Vivid account of labours of Soviet writers

BOOK OF THE DAY: CARLA KINGreviews Engineers of the Soul: In the Footsteps of Stalin's WritersBy Frank Westerman Translated by Sam Garrett Harvill Secker, 306 pp, £14.99

ON THE evening of October 26th, 1932, 40 of Russia’s leading writers were summoned to Maxim Gorky’s Moscow mansion. The meeting, attended by Stalin and several other Politburo members, marked in effect the official inauguration of “socialist realism” in literature.

It was here that Stalin outlined the task for writers remaking Soviet men and women: they were to be “engineers of the soul”. Over the next three decades, rigid conformity was imposed on the arts – not only literature but also visual art and music – to a formula sometimes epitomised as “boy meets tractor”.

Literature was to be optimistic, aiming to glorify the revolution and portray its heroes and heroines as “salt of the earth”, hard-working, clean-living and honest. The language was to be accessible to all, devoid of complexity or fantasy.

It might be assumed that little of value could be produced within such restrictions, but there were always those who would not or could not adopt the strictures of socialist realism, writers such as Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova. Even the most compliant sometimes chafed under the limitations imposed by the censors.

Engineers of the Soulis woven around Westerman's investigation of Kara Bogaz, the novel that in 1932 made Konstantin Paustovsky famous as one of the Soviet Union's leading socialist realist writers of the Stalin years.

The book’s subject was a project to extract salt from Kara Bogaz, a bay in the Caspian Sea.

But when, in 2000, Westerman, a Dutch journalist working in Moscow, tried to seek it out, the book had disappeared from libraries. The bay too, disappeared, following the construction of a dam in 1980. So we have Kara Bogaz,a vanishing novel, its hero based on a real individual, Yakov Rubenstein, who vanished into Stalin's prisons, a vanishing bay, and a visit by Paustovsky, which, it emerges, he never actually made.

Westerman's account is much more than his search for Kara Bogaz.It is a voyage of discovery of three decades of Soviet writing – part literary history, part travelogue. He traces and interviews writers' families; visits Gorky's apartment, the White Sea Canal and the remains of a prison camp on the Solovetski Islands; investigates what is left of the famous writers' colony Peredelkino; and eventually makes it to the shores of Kara Bogaz.

It is also a portrayal of the hubris of Soviet engineers and the appalling effects of their dream of perebroska– reversing the course of the major Russian rivers using the slave labour of gulag prisoners. Vast tracts of land were destroyed by salt, fish and wildlife perished, and engineers were executed when plans failed.

Even the most accommodating of the socialist realists could fall foul of the censors. Books and manuscripts were burned, though more often they were pulped. Poets and authors were disgraced and sometimes executed. Even Paustovsky had his moments of rebellion.

This is a terrific read, with vivid, well-researched and reflective insights into Soviet society. Westerman’s study may encourage more sympathetic and nuanced readings of socialist realist literature, as well as more sensitivity to the efforts by writers of the period to express themselves despite the compulsory verbiage about tractors and dams.

Carla King is a lecturer in modern history at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra