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. 

siddhartha [herman hesse]

At my highly privileged school, there used to be a class called “Div”. Div classes happened most days. They were a chance for the assigned teacher to throw anything he (always a he) thought might be of use for the development of the child. One year we had a teacher called David Lorimer, who had almost been an Olympic runner. He and his fiancee would sometimes be seen canoodling in the water meadows, before she ditched him. (So the story went). Lorimer was a strange product of liberal England. Probably born in the fifties. In many ways he seemed like a decent, understated man, albeit one who didn’t seem particularly happy with his chosen life plan, to be a teacher at a public school. There’s a curious British strand of intellectual endeavour which veers towards mysticism and this was the direction Lorimer lead us. I’m not sure if we studied Gurdjjeff or Castaneda under Lorimer, but I know we read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, a book which opened several doors, Huxley, and the doyen of a kind of post-sixties consciousness, Herman Hesse, among others.

This slightly mystic strand continues in the British consciousness. Sometimes it seems to me that our colonial endeavours owed as much to this instinct as they did to the commercial imperative. (Which is not to deny the significance of the latter.) From T E Lawrence to The Beatles there’s a longing to escape the straightjacket of the classified, calcified British social structures and flee into the uplands of the mind. Hesse caters perfectly to this longing. HIs writing created a spiritual firmament waiting to be occupied. It was potent material within the confines of a privileged boarding school. 

All of Hesse’s novels have a spiritual flavour, but none more so than Siddhartha, a straightforward retelling of the life of a Buddhist savant. The novel is beguilingly  simple. The book is not just successful because it tells a cute story, but also because it does so with no-nonsense prose and a clear narrative rhythm. In spite of its spiritual themes, the story moves along at a good lick. The India Hesse describes feels like it might be centuries old or it could be today.  At the heart of the book is an anti-intellectualism that chimes perfectly with a British sensibility. Enlightenment will not be achieved through teaching, but via a personal quest, a journey to the innermost corners of the soul. 

Re-reading the novel today, you can perfectly understand its appeal to adolescents trapped in a world where it seemed logical to question an established order which decreed that learning was there in order to prepare you for a life of tedious social conformity. If that was all that learning had to offer, what was it really good for? Hesse articulates the possibility of an alternative, more individualistic method and objective for the process of learning, one that denies the  materialist values of society. Although it must be added that it would not appear that Mr Lorimer’s Div classes, or our reading of Hesse, ever had any real transformative effect on the society we eventually inherited.