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Irina Grekova's “Na Ispytaniiakh”: The History of One Story

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2017

Adele Barker
Adele Barker*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
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Extract

In 1967 Irina Grekova's story “Na ispytaniiakh” was published in Novyi mir. The story depicts a unit of the Red Army on maneuvers in the summer of 1952 in a backwoods area of Russia. Grekova refrained from using the usual gloss reserved for such institutions as the Red Army and within several months was forced to resign from her job as professor of mathematics at the Zhukovskii Military Academy. The story was attacked by the party and, on orders of General Aleksei Epishev, chief of the political administration of the army, banned from army libraries. Twenty years later, in 1986, “Na ispytaniiakh” reappeared in a collection of Grekova's works entitled Porogi. The recent version of the story has been subject to various editorial changes, most of which concern the Stalin years. These revisions illuminate the party's changing attitude towards the Stalin era and specifically show which facets of Stalinism the party was more open about during the late Chcrnenko–early Gorbachev era and which were still too sensitive to be discussed openly.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , Fall 1989 , pp. 399 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1989

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References

This article profited grently from the help of my colleagues Alex Do Jonge, Maurice Friedberg, Val Golovskoy, Peter Maggs, and Roza Simkhovich.

1. Grekova, Irina “Na ispytaniiakh,” Novyi mir, no. 7 (1967).Google Scholar

2. Svirski, Cirigori, Soviet Writing: The Literature of Moral Opposition, trans, and ed. Dessaix, Robert and Ulman, Michael (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1981): 330 Google Scholar.

3. Grekova, Irina. “Na ispytaniiakh.” Porogi (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1986)Google Scholar.

4. See Dina Spechler on the rise and fall of Novyi mir under Aleksandr Tvardovskii's tutelage: Spechler, Dina, Permitted Dissent in the USSR: Novyi mir and the Soviet Regime (New York: Praeger, 1982): 215–218 Google Scholar.

5. See Skvortsov, L. I., “V zhanre damskoi povesti (o iazyke i stile povesti I. Grekovoi ‘Na ispytaniiakh’),” in Russkaia rech', no. 1 (January–February 1968): 26–35 Google Scholar.

6. De Jonge, Alex, Statin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union (New York: Morrow, 1986): 334 Google Scholar.

7. See D'Encausse, Hélène Carrère, Stalin: Order Through Terror, trans. lonescu, Valence (London: Longman, 1981): 50 Google Scholar.

8. Dunham, Vera, In Stalin's Time: Middle Class Values in Soviet Fiction (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974): 37 Google Scholar. What manifests itself as a disease in Soviet literature is termed by Yurii Glazov “behavioral bilingualism,” which, in his view, distinguished Stalinist society. “Bilingualism is that mode of behavior in accordance with which a member of a given society, while more or less soberly understanding the essence of what is going on around him, conducts himself with absolute conformism on the official level, whereas in a narrow circle of friends or among his own family members he expresses well-considered or even extremist viewpoints which refute the basic principles of the official world outlook” (The Russian Mind Since Stalin's Death [Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985]: 11).

9. Dunham makes the point relative to plumbing that at no time after 1917 were bursting pipes admired since, among other things, the revolution had been fought in the name of economic equality (In Stalin's Time, p. 51). Lenin, in predicting the demise of the gold standard, used the image of toilets to make his point. “When we win on a worldwide scale, we, I think, shall make solid gold public toilets on the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.” (Lenin, Sochineniia, 2nd-3rd ed. [Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1931] 17: 82). Clearly, plumbing became a point by which the average Russian measured the improvement of life after the revolution.

10. Dunham, In Stalin's Time, 194.

11. In an article Grekova wrote in 1983 entitled “Razvetvleniia dorog” (Oktiabr', no. 10 [1983|: 192–197), she spoke openly about her disenchantment with Soviet proofreaders: “As a writer the lack of ceremony with which the proofreaders arbitrarily throw their weight about in an author's text distresses me—they change the punctuation, they replace all the ‘nonstandard’ punctuation marks with the one universal comma. How to convince them that by doing this something very important—the author's intonation—is destroyed?” One can easily extrapolate from Grekova's remarks that her disenchantment probably extends into the whole area of editorial control as well.

12. Grekova, Irina, “Real Life in Real Terms,” Moscow News, no. 24 (1987): 11 Google Scholar.