Viktor Erofeev. Khoroshii Stalin. Roman.

Szarycz, Ireneusz

Viktor Erofeev. Khoroshii Stalin. Roman. Moscow: ZebraE, 2004. 384 pp. Hardcover.

Viktor Erofeev's most recent novel, a kind of Bildungsroman entitled Khoroshii Stalin (The Good Stalin), was published two years ago in Moscow. The novel was written at the request of the journal Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The title is provocative, especially in Germany, where the novel came out in Berlin under the title Der gute Stalin (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2004), and in Poland (Dobry Stalin. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 2005). The situation is different in Russia where, according to Erofeev, sixty-five percent of the population considers Stalin a hero and believes that Stalin was the country's defender and its saviour. This is rather an unusual phenomenon in the country that suffered so much from the hands of its own "father": "I have grown up and understood a thing or two"--writes Erofeev--"for the West and the great majority of the Russian intelligentsia, Stalin means one thing; for many millions of Russians, he means another. They do not believe in a bad Stalin. They cannot believe that Stalin could ever have tortured or killed. The people have created their image of a good Stalin, saviour of Russia, father of a great nation. My father walked together with the people. Do not insult Stalin!" (134).

In one of the interviews given on May 12, 2005, while promoting his new novel in Poland, Erofeev admitted that he would like to see the day when the title The Good Stalin would sound provocative in his homeland as well, but he had serious doubts if this could happen anytime soon. It is not surprising in the view of the recent events in Moscow, where Russian President Vladimir Putin put on a great show during the May 9, 2005 celebration of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. Putin's glorification of the past and the figure of Stalin may be viewed as his attempt to divert attention from the failures of the present. The ceremony was full of symbols of the past: hammer and sickle flags, portraits of Lenin, commemorative posters with Stalin's picture, displays of Soviet military machinery, and the "Victory Train" that arrived in Moscow's Belarusskii train station with a giant portrait of Stalin on its engine. In other Russian cities such as Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), the local Communist Party has proposed changing the city's name back to Stalingrad; in the eastern Siberian city of Mirnyi, a new Stalin statue was one of the centerpieces of the celebrations. A few hundred miles outside of Moscow, leaders of the city of Orel recently called for the restoration of Stalin memorials previously removed from the city and the return of Stalin's name to streets that had been renamed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although Putin himself did not praise Stalin directly (he recently even called him a tyrant), the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis proved that there is an open move in the Kremlin to resurrect and rehabilitate Stalin.

Erofeev, as a son of a high-ranking Soviet diplomat--who was a convinced communist, an adviser to Molotov, and a temporary interpreter to Stalin--experienced a privileged luxurious lifestyle in Russia as well as in France. Erofeyev's father, to whom the book is dedicated, is the good Stalin of the title; he was convinced that the Soviet system was superior to that of capitalism, but Viktor, despite all the privileges, did not share his father's conviction. Erofeev begins his novel with the sentence: "In the end, I killed my father" (7). This is a reference to the political death of the father and to the birth of the son as a free (dissident) writer in 1979: together with Vasilii Aksenov and some other independent thinking friends, Erofeev started and co-edited Metropol, an unofficial literary almanac, which provoked a political scandal. Erofeev does not fail to cite in his novel from French and English newspaper reports on the Soviet attack on the independent literary magazine: "Cinq ecrivains: Vassili Axionov (dont les oeuvres sont connues en France telles que Billets pour les etoiles ou Notre ferraille en or); Andrei Bitov, Viktor Erofeiev (critique et homonyme de l'auter de Moscou sur vodka); Fasyi Iskander (ecrivain installe en Abhazie) et Eugene Popov (jeune porte sibirien) ont publie une revue en dehors des circuits officials; en refusant de se soumettre h une quelconque censure" (17); and in English (quoted with spelling mistakes): "Soviet authorities have begun a campaign of harrassment and threat to intimidate the founders of a new inofficial litetary magazine that seeks to chalange state controle of the arts" (32-33).

The Good Stalin is about the history of Erofeev's family--his father, his mother, his own "happy Stalinist childhood" (19), and his youth. Of course, Erofeev would not be Erofeev if he did not try to confuse his readers from the first pages of the novel: "All characters in this book are fictional, including the real people and the author himself" (7). So it is an autobiography disguised as a novel, but most of all it is a book about Erofeev's path to becoming a writer despite strong opposition from his family: "She [Erofeev's grandmother] always spoke about writers with disrespect, and she took it very hard when she learned that I had become a writer" (57). His father, after the episode with II'ia Ehrenburg, whose article was rejected by Molotov for its anti-German content, turned against all writers and Russian intelligentsia: "Father nursed a grievance against Ehrenburg, and against all writers altogether, for life [ ... ]" (119).

"The writer's popularity is a shadow of power," writes Erofeev on page 101 of the novel, which can also be looked at as the author's rebellion against the entire Soviet literature, the Soviet literary establishment and, finally, against his own family. By breaking the taboo against certain themes (sex, rape, pornography, the party's and family's secrets), Erofeev makes an effort to step out from this shadow, for he himself "never became a Soviet man" [313]. Writing about one's own family, invading its privacy by disclosing its secrets, was the most difficult task while working on the novel, admits Erofeev in one of his internet chats with the Polish readership. As if justifying the choice of the title for the novel, Erofeev writes: "I know: my father is a good Stalin. Every family is a Communist cell. The father is master: he loves, he hates. Stalin took all Russians for children--that is what they are. I never saw my father drunk" [148-149]. Erofeev's relationship with his family (especially with his father) will appear crucial for his development as an independent writer, and in the novel he deals with his "lucky Stalinist childhood" and the history of Stalinist Russia on his own terms. It is possible that writing about the experiences was like therapy, freeing him from the nightmares and demons of the past.

Erofeev's book is a powerful story of the author's courage and determination to start a new life, building on a difficult past while not forgetting it.

Ireneusz Szarycz

University of Waterloo