Much of the research for this article was assisted by generous support from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies and from the Center for Soviet and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

1. Born Boris Andreevich Vogau on 11 October 1894, Pil'niak died after his arrest in October 1937. The official date of his death was long in dispute ( Reck, Vera, Boris Pil'niak: A Soviet Writer in Conflict with the State [Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1975], 1–2 Google Scholar). His best known works in the West are Golyi god (1922), “Povest’ nepogashennoi luny” (1926), and Krasnoe derevo (1929). Until recently Soviet readers were unfamiliar with these last two works. A nearly complete bibliography of his work can be found in Browning, Gary, Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985), 221–237.Google Scholar

2. Pil'niak seems to have antagonized most of his colleagues in the literary world; see Jensen, Peter Alberg, Nature as Code: The Achievement of Boris Pilnjak, 1915-1924 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1979), 91–94 Google Scholar and Browning, Pilniak, 18-19. His unpopularity extended to many in the Russian emigre community, perhaps because he encouraged emigre writers to return to Soviet Russia; see Fleishman, Lazar, Hughes, Robert, Raevsky-Hughes, Olga, eds., Russkii Berlin, 1921-1923: Po materialam arkhiva B.I. Nikolaevskogo v Guverovskom Institute (Paris: YMCA, 1983), 189 Google Scholar. See Jensen, Nature, 64-66, for a discussion of Pil'niak's renown, particularly his overnight fame following the publication of Golyi god. An early discussion of the unacceptability of Pil'niak's political stance can be found in Aleksandr Voronskii's introductory article to Boris Pil'niak, Rasskazy (Moscow: Nikitinskie subbotniki, 1927), 5. The continued difficulty of evaluating Pil'niak's prose separately from his political views is apparent from the recent republication of “Povest’ nepogashennoi luny,” a story distinguished more by its political significance than by its literary merit (Znamia, 12 [1987]: 105-128). In a short review of the story, Vladimir Gusev notes that critics still fail to evaluate Pil'niak's work according to literary criteria (Gusev, “Muchitel'nyi prizrak nochi: Boris Pil'niak i ego Povest'…,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 13 January 1988, no. 2 [5172]: 4).

3. Sympathetic Soviet critics often take pains to separate Pil'niak from the modernist tradition. See, for example, V. V. Novikov's comment that Pil'niak “otkazalsia ot modernizma, pereshel na pozitsii realizma” (Novikov, “Tvorcheskii put’ Borisa Pil'niaka,” in B. Pil'niak, lzbrannye proizvedeniia [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1976], 5). Iu. A. Andreev in his positive evaluation of Pil'niak's prose sees Pil'niak's association with the movement as a mistake from which the writer later recanted and speaks “o bol'shom periode, s” edennom v biografii B. Pil'niaka modernizmom” (Andreev, Revoliutsiia i literatura [Leningrad: Nauka, 1969], 122, 175).

4. Pil'niak's contemporary Viktor Gofman notes that Pil'niak is only superficially derivative of Andrei Belyi ( “skhodstvo v metode A. Belogo i Pil'niaka chisto vneshnee, poverkhnostnoe” ). Gofman's preference for the “organic” prose of the older writer is clear in his negative characterization of Pil'niak's works as “imitatsii stilisticheskikh priemov A. Belogo” (Gofman, “Mesto Pil'niaka,” Boris Pil'niak, Stat'i i material) [Letchworth: Prideaux, 1977], 13, 16). Pil'niak's own comments help explain the tendency to see Pil'niak as an imitator of the older writers. Pil'niak was one of the authors of Belyi's necrology, for instance, in which he, Boris Pasternak, and Grigorii Sannikov identified themselves as Belyi's pupils (hvestiia, 9 January 1934, no. 8 [5256]: 4). Pil'niak acknowledged a debt to Aleksei Remizov, the master “u kotorogo ia byl podmaster'em,” in the dedication of his story “Mat'-machekha,” published in Pil'niak's Sobranie sochinenii, 8 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo, 1930) 4: 104. Patricia Carden has argued that Pil'niak wrote as if “outward imitation of the [ornamental] style would produce the inner harmony” found in Belyi, Remizov, and Velimir Khlebnikov. Carden sees Pil'niak as an imitator of modernism who “achieved a kind of skillful surface resemblance” to the movement. Carden, “Ornamentalism and Modernism,” Russian Modernism: Culture and the Avant-Garde, 1900-1930, ed. George Gibian and H. W. Tjalsma (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), 61, 62. Carden uses the term ornamentalism to refer to “the appearance of Modernism in Russian prose” (ibid., 49).

5. Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 189. Steiner bases most of her argument on the example of western European and American artists, but her comments are applicable to certain aspects of the Russian avant-garde.

6. His comments are reported by Livshits, Benedikt, Polutoraglazyi strelets (New York: Izdatel'stvo im. Chekhova, 1978), 20.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., 24.

8. Pil'niak, “Otryvki iz dnevnika,” Pisateli ob iskusstve i o sebe: sbornik statei, no. 1 (Moscow-Leningrad: Krug, 1924), 87, 89.Google Scholar

9. Poggioli calls this approach avant-garde scientificism in Poggioli, Renato, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Fitzgerald, Gerald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1968), 140.Google Scholar

10. The reference is from an archival source quoted in Jensen, Nature, 59.

11. As Carol Avins points out, Mashiny i Volki focuses on the “image of an awakened Russia standing in opposition to an increasingly moribund Europe.” The machine is “essentially Western,” although Pil'niak attempts to incorporate it into the Russian identity: Avins, Border Crossings: The West and Russian Identity in Soviet Literature: 1917-1934 (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1983), 39.

12. Pil'niak, Boris, Mashiny i Volki (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971), 91 Google Scholar. This passage separates Pil'niak from those modernists who see the machine as “an end rather than a means … as more valuable than anything it produces” (Poggioli, Theory, 140).

13. SS 5: 259-259.

14. Ibid., 259.

15. Ibid. This comment suggests the opposition between the east and west that Avins and others have noted.

16. The problem with this kind of art, as Pil'niak clearly understood, is that it may have no communicative function. In his answer to a questionnaire published by Izdatel'stvo pisatelei in Leningrad in 1930, Pil'niak noted that “u kazhdogo pisatelia pervyi, reshaiushchii i edinstvennyi chitatel’ — on sam, v plane sub” ektivnom konechno.” If the message becomes too self-referential, the writer becomes the only person capable of comprehending his own message. See Belyi, Andrei et al., Kak my pishem (Benson, Vt.: Chalidze, 1983), 125.Google Scholar

17. Isaak, Jo-Anna, “The Revolution of a Poetics,” in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. Chefdor, Monique, Quinones, Ricardo, and Wachtel, Albert (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 162 Google Scholar. Isaak is referring to T. S. Eliot's neoclassicism.

18. Mashiny i Volki, 165.

19. Ibid., 166.

20. Ibid., 167.

21. Ibid., 165.

22. Ibid., 167.

23. Victor Serge testifies that Pil'niak hoped to make a novel “agreeable to the Central Committee” and was working on Volga vpadaet v Kaspiiskoe more with Nikolai Ezhov, who had been assigned to him as a co-author by the cultural section of the Central Committee; Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901-1941, trans. Peter Sedgwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 269. Max Eastman reports that Pil'niak's editor, I. M. Gronskii, came up with the idea of reworking Krasnoe derevo into a “form of propaganda for socialist construction and the five-year plan”: Eastman, Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (New York: Octagon, 1972): 121. Vera Reck details some of the changes Pil'niak made in revising Krasnoe derevo, but she notes that Pil'niak's half-hearted attempt to distance himself from the earlier text was not successful. Commenting that the title was taken from a story by Anton Chekhov in which it served as an ironic symbol of accepted truth, Reck notes that contemporary critics understood it as a “simple statement of fact—a derisive comment on man's puny efforts to change Nature: the Volga falls into the Caspian Sea, always has, and always will” (Reck, Pil'niak, 168).

24. Mashiny i Volki, 6.

25. SS 1: 29.

26. Ibid., 29, 30.

27. The same fear characterizes Pil'niak's reaction to the sale of his personal letters to a literary museum in his story “Prostranstvo i vremia,” Novyi mir 3(1934): 9-11.

28. SS 1: 30.

29. Ibid.

30. In the new collection, for example, Pil'niak places the more conventional, early story “Tselaia zhizn'” in the context of the innovative “Rasplesnutoe vremia,” thereby assuring a fresh interpretation of the earlier story, which in its new company seems more starkly modern and unusual (SS 5.5-26).

31. Ibid., 1: 30.

32. Ibid., 31. Pil'niak, thus, tries simultaneously to emphasize what he has contributed and indicate what still needs to be done.

33. Korni iaponskogo solntsa (Leningrad: Priboi, 1927) and SS 7: 7-117.

34. Kamni i korni: Kommentarii i obvinenie pisateliam, was first published in Novyi mir 4 (1933): 5-46 and 7-8(1933): 87-155. The work was reissued as a separate volume twice, both times with editorial changes. See Kamni i korni (Moscow: Sovetskaia literatura, 1934) and Kamni i korni (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1935).

35. Kamni i korni (1935), 60. The idea of commenting on his own works intrigued Pil'niak as early as 1921 when he had plans to publish a short piece with his own commentary and “pustit’ ego kak ‘istoricheskii’ moment…. Eto bylo by ochen’ liubopytno — kogda avtor sam sebe istorik” (see N. Iu. Griakalova, “Pis'ma Borisa Pil'niaka V. S. Miroliubovu i D. A. Lutokhinu,” Russkaia literatura 2 [1989]: 219).

36. “Kamni i korni,” Novyi mir, 7-8(1933): 155.

37. I. M. Gronskii, “Zakliuchitel'naia rech'na vtorom plenume Orgkomiteta SSP SSSR,” Novyi mir 2 (1933): 258-259. The “new book” referred to is Kamni i korni.

38. la. A. Bronshtein, for example, suggested that the self-critical method Pil'niak used in reworking Komi iaponskego solutsa should serve as a model for other writers. See Bronshtein's comments in Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s “ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934: Stenograficheskiij otchet, (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1934), 219. Reck mentions Bronshtein's suggestion in her final chapter, which is devoted to this aspect of Pil'niak's work (Reck, Pil'niak, 187).

39. Gronskii, “Zakliuchitel'naia rech',” 258, 259 (quotations). Gronskii, a long-time supporter and sometime protector of Pil'niak, most likely spoke with the knowledge and approval of Pil'niak himself.

40. Max Eastman mentions this possibility in his ascerbic comment that Pil'niak “is so glib with apologies, and watery with tears of contrition, that his enemies will tell you he is playing for the day of the counter-revolution. ‘Didn't you see I was mocking them all the time?’ he will say” (Eastman, Artists in Uniform, 108). Eastman's comments, first published in 1934, seem appropriate to many of the passages of Kamni i korni.

41. The recent furor over allegedly anti-Semitic articles written by deconstructionist critic Paul de Man raises similar questions about the meaning of the individual biography in relation to the modernist text.

42. SS 1: 30.

43. Wendy Steiner uses this phrase in Colors of Rhetoric, 93.

44. Hongor Oulanoff, The Serapion Brothers (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), 57.

45. “Mal'chik iz Trail,” SS 5: 248.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., 250, 252, 253.

48. The reference to Myron, a classical sculptor whose works we know only through their written description, is ironic. According to Gombrich, none of Myron's pieces has survived; see Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Washington, D.C.: Pantheon, 1965), 141.

49. SS 5: 259-260. He would have been heartened, we may assume, by the recent publication of “forgotten” manuscripts edited by his son B. B. Andronikashvili. Vera Reck reports that most of Pil'niak's unpublished writings were destroyed at the time of his arrest in 1937. The draft of a final novel “Solianoi ambar” was buried in the garden of Pil'niak's home in Peredel'kino (Reck, Pil'niak, 3). Several chapters of this work were published in the journal Moskva 5(1964): 97-132. The entire manuscript is now kept in the Central State Archives in Moscow; see Browning, Pilniak, 231, and Browning, “Pil'njak's Solianoi ambar: Commentary on its Unpublished Part,” Russian Language Journal 32 (Spring 1978): 89-100.

50. SS 5: 254.

51. Ibid., 260.

52. Ibid., 254, 260 (quotations).

53. Mashirty i volki, 6.