the naked year (boris pilnyak, tr. alexander r tulloch)

1917 was a year that changed the world and set up a paradigm for the twentieth century. What’s your take on Soviet Revolution? Amidst all the bombast and the dogma, the actuality of what it was like to be a human being in this moment, to live, fight, love, be scared, be confused, be Chekhovian, tends to be overlooked. Pilnyak’s remarkable novel, part Tolstoy, part Sterne, offers, as only literature can, an insight. Unsurprisingly, because on the whole writers need years like 1917 to give them polenta, there are several texts which deal with the human aspect of the revolution, including work by Babel and Marina Tsvetaeva, even if, like The Naked Year, these texts tend to be little known.

Pilnyak’s novel has a complex brilliance. It captures the effects of the revolution on a world beyond Moscow, out towards the East, on the edge of Asia. Here, even language becomes muddled up. Seismic changes occur and they are just changes. One particularly lovely sequence follows an elderly aristocrat, ordered to leave his stately home, who finds himself in a paradoxical way liberated, a freedom to just be a man walking miles to the nearest train station, even if that sense of freedom will only last a day or two. The Naked Year has no central character, moving through a panoply of different figures from chapter to chapter. The novel succeeds brilliantly in demonstrating how 1917, as well as being a forerunner for the century, also harks back to the dense, hermetic life of the Russian interior, a place where Europe and Asia are in constant flux with one another.

“The rulers of Russian during the past two centuries, since Peter, have wanted to adopt this culture. Russia languished in a stifling, utterly Gogolian atmosphere. And the Revolution set Russia against Europe. And furthermore immediately after the first days of the Revolution, Russia, in its way of life, customs and towns – returned to the seventeenth century. On the border of the seventeenth century there was Peter… there was a native Russian art, architecture, music… Peter came along – and genuine folk art disappeared… – Popular rebellion is the seizing of power and creation of their own genuine Russian truth by genuine Russians. And this is a blessing!… The whole history of peasant Russia is the history of sectarianism. Who will win this struggle – mechanized Europe or sectarian, orthodox, spiritual Russia?…”

This is one of the most instructive and playful texts about the Russian revolution, one which offers a perspective which incorporates the multiple truths of that event, truths which the subsequent victors of history, from both sides, chose to bury, because ambiguity is a fervent opponent of dogma.