Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar Extended Edition: Extended Edition

By Yuri Tynianov

This Extended Edition of Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar provides the fascinating and invaluable background to one of the greatest novels of the Soviet Era. Susan Causey spent seven years  researching and translating Tynianov's masterpiece. The Extended Edition brings all that work together. 

Her Introduction pl

• Language: English
• Publisher: Look Multimedia
• Release date: Sep 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781999981549

Yuri Tynianov

Yuri Tynianov (1894-1943) was a Russian writer and literary theorist, and a central figure among the revolutionary-era scholars who came to be known as the Russian Formalists.

Book preview

DEATH OF THE

VAZIR-MUKHTAR

EXTENDED EDITION

THE PLOT

Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar tells the story of the last year in the life of Alexander Griboyedov, a diplomat and playwright in the Russia of Tsar Nicholas I. The novel takes him from being feted in St Petersburg in March 1828, as the successful negotiator of a peace treaty with Persia, through his return to Persia as the tsar’s Vazir-Mukhtar (Minister Plenipotentiary) and his death at the hands of a Tehran mob in January 1829.

On this simple arc Yuri Tynianov hangs a rich, multilayered exploration of Griboyedov’s interior life and Russian society. Allusions, metaphors and meditations mix with dreams, dinner parties, affairs and negotiations to create a whirling, immersive experience. Tynianov uses the techniques he developed as a leader of the Formalist school of criticism to make his story vivid, unexpected and forward driving.

First a poetic prologue recalls the short-lived officers’ revolt of December 1825 and the disillusionment which followed. The contradiction between Griboyedov’s commitments – to serving the Tsar’s imperialist ambitions on one hand and to his Decembrist friends and his writing on the other – is an underlying note throughout.

In St Petersburg Griboyedov is presented to the Tsar, negotiates with senior ministers, takes up with former mistresses and generally enjoys his celebrity. Travelling to Persia he stops for months in Tiflis and consummates an obsession by marrying a very young Georgian princess. In Tehran he faces down the Shah and his cabinet of eunuchs but falls victim to a religious djakhat. The final coda picks up on the story told by Pushkin of meeting Griboyedov’s coffin on its journey back to Russia.

THE HERO

Alexander Griboyedov (1795-1829) was a conflicted figure in 1820s Russia, as both a distinguished diplomat on behalf of the Tsar and the author of a widely read play satirising Tsarism’s corruption and stagnation. He became a diplomat by joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after his father died leaving heavy debts. That gave him an entree to St Petersburg social and literary circles, but after getting involved in a notorious duel he was obliged to leave the capital in 1819 for a posting in Persia.

As a diplomat Griboyedov, based both in Tehran and Tiflis (now Tbilisi), was deeply involved in the wars between the Russian, Turkish and Persian empires. This kept him out of harm’s way in 1825 when the Decembrists launched their brief revolt against the new Tsar Nicholas I. He went on to achieve a major success by negotiating the 1828 Treaty of Turkmanchai which imposed onerous peace terms on Persia.

In this period Griboyedov also wrote his most famous work Woe from wit (Gore ot uma). Banned by the censor, the play circulated in thousands of hand-written copies in the months before the December Revolution. It is still seen as a major work of Russian literature, setting Griboyedov alongside his friend Pushkin.

Look MultiMedia

Translated by Susan Causey from

Смерть Вазир-Мухтара (Smert’ Vazir-Mukhtara) by Yuri Tynianov

First published in the USSR 1927-28

Extended Edition published by Look Multimedia Ltd 2019

Translation and Edited Translation © Leo Causey 2018

Additional material in the Extended Edition © Leo Causey 2019

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-9999815-3-2

ISBN 978-1-9999815-4-9 (e-book)

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THE AUTHOR

Yuri Tynianov (1894-1943) was one of the brave and talented young people of the Russian Revolution, a trailblazer of innovation in literary theory, and also an author, screenwriter, poet and translator. The son of a Jewish doctor, he went up to Saint Petersburg in 1912 and married while still a student, scrambling between jobs to support his family. A hugely popular lecturer and thinker, he taught at several institutions, did a variety of publishing work and wrote screenplays for the Sevzapkino studio.

His literary criticism as a member of the Formalist group is still highly regarded, but Tynianov’s greatest legacy is his meticulously researched fiction. Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar has been described as the most extraordinary historical novel one could read. Lieutenant Kizhé inspired a film and one of Prokovief’s most-loved scores. Both were written at Tynianov’s literary peak in 1926-28, just as a long-term illness – multiple sclerosis – tightened its grip on him.

By then Stalin was also tightening his grip and time had run out for the Leningrad spring. Tynianov wrote more novellas and a biographical novel Pushkin while earning his living mainly as an editor. Illness increasingly limited him. When war came he was evacuated from the siege of Leningrad and died in Moscow.

THE TRANSLATION

Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar has never been fully translated into English until now. A version by Alec Brown was published in 1938 as Death and Diplomacy in Persia but it omits key parts such as the prologue. Susan Causey, an editor and journalist, who worked extensively on Russian cultural projects in the 1990s and 2000s, saw the need for a good translation. She completed the work over five years as a retirement project but was killed in a road accident before she had the opportunity to publish it. Her husband, Andrew Causey, died shortly afterwards.

Friends of the Causeys worked with their two sons to recover the manuscript and show it to several experienced Russianist translators and academics. Their assessment was very favourable. Tim Johnson, a long-term friend and colleague of the Causeys, took on the task of publishing it. He was able to commission Vera Tsareva-Brauner, lecturer in translation at the University of Cambridge, to edit the translation from the point of view of a native Russian speaker. This version was completed in December 2017 and is published by Look Multimedia in online and hard-copy formats.

Susan Causey spent about seven years working on Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar. Besides making the translation, she researched extensive Explanatory Notes, wrote a panoramic Introduction and compiled a Bibliography. Her work has now been brought together with the novel in this Extended Edition. The Introduction places Tynianov at the midst of the creative storm in the early years of the Soviet Union and shows how his novel, set soon after the Decembrist uprising, reflects back on his own time. The Notes explain the teeming references which make Tynianov’s text such a breathtaking introduction to Russian literature, politics, history and society in the era of Pushkin and the Decembrists.

PUBLISHER’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In June 2014, my friend Andrew Causey was dying and his wife Susan had brought him home from hospital to care for him in his final weeks. On 10th June the phone rang and I picked it up, thinking it could be news of him, but it was Andrew himself, telling me that Sue had been killed, stepping in front of a bus on Oxford Street.

Andrew was bedridden but he summoned up all his remaining energy to help his sons, Leo and Edgar, to organise Susan’s funeral and make dispositions for the family in the time left to him – he died on 27th June. So my first acknowledgement is to Andrew, not only for the help and encouragement he gave me towards the publication of Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar in the last weeks of his life but also for his unfailing support to Susan over many years which made the translation possible in the first place.

Once Leo had recovered the manuscript from Susan’s papers and the files from her computer it was possible to produce a complete copy of her translation. Rosalind Lavington, a friend of the Causeys, encouraged me to explore publication. Thanks to a key introduction from Anne and Graham Rook I was able to show the translation to several experts in Russian literature and translation, including Nicolas Slater, Antony Wood, Donald Rayfield and Bryan Karetnyk. Their favourable assessments provided further encouragement, and it was clear that the translation should be edited, for example to catch the complexities and colloquialisms which Susan had not had the opportunity to resolve fully.

I wrote to some potential editors and Muireann Maguire kindly promoted my search to the wider BASEES membership. Inna Tigountsova produced test edits which were essential for identifying the issues to be tackled and the scale of the task. Vera Tsareva-Brauner took on the challenge of editing the whole manuscript. I am very grateful for her decision. Her drive, dedication to language and flexibility made her the ideal editor for the circumstances. Her contribution to the finished translation has been invaluable. Meanwhile my wife, family and friends kindly tolerated my obsession and the time it absorbed.

Finally, Leo and Edgar have provided a vital combination of financial and moral support. Always encouraging, never interfering, their approach ensured that preparing Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar for publication has been a pleasure, not a chore. Susan Causey made a major contribution to twentieth century literature by translating this work fully into English for the first time, and her sons’ generous support has rescued that contribution for the benefit of all.

Acknowledgements for the Extended Edition

Many thanks are again due to Vera Tsareva-Brauner for editing Susan Causey’s Introduction for the Extended Edition. Elena Goodwin, Lecturer in Russian Translation at the University of Portsmouth, made a major contribution to researching and editing the Explanatory Notes and Bibliography. Publishing the Extended Edition would have been impossible without their skills, talents, patience and professionalism.

Tim Johnson, Publisher, Look Multimedia, London,

April 2018 and April 2019

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ON BEHALF OF THE TRANSLATOR

Susan Causey’s own list of acknowledgements would have included several Russian and linguist friends who encouraged her to embark on translating such a difficult document in the first place and on whom she drew to discover obscure meanings – of many Persian as well as Russian words – or construe complex syntax. With apologies to those omitted here, two very valuable to Susan were Elena Korf and Firuza Melville, with their respective Russian and Persian advice and contacts. Antony Wood provided early encouragement on a possible route to publication. Susan would also have thanked her employers, The Prince’s Trust for the marvellous opportunity they provided to engage with Russian culture at a high level over about 15 years. I hope to be able to add to the this list once the translation is published.

Susan would also have thanked her sons, Leo and Edgar, her daughter-in-law Jacki and her grandchildren Eleanor, Jess and Joe who were a vital source of love and cheerfulness for her in the difficult years of Andrew’s illness. Not least she would have thanked Andrew for his unfailing and constructive support over more than 40 years. Andrew and Susan had a very collaborative marriage, not just in their writing – Susan made a major editing contribution to Andrew’s art historical publications – but in all aspects of their life. One example all their friends enjoyed was the beautiful garden they created together at their cottage in Exmoor.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Why Did He Die?

1.Tynianov: life and work

2.Writer-diplomat on the stage of history

3.In the shadow of the writing

4.‘Political’ explanations

5.Griboyedov himself

6.Collapsed hopes

A Griboyedov Chronology to 1828

Note on Spelling

Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar

Explanatory notes

Note on the Text

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION: WHY DID HE DIE?

Moral conflict between taking a decision to try changing a corrupt, unjust regime, and the acceptance of an authority that may be unjust, but nevertheless underpins stable national life – questions raised by Tynianov in Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar – are anticipated in the final scene of War and Peace. Eight years after the triumph over Napoleon of 1812 an ugly disagreement between Tolstoy’s main character, Pierre Bezukhov, and his brother-in-law Nikolai Rostov warns of a threat to the mood of security in Russia. With the longed-for peace arrived at, emotional torments resolved, and the serenity of intimate family lives achieved, this row signals the divisions that would soon split Russian society.

Pierre returns from a visit to St Petersburg in angry despair:

‘. . . what a government! They see conspiracies everywhere, they’re afraid of everything . . . everything’s falling apart. There’s thievery in the courts, in the army only the rod . . . they torment the people, stifle enlightenment. Whatever is young and honest, they destroy! Everybody sees that it can’t go on like this. . . . When you stand and wait for [a] tightened spring to snap any moment, when everybody’s waiting for the inevitable upheaval – people must join hands . . . to oppose the general catastrophe.’ ¹

Nikolai’s wartime mentor, the retired but youthful General Denisov, who is visiting his protégé, sees Pierre’s point at once: ‘Everything’s nasty and vile, I agree . . . but if you don’t like things: rebellion, that’s the way! I’m your man!’ he cries in French. Rostov himself, modest and brave hero of 1812, is incensed. He answers Pierre harshly:

‘You say everything’s bad with us and there’ll be an upheaval . . . you’re my best friend, you know that, but if you were to set up a secret society and start opposing the government, whatever it might be, I know that my duty is to obey it. And if they ordered me right now to go against you with a squadron and cut you down – I’d go without a second thought!’

Tension between the desire of intelligent men to oppose a bad system whose time was past and a belief that only the sustained weight of authority could ensure order strained Russia’s social fabric in the 1820s, the period described in Tynianov’s book – when those who took part in reformist secret societies were punished severely. But as Tynianov was writing a hundred years later in the 1920s, when a revolution that had been the goal of so many in the meantime had actually happened, the writer sees the spring being tightened again.

Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar is an account of the last year in the life of the writer-diplomat Alexander Griboyedov, murdered by a mob in Tehran in January 1829 at the age of 34. Appearing in the Leningrad journal Zvezda over 18 months from January 1927, the novel is set in the aftermath of the rebellion forshadowed by Denisov in War and Peace, when a climate of repression followed the failure of the ‘Decembrist’ revolt against Tsarism by a group of young officers in December 1825. Griboyedov’s great play, the comedy-drama in verse Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma), completed in 1824, portrays the corrupt, stagnant society Pierre describes and stands at the head of a brilliant sequence of literary works criticising Russia’s failure to modernise after the victory of 1812. Although censorship prevented the play’s performance during Griboyedov’s lifetime, it circulated very quickly in thousands of handwritten copies and became a classic of Russian literature. The play’s characters, situations and memorable phrases find echoes throughout Tynianov’s novel, highlighting the playwright’s confused loyalties after the failure of Decembrism, but also Tynianov’s own perception of the pressures on the dissenter – and specifically on a writer like himself – at the end of Russia’s first Soviet decade.

1 Tynianov: life and work

Yury Tynianov was born in 1894, the son of a Jewish doctor in Rezhitsa (now Rezekne), then included in the Russian north-western province of Vitebsk but today in Latvia. Tynianov went to high school in the ancient city of Pskov and – apart from absences caused by illness – moved permanently to St Petersburg when he entered the university in 1912. There, in the capital of the empire, he was soon recognised as part of the remarkable artistic generation whose creative lives spanned the Russian Revolution. Tynianov was active in literary circles from the start of his university life and from 1918, when he joined the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoyaz, founded in 1916), he was identified with the group of literary theorists and critics known loosely as Formalists. Even before Tynianov graduated he was developing independent ideas within the group, as he embarked on a career of teaching and writing.

It has been said that ‘there are as many Formalisms as there are Formalists’, with doubt expressed as to ‘whether there is even a common denominator’ between Tynianov and the Formalist critic closest to him, Viktor Shklovsky. The group aimed to replace the dominant Symbolist movement, with its over-elaborations and mystic overtones, and to clear away academicism, laying the ground for a modern study of literature backed up by coherent theories. A third member of the group, Boris Eikhenbaum, described the Formalists’ ambition as ‘to create, on the basis of the specific properties of literary material, an independent literary science’.² It was agreed that creating a work of art involved a writer transforming his material, presenting its ‘basic matter’ in a new way. The particular form the work took, its specific stylisation, the narrative’s pattern or order of telling, would depend on the idea the work wanted to convey, so that the theme or plot (siuzhet) took precedence over the story or more familiar narrative (fabula), with meaning established through literary form and structure. In choice of language and sentence construction, the Formalist practice of ‘de-familiarisation’ or ‘making strange’, was a way of using a writer’s skill to make the reader’s initial perception of what was being said more unusual and difficult, so that an object, character or event would be seen as if for the first time, and a fresh, child-like vision of the world restored. Shklovsky initiated the change, emphasising the use of rhythm, phonetics, repetition and syntax as examples of devices (priemy) that would achieve the transformation, calling the artistic work ‘a sum of devices’.

Tynianov published his first book, Dostoevsky and Gogol: Towards a Theory of Parody, in 1921 and before that had started teaching popular courses in Russian literature, mainly at Petrograd’s semi-independent Institute for the History of the Arts (soon to be the State Institute, or GIII), a powerful operational base for him and other Formalists. He began his career in tumultuous times and the variety of his literary work reflects the uncertainty of the period, when many writers left Russia because they feared persecution and hardship. Others strained to consider how literature might best serve and reflect the new society, while scrambling from one job to another to earn enough to support their families. Tynianov had married the musician Yelena Zil’ber (sister of his friend, later a distinguished oncologist, Lev Zil’ber) while still a student and was already the father of a young daughter; his wife’s career, which had promised brilliance, had been ended by injury to her hand. He published reviews of his contemporaries in the periodical press, including Mandelstam, Pasternak and Akhmatova, taking part in study groups at GIII on contemporary poetry and fiction, and fed his evaluation of new work into a maturing theory of literary evolution. Under the pseudonym Yu. Van-Vezen he wrote satirical articles on music, cinema and western writing, where he honed a laconic, ironical prose style (described as ‘wittily hyperbolic’ by the Tynianov specialist Vladimir Novikov³); and as Yusef Motl, he published in 1925 his first prose story, ‘Brooks’s Parrot’ (‘Popugai Bruksa’) – a Jewish village story in the manner of Sholem Aleichem.

Tynianov was employed in the early Soviet period (1921-24) as a French interpreter for the Comintern, enjoying the closeness to officials in the new regime, and for a brief period organised proof-reading for Gosizdat, the state publishing house. A hugely popular teacher and thinker, he gave courses and lectures at other institutions as well as GIII, researched and lectured at Petrograd University’s influential new Institute for the Comparative Study of the Literatures and Languages of the West and East (ILYaZV), and followed a particular passion by publishing, over 15 years, three volumes of his translations of poems by Heinrich Heine.

Tynianov’s first historical novel, Kiukhlia, grew into a lengthy study following a commission for a children’s book. Based on the life of the Decembrist poet and critic, Wilhelm Kiukhelbeker, and researched during his university years out of personal interest, the book appeared in 1925, the year Tynianov also started work in the Leningrad film studio Sevzapkino. The move into cinema was partly the result of his own enthusiasm (he wrote that year ‘It is difficult to find an ambitious person who would not at some point write a screenplay’;⁴ in 1926 he was appointed dean of a new cinema faculty at GIII), but the shift was also welcomed by Tynianov because of a need to diversify his sources of income after a particularly fierce Marxist attack on Formalist methodology in 1924-25. For two years, he wrote and edited film scripts and articles on film theory alongside his literary activities, holding a staff position at Sevzapkino in the more relaxed film industry, taking lessons in clowning and boxing with the avant-garde theatre group FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor), even screen-testing for the role of Pushkin in the film The Poet and the Tsar (Poet i tsar). Films were made of his scripts for The Overcoat (Shinel, based on several Gogol stories and directed by Kozintsev and Trauberg, the founders of FEKS), Club of the Great Deed (S.V.D., about the Decembrists, co-scripted with Iulian Oksman) and, in 1934, Lieutenant Kizhe (Poruchik Kizhe), making use of an early, filmscript version of his own novella.

In the first post-revolutionary years, Formalist thinking had continued the Opoyaz preoccupation with textual analysis based on a study of the language of poetry, focusing also on verse style and structure. But once stability had been restored – after Russia’s long Civil War, the coming of the ideologically relaxed New Economic Policy, and the lifting of the foreign blockade – private publishing resumed and an influx of popular film and fiction from the West suggested different avenues to explore. The theorists interested in framing a culture for the age and its new audience, harassed by criticism of their literary theories, had begun looking also at possibilities for prose-writing. For Tynianov the shift was to have a special significance: his health had always been weak, entailing periods away from the city in the south, and in July 1927 during a period of respite in the Crimea his position at Sevzapkino was not renewed, while his Kiukhlia was achieving much success. Tynianov spoke to friends at this time of his ‘love for literature’, and ‘giving up cinema’. He had already published the first chapters of Vazir-Mukhtar, and when he met difficulties with its development he quickly wrote his fiercely satirical novella Lieutenant Kizhe (Podporuchik Kizhe), before resuming the big novel, which continued to appear in Zvezda until its completion in mid-1928.

Tynianov’s approach to writing Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar reflects his involvement in film and the literary move away from poetry, but also the pressures in the changing Soviet society as the period of post-revolutionary debate came to an end and ideology came to dominate in the administration of culture. The writer’s work on a theory of literature immediately before and during these changes is relevant too. Tynianov shared many of the Formalist tenets held by Shklovsky, but he placed them in a framework that took further the concept of ‘making strange’. He elaborated an idea of literature as a dynamic system within the historical and social context, in which the structure of devices that compose an individual work is unique, responding both to what is happening around it and to the work that precedes it (‘synchronically and diachronically’, as he was to write in 1928).⁵

After close analysis of the stylistic differences between writers – in his case especially Gogol and Dostoevsky – Tynianov had written that ‘any literary succession is first of all a struggle, the destruction of the old whole and a new construction of the old elements’. He had found that parodies and similar literary devices lead a double life: behind the forward, overt content of the work stands a second plane, the one that is stylised or parodied. Now, he was coming to believe that all literary texts are directed towards other works, that the identity of a piece of writing in terms of genre, style, or school is based on its relations to others through the over-arching literary ‘system’. In discussing Tynianov’s elaboration of Formalist ideas, Peter Steiner observed: ‘Shklovsky is the orthodox Formalist, while Tynianov turns out to be the John the Baptist of Structuralism.’⁶ The movement Steiner points to was later taken forward under the leadership of Roman Jakobson, a fourth leader of the loose grouping of Formalist scholars, with whom Tynianov was to write his most disciplined work of literary theory, Problems in the Study of Literature and Language (Problemy izucheniia literatury i iazyka), published in late 1928. Originally based in Moscow, Jakobson emigrated in 1920 to Prague, where literary theorising continued to be possible in the 1930s, and later still to America.

From the first post-revolutionary period, the Formalists faced criticism from cultural officials and – especially – rival groups, who charged them with escapism, sterility and irrelevance, with being ‘bourgeois professionals’ who were failing to create a proletarian art. The attacks of many colleagues focused on the Opoyaz belief that literature was a self-contained sphere of activity operating according to its own ‘immanent’ laws, and so functioning independently of the influence of sociology or political/cultural history – an idea inimical to the historical determinism of Marxism. Leading Communist Party figures held back during the all-out Marxist assault of 1924, refusing to respond to petitions motivated by ideology. The cultural commissar Lunacharsky remained content to call the Formalists ‘stubborn relics’. Bukharin⁷ found them useful in providing ‘a catalogue of poetic devices . . . but please don’t call this inventory genuine science’. Trotsky, then a senior figure in the government, decried Formalist theory for its ‘superficial and reactionary character,’ while conceding that it might be useful ‘confined within legitimate limits.’⁸

Formalism was evidently revolutionary in intent, an integral part of Russian Modernism in literature, art, and music. This was perhaps what had drawn Tynianov most strongly to Opoyaz, when he joined the group two years after its founding by his famous colleagues. He did not always share the theoretical principles they had already elaborated, a historical and social understanding of literature being important to him from the start. In her memoir Tynianov as Literary Scholar’⁹ (‘Tynianov – literaturoved’, 1965, 1974), Lidiya Ginzburg, one of the GIII students closest to him, who was herself to have a distinguished literary career, wrote:

‘Tynianov . . . uncovered in himself a passionate desire of the epoch to interpret the past by means of the present, and the present via the past. Historicism was the very ‘air’ of the 1920s.’

In the mid-decade Eikhenbaum, Shklovsky and others of their Opoyaz group produced work that indicated a change of heart, or seemed to bow to the pressure of official ideology. This change of approach Ginzburg saw later as having been ‘much anticipated by Tynianov’s works of literary history in the first half of the decade’, but the lack of a joint stance by the group made it vulnerable to the pressures that soon increased. At the government level, a period of indecision and drift in Russia’s leadership was resolved in 1927 in favour of imposed political authority that had negative consequences for the Formalists. The leading scholar of the period, Sheila Fitzpatrick, describes this as the start of ‘cultural revolution’, when all Russian society was now required to conform, as the whole country geared up and strained to achieve the fundamental modernisation that was the ambition of the First Five-Year Plan.¹⁰

Tynianov’s theoretical writing appeared in three main publications: Dostoevsky and Gogol, The Problem of Poetic Language (Problema poeticheskogo iazyka, 1924), and Archaists and Innovators (Arkhaisty i novatory, 1929), a collection of his essays written over the previous decade. After Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar and Lieutenant Kizhe, he published two more novellas, The Wax Figure (Voskovaia persona, 1930) and Young Vitushishnikov (Maloletnyi Vitushishnikov, 1933), savagely comic satires capturing specific historical moments, as well as a long unfinished novel based on the life of Pushkin (parts 1 and 2 appeared in 1937; the incomplete part 3 in 1941). Though Tynianov was increasingly ill, he continued writing and editing, his inability to spend time in the archives that underpinned most of his fiction compensated for by researches carried out on his behalf by former students and colleagues. He was evacuated in 1941 to Perm in the Urals, but was brought back two years later to Moscow, where he died in 1943 from the progressive multiple sclerosis that had weakened him since he was barely 30.

2 Writer-diplomat on the stage of history

Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar has been translated into English by Alec Brown as Death and Diplomacy in Persia (Boriswood, London, 1938), with cuts, which the Reference Guide to Russian Literature¹¹ says ‘emasculate the novel’. More recently, Griboyedov’s story has been brought closer to English speakers in a number of ways. Since the changes in the world picture unleashed by the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 19th-century Great Game in which Russia and Britain vied for influence in the Islamic world has been studied as a part of the background to the 20th and 21st-century events. Griboyedov, the Farsi-speaking diplomat who negotiated the Turkmanchai peace treaty between Russia and Persia in 1828, was one of the earliest Russian actors involved. His biography by Laurence Kelly, Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran,¹² concentrates on Griboyedov’s final mission to Persia as the Tsar’s Minister Plenipotentiary (Vazir-Mukhtar in Persian). Using archives in London and Istanbul, as well as wide Russian reading, Kelly clarifies the international intrigues surrounding the writer’s murder.

More tangentially, Griboyedov’s role in securing the repatriation of several thousand Armenians from Iran in 1828 is noted in current guidebooks to Armenia, and was touched on in the 2009 exhibition at the British Museum devoted to Iran’s 17th-century Shah Abbas, who had imported the entrepreneurial Armenians to Isfahan to build his trading empire. On the site of the old fortress in Yerevan, an inscription records thanks to Griboyedov from ‘the grateful Armenian people’, noting also that Gore ot uma (Discontent of Mind, as it says) had its first-ever performance there in 1827, when it may have earned funds to support the families’ return home. The play was translated as Chatsky¹³ by Anthony Burgess and performed with Colin Firth in the lead role at the Almeida Theatre, London, and a six-city tour in 1993. In a well-loved novel of the region set in the early 1920’s, Ali & Nino by Kurban Said (the pen name of Lev Nussimbaum), the young couple – he Azerbaijani-Persian and she Georgian, the poet-diplomat’s great-niece through his marriage – visit Griboyedov’s grave in Tiflis (Tbilisi), following an established tradition to gauge the chances for their joint future (the omen is negative). Later, in Tehran, Nino is shocked when Ali takes part in the excesses of the annual Ashura, commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in the early Islamic period, and reflecting the Ashura of 1829 when the murder of Russia’s Vazir-Mukhtar took place.

The main action of Tynianov’s novel covers a brief eleven months from March 1828, when Griboyedov travels to St Petersburg at the close of the second Russo-Persian war. He came bringing the Treaty of Turkmanchai whose terms, highly punitive to Iran, he had been responsible for negotiating. The story proceeds through the writer-diplomat’s unwilling return to Tehran to oversee the fulfilment of the terms, which will bankrupt Iran’s Qajar dynasty. Putting off the implementation of this unpleasant task, he makes a two-month diversion to Tiflis on the way. The Georgian capital is familiar to Griboyedov through its role as the secure base for Russian dealings with Persia – Georgia had been under imperial protection since 1804 – and his own posting there in 1821-23. On the eve of his departure for Iran, Griboyedov registers his optimism for a personal future in Georgia by marrying the 16-year-old princess Nina Chavchavadze, who accompanies him to Persia. Griboyedov’s death, foretold by the book’s title, took place at the end of January 1829, after cat-and-mouse dealings with his Persian hosts during which he feels increasingly exposed through having to impose the harsh policies required of him by Petersburg.

The novel’s focus is determined by Griboyedov’s double life. He is the author of the play exposing to ridicule the period of stagnation and smug reaction following the Russian autocracy’s failure to capitalise on surging national self-confidence after 1812. Although not performed in Russia until 1831, and even then with cuts imposed by the censors, the play’s text was widely known among people of Griboyedov’s class and generation, and had been seized on by the would-be social transformers who planned the Decembrist revolt as their political bible. But less than three years after the failure of Decembrism the poet-diplomat has become the instrument of that same autocracy: the Vazir-Mukhtar, the autocracy’s Minister Plenipotentiary charged with its provocative and cruel policies.

Tynianov was a careful and precise scholar, basing the events and characters of his novel on official documents, memoirs and letters. His portrayals of the leading characters range from the Tsar and his ministers, Alexander Pushkin and other literary figures, the military commanders Yermolov and Paskevich and the dancer Katya Teleshova to the hack journalist Faddei Bulgarin, the Russian deserter Samson Makintsev and the officer Arkady Maiborod who betrayed the Decembrists, not to mention Persian rulers, eunuchs and mullahs, the family and friends of Nina Chavchavadze in Tiflis, and the servants. All are drawn from these researches.

Through the writer’s immersion in the period, his narrative and portraits largely conform to known data, but Tynianov was clear that he was not offering a straightforward work of history. He wrote in a fragment of autobiography (1939): ‘Literature differs from history, not through invention, but through a greater, more intimate understanding of people and events’.¹⁴ Asked to describe his method in writing historical fiction for the anthology How We Write (Kak my pishem, 1930), Tynianov replied ‘Where the document ends, I begin’.¹⁵

His knowledge was extensive, but where his understanding of the historical circumstances led him to believe the accepted interpretation of events was wrong, he created his own intuitive account. Tynianov’s judgement in ‘Vazir’ that the Russian battalion of deserters commanded by Samson Khan fought with Persia against their compatriots contradicted previous historians’ view that the men had refused to fight with foreigners against their countrymen, but his surmise (for which no direct evidence was then available) was later proved right by a paper previously overlooked. Tynianov found no documentary evidence either for Griboyedov’s seduction of Faddei Bulgarin’s wife, but in How We Write he outlined the different pieces of evidence on which he justified it (including a contemporary caricature of Bulgarin’s family in which the journalist’s son is drawn with a clear physical resemblance to Griboyedov).

Other changes are made as part of Tynianov’s shaping of history to serve the novel’s purpose. His Griboyedov anticipates the official declaration that the philosopher Chaadayev, critical of the Russian system, is mad, a view not expressed until 1836. This chimes with Griboyedov’s own play, in which his protagonist Chatsky’s free-thinking ideas lead those around him to accuse him of madness – although of course now the play’s author would seem to have switched sides. In his essay The Theme of ‘Gore ot uma’¹⁶ Tynianov also related Chatsky’s fate to that of Byron, hounded out of England as Chatsky is from Moscow by rumours of scandal: the Russian journals had been full of Byron’s treatment of his wife as Griboyedov began writing the play; Byron’s commitment to the cause of Greek independence matched the liberalising views of the Decembrists.

Perhaps the best illustration of Tynianov’s small twists of history that have wider resonance is the epigraph he chose for the novel’s Chapter One: a quotation in Arabic which Tynianov’s own published footnote, detailed in the Explanatory Notes, says is by the 10th-century poet Al-Mutanabbi, from a letter Griboyedov wrote to Bulgarin. The quotation is indeed from a Griboyedov letter (of 1820), but the Arabic text is a rephrasing Griboyedov made in that letter, written not to Bulgarin – widely known in Russia later as corrupt and a secret-police informer – but to an old friend and literary ally, Pavel Katenin, who does not appear in the novel. Of the book’s 20 epigraphs to chapters and sub-chapters this is the only one that is not historically accurate. It is important because it signals at the novel’s start the importance of the East, of Russia’s Orient, for Griboyedov’s story. The change in the quotation is small: from ‘The worst country is the place where there is no friend’, to ‘The greatest unhappiness is when there is no true friend’. In sending it to Katenin in 1820, Griboyedov had been making a joke to amuse his old friend, while for Tynianov this second version is important for the tone it sets at the novel’s opening, pointing forward to the lonely isolation Griboyedov is feeling eight years later when his Decembrist friends have been killed or exiled – and those who remain view him with suspicion.

In using a further sleight of hand to present the corrupt Bulgarin as the letter’s recipient, Tynianov is suggesting that Griboyedov has fully friendly relations with this unpleasant man. As the historian and writer Natan Eidelman explained, ‘In order to reach the truth [he] brings together . . . polar opposites . . . the enigmatic, mysterious relationship Griboyedov-Bulgarin suddenly offers Tynianov a key to important matters’.¹⁷ Because of the small changes Tynianov made in this epigraph so early in the book, the reader is already thinking about the East and there is awareness of its subject’s anguished detachment, while the odd relationship between the author of the great play and a corrupt police spy prompts the key questions Eidelman sees addressed in the novel: ‘What did the great Griboyedov want in the last year of his life, what was he striving for, what did he live by, and why – in the end – did he die?’

As the story unfolds, the way dual loyalties influence Griboyedov’s approach to the issues of his past and present gradually trace what could be called a moral ‘map’ of the writer’s inner life. The outlines are arrived at partly through accounts of meetings with friends, relatives and colleagues, when his ironic mental response weaves through the encounters, either as his own unvoiced thoughts or as authorial description seen through his eyes. In addition, the forward drive of the narrative is balanced by sub-chapters wholly devoted to meditative passages which Veniamin Kaverin,¹⁸ Tynianov’s literary colleague and another brother-in-law, describes as making this book – unlike Tynianov’s earlier Kiukhlia – a ‘philosophical novel’, one with an underlying moral theme. Kaverin points out how all the ‘poetical digressions, when Griboyedov remains on his own’, are linked to quotations taken from Russia’s national epic, the 12th-century Song of Igor’s Campaign (Slovo o polku Igoreve), chronicling the Kievan prince’s unsuccessful eastern venture to drive encroaching tribes from Russian lands.¹⁹ The repeated references to Slovo suggest not just the historical parallel of outside incursions on Russia’s eastern frontier, but Griboyedov’s ambitions for his own writing (what he’d like to have written himself), and also – in that the inclusion of these extracts is Tynianov’s initiative – thoughts about Russia’s destiny even in the contemporary Soviet period.

Kaverin lists the many references in the novel to Gore ot uma, calling the novel ‘a huge psychological commentary on the comedy of genius’ and pointing out that Gore ot uma is ‘the prism through which his friends and enemies look at Griboyedov’ – providing a standard against which to measure his actions. Some, the Tsar and his officials, see the play as a reason to distrust its author, while the failed Decembrists look on his current official role as a betrayal of the values the play has embodied for them, and friends and fellow-writers of his own generation still consider Gore a triumph but wonder why there have been no successor works. Tynianov wrote The Theme of ‘Gore ot uma’ in 1938, although it was not published until after his death.²⁰ In this darkest period in Soviet Russia he identifies how the play’s hero Chatsky, who has reformist ideas and fought in the wars against Napoleon, is denounced by the corrupt, conformist society post-1812 in a process launched by an invented slander. Now, in 1988, Kaverin writes shortly before his own death that Griboyedov’s authorship of the play ‘is always with him, it pursues him . . . it gives cause for slander, leading to [his] denunciation’. The use of the word ‘denunciation’ (donos) in this judgement by Kaverin, who had largely been responsible for the literary rediscovery of Bulgakov and Tynianov in the 1960s, also reflects on the Soviet situation in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, when a donos to the security organs became a standard method of removing ‘enemies’ from public life.

For Russian people, the text of Gore ot uma is as full of aphorisms and quotable ironies as Shakespeare’s plays are for English speakers. So the retreat from revolutionary idealism in a conformist society and the rejection by that society of a clever, youthful person with radical views that are the main themes of the play would have been easily recognised by Tynianov’s desired readership as a mainly unspoken underpinning of his 1927 novel. In The Theme of ‘Gore ot uma’, he drew parallels between that play and Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro. He quoted the scholar and editor Osip Senkovsky’s review when Griboyedov’s comedy was first published,²¹ defending the serious purpose lying behind the surface of the play, insisting on its importance as a social drama with timeless resonance and countering the emphasis laid on it as a lightweight comedy of manners by the numerous Griboyedov contemporaries targeted by its satire. ‘Like The Marriage of Figaro’, Senkovsky wrote, ‘this is a political comedy’. Tynianov himself noted that ‘the amusing drama of personal relations is played out against a background of major social and public events . . . not visible on the stage’;²² these events he describes as the state’s lack of response after 1812 to the victory of the ‘heroic populace, principally [its failure to introduce] an end of serfdom’, characterising as a ‘dead interval’ (mertvaia pauza) the period between 1812 and 1825.

This interpretation of Griboyedov’s theme, and of its masking at a time when overt expression was impossible during the mertvaia pauza, more than hints at Tynianov’s approach to writing his own novel. He recognises that the Soviet historical and social context is moving beyond the increasing criticism of the Formalists, and pays critical attention to the political climate making this possible. Since the first months of the Bolshevik regime, tensions had been evident between the demands of order and pluralism, authority and freedom, but these came to a head in the years from 1923, starting with the illness and death of Lenin and proceeding through the jockeying for position between his rival successors. After what has been called ‘a four-act drama’ of confrontations, bitter accusations and changing alliances, the struggle was to reach its climax at the 15th Party Congress in December 1927. Bolshevik leaders such as Zinoviev and Kamenev were disgraced. Trotsky – apparently the most natural inheritor, the advocate of pluralism and debate -was removed from the Communist Party, then exiled to Kazakhstan and, in January 1929, expelled from the Soviet Union altogether.

While published well in advance of the Soviet Union of Writers’ style and content rules of 1934, Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar is one of the first in the period following the Revolution to make use of a similar kind of political allegory to that of Gore ot uma. The novel’s overt narrative is the tragedy of Griboyedov: his death and the intrigues and personal agonies in the year leading up to it. But behind this plane, the reader is encouraged to consider the ‘philosophical’ aspect, to understand the dilemmas and pressures of Griboyedov’s situation in 1828 in terms of the position of a clever, thinking person in an increasingly oppressive social environment and of the Russia of Nicholas I’s continuity with contemporary Soviet Russia.

How does Tynianov indicate this underlying intention? Kaverin says the novel is ‘full of hints hiding themselves as though in the shadow of the writing and audacious comparisons more typical of poetry than prose’. As if taking this idea further, Joseph Brodsky,²³ discussing the work of Tynianov’s contemporary Osip Mandelstam, wrote that

‘Poetry is, first of all, an art of references, allusions, linguistic and figurative parallels. There is an immense gulf between Homo sapiens and Homo scribens, because for the writer the notion of theme appears as a result of combining the above techniques and devices, if it appears at all.’

Both descriptions could refer to Tynianov’s writing in Vazir-Mukhtar. As discussed above, references and allusions abound, while comparisons are often surprising, and adjectives paired in descriptions can seem to be diametrically opposed or are simply ‘wrong’ – all practices that bring the reader up short, seeming to ask for deeper thinking about what the author is saying. Angus Fletcher, in his work on allegory,²⁴ uses a 19th-century phrase to call it ‘the art in which one thing is related and another understood’. He goes on to say that in allegory ‘the particular meaning of the work is not immediately obvious’, but ‘this enigmatic art thrives because its difficult ornament arouses the reader’s curiosity’ . . .

‘. . . the author seems to depart from the world of experience and the senses, thriving on their overthrow, replacing them with ideas. In this way allegory’s intention seems to be a matter of clearly rationalised ‘allegorical levels of meaning’. These are the double aim of the aesthetic surface: they are its intention and its ritualised form is intended to elicit from the reader some sort of exegetical response . . .[although] exegetical problems can always arise as to the specific intention of any particular work.’

Fletcher goes on to describe the allegorical variant ‘Aesop language . . . whose main aim is political subversion – of a defensible kind, since the powers to be subverted are denying political liberties’. It is ‘a strategy for criticising the status quo with immunity’.

At the time Vazir-Mukhtar was published, a preoccupation in Russia’s educated circles was remembering the past at particular moments in the present. The first decade of Soviet rule was marked by a series of anniversaries: on the 1924 centenary of the great Petersburg flood the city was again deep under water, evoking memories of Pushkin’s anti-autocracy poem The Bronze Horseman; in 1925 the uprisings of 1825 and 1905 were celebrated as precursors of the Bolshevik Revolution; and in the run-up to 1927 work was intense to mark the completion of the first decade of Soviet rule with a series of art works, not the least Eisenstein’s October and Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg. Asking his readers to consider the present in representations of the past was not a difficult request to make, especially when Tynianov’s writing in Vazir-Mukhtar contained hidden hints and ‘audacious comparisons’, as well as ‘references, allusions, figurative and linguistic parallels’, the kind of ‘difficult ornament’ that arouses the reader’s curiosity. On the book’s very first page he or she is already confronted by ‘faces of amazing muteness.’ The ‘Baltic muteness of [secret police chief] Benkendorf became the sky of Petersburg’ as well as a reference back to ‘one big prison cell (as they said in Peter’s day)’ a hundred years earlier still. That the past revolutions being celebrated by the new Soviet government had been followed by stagnation and bureaucratism, repression and cruelty, was not always noted by the thought police of the 1920s.

3 In the shadow of the writing

The publisher of the first English version of Vazir-Mukhtar, Boriswood, was a small private house whose list of over 60 titles in the years 1931-38 focused largely on modernist poetry and fiction and the book’s translator, Alec Brown, went on to translate Pasternak and Maxim Gorky, Cocteau and Zola. But the publication did poor service to Tynianov. The translator explained that the cuts made were mainly ‘material interesting only to Russian readers or to those reasonably acquainted with Russian literature’.²⁵ They account for 25 per cent of the text, scattered throughout from beginning to end, but perhaps the most important omission from the 1938 translation was the novel’s four-page prologue. Without this, it is possible to read Tynianov’s theme almost exclusively in terms of Griboyedov’s fate, of his disappointment as a writer and the dilemmas he faces as a diplomat, often cast into relief by images and quotations from his more idealistic writing of 1823. It could be a purely 19th-century story: more literary and discursive than the Alec Brown translation, and suggesting a more psychologically charged biography – involving more imagination – than Laurence Kelly’s. But the novel’s prologue encourages alertness to the hint suggested by the contemporary marking of anniversaries – to read, in the writer’s detailed evocation of the past, observation of his own time.

In his book Russian Thinkers, Isaiah Berlin described the failed Decembrist revolt, in which the idealistic young officers called for a constitutional monarchy and the end of serfdom, as a ‘great fiasco in the life of their [the thinkers] society’.²⁶ Secret groups among the élite officer corps in St Petersburg and south Russia tried to use the opportunity presented by the unexpected death of Tsar Alexander I and uncertainties over the succession to kick-start modernisation of the autocratic regime. In the event, their attempt to catalyse change by refusing to swear allegiance to the new Tsar, Nicholas I, was not well prepared – their men were confused and the three thousand rebels involved in the stand-off in Petersburg’s Senate Square were dispersed when the Tsar ordered up artillery. Some two hundred soldiers died in the fracas surrounding the demonstration on the square, whose consequences were swift and harsh. The scale and intensity of the interrogations that followed, the clampdown on free thinking, the proliferation of spies and secret police, and especially the botched hanging of the revolt’s five aristocratic leaders (the rope was rotten) alienated a generation of idealists. Griboyedov was one of the known liberals implicated, although his residence at the time in Georgia guaranteed his innocence of direct participation – but the story that will end with his death opens at the moment of the revolt’s failure, as the optimism of the would-be reformers ‘with their springing step’ is snuffed out at a stroke, suggesting from the first the link of Griboyedov – for it is his story – to their fate.

Tynianov’s style in the brief prologue – what Novikov describes as ‘expressive grotesqueness and use of metaphor, the rhythmic quality of the authorial voice’ – is compared to free verse. But the way the writer’s sentences sometimes flow lyrically and are sometimes cut abruptly short is also filmic. The opening paragraphs compose a collage of motifs that might be intercut as in an Eisenstein movie – ‘breaking bones’, ‘prison cell’, ‘muteness’, Petersburg dominated by ‘gendarmes’ and ‘emptiness’ – to draw immediate attention to the rebellion’s cruel aftermath. There is a claim to Russian universality in this description – ‘the age itself’, ‘the Russian mechanism’ – and the society is made human, as if it had biological entity – ‘blood flowed out’, ‘the blood of the century pulsed’. The subjects of these lines are certainly the men who stood on the cold square, daring to press for change, but also the wider society they stood for, and perhaps it is most strange to note not just the immediate switch ‘there on the square’ from expectation of action to the ‘amazing muteness’ of the gendarmes’ faces, but also to find the young officers described during the interrogations that follow, as ‘the fathers’, who are now nervous of ‘the children’ and even ‘curry favour with them’. This is the outcome of the great fiasco in their society: those who are not hanged or exiled are effectively silenced, there is a transition from action to muteness and a change of generations; the ‘fathers’ are troubled by ‘conscience’ and ‘memories’ as different ideas and different people become important.

The idea of generational interplay is not new in Russian literature. As one Decembrist ambition was finally achieved with the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Ivan Turgenev made famous the phrase ‘fathers and children’ to describe the schisms and gulfs that arose in Russian society. In the period after 1825, clever people found themselves unable to redress the unfairnesses in their society and increasingly drastic measures seemed necessary if change was to happen. Turgenev’s novel, known as Fathers and Sons in translation, opposes the nihilist student Bazarov, who rejects the old order, to the liberal gentry born before him, reflecting the pattern of growing radicalism since the failure of reform after 1825. The dedicatee of Turgenev’s book, the critic Vissarion Belinsky, came to prominence in the 1830s, formulating the idea of writers as the ‘conscience’ of Russian society: as there was no forum for debate in the repressive police state of Nicholas I, Belinsky was the passionate advocate of the idea that the intelligentsia should be the moral and political opposition to the autocratic régime and its supporters. But in the aftermath of 1825 Tynianov’s ‘fathers’ are ‘fluttering’: some dead ‘before their time’, finding no outlet for action, others – as Turgenev was to be, according to Isaiah Berlin – ‘not without a sense of guilt’, and many troubled – like Griboyedov in this book – by ‘memory’ and ‘conscience’.

Senate Square was renamed ‘Square of the Decembrists’ (ploschad Dekabristov) between 1925 and 2008. The Bolshevik leadership liked to cite Decembrism as a legitimising forerunner of its own successful assumption of power, following a formulation made by Lenin the decade before, in which he anticipated the Social Democratic revolution he hoped to see in his own lifetime building on the work of three generations: the gentry Decembrists of 1825, the raznochintsy – the people newly allowed to benefit from education, like Bazarov – in the 1860s, and the working class in 1905, when the autocracy was almost overthrown after a failed war with Japan and popularly constituted administrative councils, or soviets, first came into being. Generations changing or being overtaken by ‘new men’ in parallel with political and social upheaval was an accepted post-revolutionary trope, but Tynianov was one of the first to point to the perversion of this latest revolution’s idealistic ambitions over the course of the first Soviet decade. Tynianov’s contemporary Ilya Ehrenburg, in his memoir People, Years, Life (Liudi, gody, zhizn’),²⁷ described the speed of change at this time. His own generation, he wrote, was that of Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Babel and Tynianov, ‘whose youth had belonged to the pre-revolutionary years; we remembered a great deal, which sometimes hindered and sometimes helped us’. Briefly returning to Russia from Western Europe in 1924, Ehrenburg observed the active youth around him, who had ‘seen the Revolution with the eyes of adolescents’ and whose adult life was shaped in the years of both the cruel Civil War and the New Economic Policy, when many believed that opportunism and greed were let loose. ‘I was older than them by no more that ten or twelve years; but the change of generations was abrupt’.

As Tynianov turned to write his novel, a particular issue came to the fore as part of the struggle within the political élite that was to decide the character of Russian society in the Soviet period. By the mid-1920s it was clear that the survival of the new order depended on upgrading the country’s derelict factories, exhausted after a decade of war and civil war. The Bolsheviks’ New Economic Policy permitting private trade had brought food into the shops, but by 1925, with no parallel increase in manufacturing, peasants in the countryside had nothing to buy with any money they might earn. They were reluctant to market their produce, and food shortages menaced the cities as they had from early 1917. Tynianov used Griboyedov’s story to suggest parallels between the writer’s attempts to follow his own path despite the authoritarianism imposed after Decembrism and the situation of Tynianov himself and other creative people, ‘whose youth belonged to the pre-revolutionary years’ – as their opportunities as individuals narrowed and the character of the Soviet leadership became clearer in the crisis a century later.

Although the Moscow Formalist Jakobson left Russia in 1920, Tynianov and his closest friends and colleagues had mainly responded to the Revolution with energy and engagement, excited by such modernising reforms as the drive for universal education and the opportunities for artistic experiment. Shklovsky fled briefly to Berlin in 1922-23 when his earlier political activity made him vulnerable during a crackdown on the Social Revolutionary faction; and the possibility of Tynianov joining other Russian emigrés in Germany was not out of the question, because of his fluent German and wide knowledge of European and American writing. But the literary world of Petrograd-Leningrad was his natural milieu – Ehrenburg described him as ‘a real Petersburgian in the old sense of the word’ – and the companionship of those Tynianov was close to mattered to him. The year 1926 when he was writing Vazir-Mukhtar became a crucial turning point in this world.

In her memoir of Osip Mandelstam, Tynianov’s and Ehrenburg’s contemporary, the poet’s widow Nadezhda described how from 1925 to 1930 her husband suffered a kind of writer’s block, attributing his inability to write poetry to his ‘first doubts about the Revolution’. She said that in the preceding period from 1922 Mandelstam agonised over the regime’s retreat from liberal, humanist values, as ‘new people’ acted coarsely in positions of authority and seemingly arbitrary killings and other violence continued even though the country was no longer at war. Mandelstam had believed in the rightness of the Revolution, she said, and ‘in so far as he accepted the new reality’, he ‘could not help but condemn his own doubts’.²⁸

The main high-level debate in 1925-26, the one that would determine who was to lead the country, and how it would be done, centred on the food supply crisis. Ideas gained ground that Russia’s peasants should be forced to hand over the agricultural produce that would effectively ‘fund’ industrial modernisation – but they were opposed by Nikolai Bukharin, then allied in the government with Joseph Stalin, who advocated an alternative strategy of slow encouragement and persuasion of the peasants (through different forms of cooperation). Explaining his more humanistic plan, Bukharin said in a speech of January 1926: ‘We do not want to drive the . . . peasant into communism with an iron broom’. Bolsheviks, he said, were ‘pioneers, but we do not carry out experiments, we are not vivisectionists who . . . operate on a living organism with a knife’. ²⁹ In 1940, after the horrors that accompanied Stalin’s headlong industrialisation from 1929 became known and Bukharin had been executed following his 1938 show trial, Arthur Koestler’s fictionalised account of Bukharin’s imprisonment, Darkness at Noon, included a speech by the Bolshevik leader’s Communist interrogator describing ‘two conceptions of human ethics’:³⁰

‘One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct . . . the other . . . demands that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community – which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second vivisection morality.’³¹

Mandelstam chose not to write poetry at