance, would also seem to apply to Kara Bogaz, the book with which Konstantin Paustovsky made his breakthrough as a Soviet writer in 1932.

I started reading it soon after I moved to Moscow as a correspondent, as part of my attempt to get to know the former Soviet Union. That I reached for Paustovsky first was not unusual: he was considered the master chronicler of the Russian Revolution, the civil war that followed and the early years of socialism. Every correspondent in Moscow dreamed of being able to send home dispatches from the front line of history the way he had.

Kara Bogaz, in Paustovsky’s own words, is about ‘the annihilation of the desert’. To this end, he notes, a group of enthusiastic Five-Year-Planners has been working on an industrial salt-extraction plant on the east coast of the Caspian Sea. ‘A complex of this sort will deal the desert a fatal blow. Around it, with the reclamation of water and oil and the mining of anthracite, there will arise oases from which a systematic campaign against the plains of sand can be launched.’

Once you’re past the cover and title page, but before you’ve reached the first chapter, a map shows the setting in which you are about to find yourself: the bay at Kara Bogaz resembles an infant at the breast of a woman bent with care – the Caspian Sea. The umbilical cord is still intact. At a glance, the surrounding countryside would appear to consist only of empty desert and nameless highlands. The closest points of reference are the Volga delta and the Aral Sea, both nearly five hundred kilometres away.

Paustovsky quotes a naval report from a lieutenant by the name of Zherebtsov, a cartographer in the service of the tsar: ‘I hasten to report, Sire, that I have fulfilled your request and will bring with me two extremely rare birds, which I shot myself in the bay at Kara Bogaz. Our ship’s provisioner saw fit to mount them both and they are now in my cabin. These birds originate in Egypt, they are called flamingoes, and they bear a coat of feathers of the finest pink.’

In this naval scout’s wake, Paustovsky leads you on an exploration of the southernmost boundaries of the Soviet Empire.

You, the reader, are free to consult the map a hundred times – as often as Lieutenant Zherebtsov might pull out his sextant to take the altitude of a star. These intermittent sightings help to keep the story on course, with a straight wake spreading behind.

Or so you might suppose. But there is something peculiar about the geography in Paustovsky’s book. I kept flipping back to the map at the front and couldn’t stop looking at it. The bladder-shaped inland sea called Kara Bogaz seemed improbably large to me. If that bay, which Paustovsky claims has 800 kilometres of coastline, is really as prominent as the map would lead us to believe – then why had I never noticed it before?

From an unemployed geologist in a Moscow metro tunnel I bought a set of four rollable maps. Their combined wingspan was two metres twenty, and they covered all eleven time zones of the former Soviet Empire. From Kaliningrad in the west to the Bering Strait before Alaska.

Clutching the cardboard tube under one arm, I took the escalator to daylight. By then I had already moved into my Rotterdam newspaper’s KorPunkt on Proletariat Square. This ‘Correspondents’ Point’ – a vestige of the Soviet days – was in actual fact a decrepit little office with a Czech telex machine, in an apartment complex reserved for journalists and diplomats. Rumour had it that the air ducts and electricity sockets were riddled with microphones the size of a pinhead. I had no idea whether that was true. What I did notice, however, was that my neighbours were all grouped according to Soviet criteria, into foreigners from friendly nations (entrance hall 1) and foreigners from bourgeois states (entrance hall 2).

In front of the only window in my office stood a metal desk. The view – of the sheer wall of a brick apartment building no fewer than fourteen storeys high – was dismal. By pressing my forehead against the glass I could see, off to one side, a fenced-in building site. Down there, at any rate, the proletariat were not engaged in meaningful labour: the site was overgrown with elderberry and scrub.

To avoid having to stare at this sombre still life, I turned my desk ninety degrees. On the wall in front of me I pinned my map of the fifteen former Soviet republics. In this way, I opened for myself new vistas – a view of which, throughout those years, I never tired.

Sitting at my keyboard (in my cockpit), I soared over one-sixth of the populated world. Without that fan of meridians above my computer screen, I would often have lost my way.

My wall map dated from 1991, the year the Soviet Union expired. On it, cities such as Leningrad, Gorky and Andropov had been given back their pre-revolutionary names. Only the highest Soviet mountain (7,495 metres) was stilled called ‘Communism Peak’.

One of the first places I looked up was the bay at Kara Bogaz. My gaze travelled along the Caspian. The tangled coastline on the wall matched that on the little map in the book before me. There was only one snag: on my rollable map, the bay at Kara Bogaz did not appear at all.

My eyes darted back and forth between book and wall. How could that be? Was the bay at Kara Bogaz a figment of Paustovsky’s imagination? And if not, had this lagoon the size of Flanders simply disappeared from the official annals after 1932 – or from the face of the earth?

On a Soviet map, of course, the absence of a medium-sized inland sea could have been a case of cartographic manipulation. Krasnoyarsk-26 and Tomsk-7, cities where plutonium was produced on an industrial scale, were not on the map either. And if Soviet cartographers had been able to move entire mountain ranges along the Crimean (to camouflage the location of a submarine base), the airbrushing-away of a bay would not have been problematic. Who knows, perhaps the ‘industrial belt’ described by Paustovsky had been upgraded after 1932 to a testing ground for anthrax or mustard gas – with the bay at Kara Bogaz papered over to protect it from prying eyes.

The other possibility was that Paustovsky, by way of fictive decor, had concocted his own bulge on the Caspian. Novelists were free, after all, to conjure up landscapes – even though Soviet writers were admittedly bound to a factual, ‘socialist’ reality. In Paustovsky’s day, the writers’ motto had been ‘Down with all fantasies, aestheticism and artistic psycho-falsities’.

A third possibility occurred to me: could it be that maps and books of Soviet manufacture accurately reflected a socialist reality? And if so, how did that reality differ from ours?

With no more than the vaguest of notions about any of this, I resolved to find answers to these questions. To that end, I began making plans for two journeys: one to the bay at Kara Bogaz (or in any event to the spot where Paustovsky claimed it was) and another, imaginary but parallel to the first, straight through Soviet literature.

Maxim Gorky’s brain is kept in a preserving jar at the Moscow Institute of Neurology. It weighs 1,420 grams, and slices of it have been examined under the microscope for traces of genius.

In the late afternoon of 18 June 1936, only a few hours after the passing of ‘this brilliant littérateur and selfless friend of the workingman’, both hemispheres were lifted from his skull and handed over to Soviet science. A white-coated laboratory assistant immediately set about making plaster casts. ‘And so the size and pattern of the grooves and meanders has been preserved for all time,’ Pravda reported.

The same evening, the Kremlin’s official sculptor was called in to make Gorky’s death mask. For more than sixty-five years that relic has been lying on the little table beside his pristinely made-up bed. It stares at you hollow-eyed, the moustache neatly combed, the lips bearing just the hint of a smile.

On orders from Stalin himself, Gorky’s residence on Malaya Nikitskaya was sealed that very day: in accordance with the letter of the Party leader’s instructions, not a single umbrella stand was to be moved.

I had passed the Gorky House many times before without noticing the mosaic flowers on the facade. But now that I had come to satisfy my curiosity about the writer’s home, I paid closer attention. It was a cold and dank October day. The pavement glistened with rain, and with every gust of wind a lime tree scattered bunches of autumn leaves like pamphlets in the air. In a literary guide to the capital, I had read that the Gorky House was built in 1900 under commission from Stepan Ryabushinsky, a God-fearing merchant who, at the tender age of twenty-six, was already among Moscow’s twenty richest inhabitants. An art-lover and collector of religious icons, Ryabushinshky had opted for a villa in art nouveau style, an angular colossus with a minimum of ostentation on the outside.

Beneath a pillared balcony, a cast-iron grille hid the entrance from view. Visitors to the ‘Gorky House Museum’ were shown around to the servants’ entrance, where a creaky wooden landing led to the cloakroom. It was as cold inside as it was out, but the babushka behind the counter insisted that I leave my coat with her – she undoubtedly lived off the tips.

Cardboard arrows pinned to the walls showed the way into the house itself. I entered an impressively high hallway, where a staircase of natural stone cascaded like a frozen waterfall.

‘Young man!’ An attendant sitting beside an electric radiator called me to order. Had I perhaps overlooked the box of rental slippers? I squatted down to tie the felt pads to the soles of my shoes, allowing me to polish the parquet rather than dirty it.

From the staircase I coasted into the parlour. The elegant curves of the wooden door frames were sumptuous, if not quite baroque. Two entwined serpents held a gas lamp aloft.

How, I wondered, could a ‘proletarian writer’ like Gorky have felt at home amid such furnishings?

Opposite the library a set of double doors opened onto the space assigned to Pyotr, Gorky’s private secretary, whose daily labour it was to sort through mountains of incoming and outgoing post. Passing an umbrella stand, I found myself in Gorky’s spacious office. The room was dominated by a huge desk covered with a mat of green felt, a sort of billiard table without the cushions. His spectacles and fountain pen still lay beneath a reading lamp; the coat hanging on the rack was Gorky’s own.

So this was where the restless Alexey Peshkov had found refuge at last. After countless wanderings it was as Maxim Gorky – ‘The Bitter One’ – that he had come home to Moscow, where Stalin brooded over him like a foster-father.

Judging from the photos on the sideboard, the Father of the Country had been a frequent visitor. In one picture he sits beside Gorky on a leather divan which – now behind a barrier of ornamental braid – is still there to be admired. The writer is wearing an arty Uzbek skullcap and plucking at his bristly moustache. Stalin has his legs crossed. His boots gleam.

In a letter to a French writer-friend, Gorky remarked: ‘I am blamed for being on the side of the Bolsheviks, who renounce freedom. Yes, I am on their side, and precisely because I am for the freedom of all honest workers, and against the freedom of parasites and charlatans.’

It was only natural that my own voyage through Soviet letters should begin with Gorky. In his 1948 handbook, Ten Centuries of Russian Literature, Johan Daisne, chief librarian of the city of Ghent, characterised him as ‘the heart and soul of all of Soviet literature’. Gorky was not only president of the powerful Union of Soviet Writers set up by Stalin in the 1930s, but actually held membership card number 1. By means of bursaries and travel grants he kept the nation’s literary talent moving, while at the same time subjecting it to the filter of his criticism. ‘One can rightfully claim that virtually all Soviet writers owed something, often a great deal, sometimes everything, to him […] they were discovered, or trained, by him,’ Daisne writes.

Konstantin Paustovsky spoke of a unique ‘Gorky feeling’: the sensation that the old man was permanently present in his life. He wrote: ‘People like Gorky constitute an epoch of their very own.’

It was shortly before leaving Amsterdam that I had first encountered his work, when a friend handed me a Penguin paperback. ‘Read it on the plane to Moscow,’ he counselled. ‘It will be a good warm-up.’ It was My Childhood, the first volume of Gorky’s autobiography: a book which starts with an unforgettable anecdote about frogs.

Alexey is a mere toddler. His father is lying on the floor of their home in a white robe, his toes spread strangely, copper coins on his eyelids. The boy’s mother sits beside the body, weeping and combing her husband’s hair. That afternoon, clutching his grandmother’s hand (‘she was all black and soft’), Alexey stands in the rain beside an open grave at the riverside. As the casket containing his father, felled by cholera, is lowered, he hears a croaking. There are frogs in the muddy grave; twisting their way out from beneath the pine planks, they hop up against the walls but fall back again and again, along with the clods under which the gravediggers are burying his father’s coffin.

On the way home, the little boy asks his grandmother: ‘Will the frogs be able to get out?’

‘No, they don’t stand a ghost of a chance, God help them!’

The story of the frog burial was the first I read of Gorky. Misery and misfortune follow in such hopeless succession that it is hard for the reader to imagine that this urchin will later have more laurels heaped upon him than any living writer before or since.

When Alexey is eleven, his hysterical, tubercular mother dies too. On the docks of Nizhni Novgorod he supports himself by manhandling cargo and stealing timber. One night in 1887, after losing his job as galley boy on the Volga steamer Goodness, the 19-year-old shoots himself in the chest. Although aimed at his heart, the bullet pierces only his left lung.

In the end, of course, the story of the orphan Alexey Peshkov is one of rags to riches – very much a Russian dream as well. Less than twenty years after attempting suicide he finds himself on the upper deck of the ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse as thousands of pennant-waving sympathisers along the Hudson welcome him to the New World. ‘Riot of Enthusiasm Greets Maxim Gorky’ was the next morning’s headline in the New York Times. ‘He is a socialist, not an anarchist, and will raise funds for revolution.’ His reception was given additional lustre with a banquet, and a speech by Mark Twain.

There, on the far side of the Atlantic, Gorky – by then world-famous for his vagabond stories – writes four anti-American pamphlets and a novel, The Mother. According to Daisne, The Mother is ‘a glorious work’, the birth of something entirely new in Russian literature: ‘The introduction of the grass-roots revolutionary, as opposed to the genteel rebel already familiar from Tolstoy.’

In his eyes, Gorky had ‘at last’ achieved an amalgam of realism and idealism: ‘The moaning and groaning is gone; the brisk, heroic tone of the new socialism has dawned.’ Lenin considered The Mother ‘a useful tool’.

In the blurb of my edition, Gorky’s best-read novel was lauded as ‘the unsurpassed document of social idealism’. The book begins like this:

Every day the factory whistle bellowed forth its shrill, roaring, trembling noises into the smoke-begrimed and greasy atmosphere of the working men’s suburb; and obedient to the summons of the power of steam, people poured out of little grey houses into the street. With sombre faces they hastened forward like frightened insects, their muscles stiff from lack of sleep.

The Mother served as model for what would become the Soviet school of writing. It was universally considered to be the first ‘socialist-realist’ novel, the prototype for a genre which Stalin, assisted by Gorky and his Union of Soviet Writers, would impose as a mandatory template in the 1930s.

Unlike My Childhood, The Mother is written in the style of the pamphleteer. The union activist Pavel Vlasov and his heroic mother are both straightforward characters; their struggle against the exploitation of the workers allows room for not a smidgen of doubt.

But what fascinated me most was that Maxim Gorky himself was infinitely more complex than his heroes. He was a self-made writer, an autodidact who had attended primary school for only a few years. In 1892, at the age of twenty-four, he’d lived among the vagrants of southern Russia and recorded their stories – working under the pen name ‘The Bitter One’ from the outset. His raw, unadorned realism was received with overwhelming enthusiasm, considered more authentic and closer to the bone than the socially engaged prose of the tennis-playing Count Tolstoy.

In a Russian society already rife with dissatisfaction with the authoritarian tsar, Gorky’s dialogues in the idiom of the outcast struck a nerve. Intoxicated by his national and international success, he then tried his hand at writing didactic drama and heroic, revolutionary verse such as ‘The Song of the Stormy Petrel’. With his slicked-back hair, pallid features and blue eyes he was becoming a living icon, and before the century was out he had achieved a reputation on a par with the writing physician Anton Chekhov.

Gorky, however, was more impetuous than his contemporaries. Still newly married to Yekaterina, an 18-year-old proofreader at the Samara Gazeta, he fell for the charms of the actress Maria Andreyeva, the leading lady in his play Night Asylum. The play’s premiere at Moscow’s Art Theatre in 1902 caused a scandal. ‘How it saddens us to live in a society that waxes enthusiastic for the stench, depravity and perversity of revolutionary sedition,’ the critic for The Messenger wrote.

From now on, whether he is in the Crimea, in Nizhni Novgorod or Petrograd, Gorky is shadowed by the Okhrana, the tsar’s secret police. In 1905, that tumultuous year of the revolution-that-was-not-to-be, he is the hero of strikers and mutineers. On the very evening of ‘Bloody Sunday’, when the Imperial Guard opens fire on a demonstration outside the Winter Palace and the fleeing factory workers fall in the snow like wounded rabbits, Gorky and his associates issue an appeal to popular revolt. ‘We call upon all citizens of Russia to commence immediately with the struggle against the autocracy, in brotherhood and with iron determination,’ their pamphlet reads. In a letter to Yekaterina, with whom – despite his assorted romances – he continues to be very close, he writes: ‘And so, my beloved, began the Russian Revolution. I extend to you my sincere congratulations. Lives have been lost, but do not let that discourage you… blood is the only thing that can change the colour of history.’

Two days later Gorky is tossed into the dungeons of the Peter and Paul Fortress, opposite the Winter Palace. Scientists and artists all over Europe, from Marie Curie to Auguste Rodin, demand his unconditional release. To relieve some of the pressure, the tsar has him set free on bail, and not long afterwards the enfeebled ruler announces a special amnesty for revolutionaries in exile – self-imposed or otherwise. And so it happens that Gorky in that same year meets with Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov on Russian soil. This prematurely balding lawyer, who has assumed the Party name ‘Lenin’, is a hot-tempered fellow with, as Gorky notes, an ‘ironic’ look in his eye. Their first meeting is an uneasy one, but the famous author decides to fund Lenin’s splinter party. From this point on their friendship will be marked by a mutual fondness, but also by irritation.

Gorky’s fund-raising for Lenin’s Bolsheviks takes him as far afield as America. But in February 1917, as soon as the hated tsar is actually deposed, he changes his mind and the intrepid revolutionary begins to distance himself from Lenin and his coterie. In a letter to Yekaterina, he gives vent to his feelings: ‘They are absolute idiots, these Bolsheviks. They walk down the street chanting: Down with the ten bourgeois ministers. What do you make of that!? There are only eight of them!’

Russia, now in the throes of a world war, is adrift. In the elegant streets of Petrograd, Gorky witnesses looting, vandalism and a lynching in the market square – ‘animal instincts’ which he believes Lenin encourages in his followers. The Bolsheviks see no reason to rein in the greedy paupers; consequently, everything refined and noble about the imperial city is being laid to waste. In his own newspaper, New Life, Gorky warns against the ‘Asiatic’ barbarism of the Russian peasants, which seems poised to overthrow the civilised ‘European’ culture of the cities. Had Rome not also been laid waste by barbarians? If this continues, he foresees ‘the return of the Middle Ages’, or worse: ‘a civil war’. Of Lenin, Gorky writes: ‘He does not know the people, he has never lived among them; he has only learned from books how to stir them up.’

On 25 October, a few days after the Bolsheviks finally seize power, the headline above Gorky’s main editorial reads: CIVILISATION IN DANGER! To curb the iconoclasm of the masses, he organises nightly vigils by intellectuals at palaces and monuments. But night after night, ‘citizen soldiers’ with fixed bayonets raid the courtyards of the rich. To the annoyance of the militiamen in their red armbands, Gorky takes in dozens of refugees: writers and poets fallen from favour, a strikingly beautiful baroness by the name of Benckendorff, even a grand duke actually related to the Romanovs.

Gorky launches broadsides at Lenin and Trotsky, calling them ‘firebrands carrying out a cruel experiment on the Russian people’.

‘Gorky welcomes the Revolution,’ Trotsky retorts, ‘like the chicken-hearted curator of an art museum.’

Gorky’s next volley, in his newspaper column: ‘Lenin and Trotsky have not the faintest idea what freedom is.’

Trotsky, livid now: ‘He is a counter-revolutionary.’

Alienated from his political associates, the popular author feels like a loner and an outcast – just like in the old days. The humanist who once, weeping with shame, pressed a banknote into the hand of a youthful prostitute, wonders aloud whether he is rapidly descending into misanthropy. ‘I should set up my own party,’ he writes to Yekaterina in March 1918. ‘But I wouldn’t know what to call it. It’s a party with only one member: me.’

That month Trotsky signs the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans, but peace immediately gives way to another war: this time within Russia, between the Reds and the Whites. Wasting no time, the Bolsheviks immediately impose the rule of

Reviews for Engineers of the Soul

[anisoara-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I feel compelled to write a review (I usually just rate my books) as I, unlike the other reviewer so far, have found this to be a very tight book. The life of Konstantin Paustovsky provides its narrative backbone, and the disappearing bay at Kara Bogaz - its focal point. At various nodes along the way, where Paustovsky's narrative intertwines or intersects with the stories of other Soviet writers, Westerman elaborates on those writers as well, and how their own lives and writing are affected by the narrative of Soviet literary policy. There's no denying that this policy ruined some of the Soviet Union's finest writers, such as Andrey Platonov, and left others writing for the desk drawer. What makes this book highly unusual is its theme of despots and massive waterworks. I'm not sure yet that I'm entirely convinced, but I also think that Westerman is onto something!

[steve38 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A good attempt to give us a contemporary perspective on Russian writers active during the Stalinist period and a little beyond. Western interest is often too focused on dissidents and expatriates rather than those who continued to work in Russia and had great popularity. But it suffers from some of the usual set backs. Writers are always seen as struggling against the political system and trying to give hidden subversive messages in their work. This may or may not be true but what is overlooked is that they are in simple terms Russian patriots. As writers from all cultures do they are reflecting the life they see around them. Many of the writers were apolitical. Is is not necessary to try to find a triumphant, McCarthy style anti-communist message in everything.Mr Westerman took an imaginative route in visiting the remote site on the Eastern shore of the Caspian Sea that was the location of one of Paustovsky's books. A good attempt at intepretive pyschogeography. He also did well in talking to living relatives in a sympathetic and non-intrusive way. But he sometimes gets a little lost in the various by-ways he takes and though not necessarily needing a neat conclusion the book in the end seems to lack an overall purpose.