Good Stalin by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-10-23T08:31:21+00:00

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Why do writers write autobiographies? If you ask me, it’s a serious affliction. It’s like carving your initials into a bench. The writer’s task consists in not writing an autobiography, in evading this task, in feeding it to the fishes. Gorky filled his autobiographical trilogy with kilometers of dialogue, each one as plausibly realistic as it is false. The leaden abominations of Russian life are sold for a hundred pounds of bitterness. There is nothing revolutionary about this grief: it is like Sologub’s conundrum. Zero equals zero. Nabokov, on the other hand, maintains that he lived in paradise. For him, this paradise consisted of the vainglorious details of the sated life of an egotistical young lord, whom the revolution later took great pleasure in punishing. Nabokov struggles to try and find the rhythmical cycles in his life, and strikes matches in order to celebrate its meaning, but, being an agnostic, he falls into the trap that he himself has set, and goes off on a tangent. His flight from chance is like a slalom. He comes across as disgustingly pleased with himself in his memoirs. It is the very vulgarity on which he had declared war. Gorky and Nabokov represent the two poles of Russian literature: they turned their autobiographies into an identical product — verbal diarrhea.

The life of the writer flies in the face of the meaning of life. It is not sustained by a million details, like other people’s lives. Unlike the writer’s words, it is smaller than the writer. It has a reductive effect on him. His metamorphoses are of interest only as an example of pure suffering. It is an unreliable account, and treachery is its abode. Dostoyevsky dedicated the epitaph on his mother’s grave to the torn-off 'member’ of the useless hero:

Rest in peace, dear remains,

Until the joyful morn.

That is our only salvation. Whatever a writer does, he merely wastes his time. Unworthy of himself, he consists of nothing but wasted time. He befriends revolutionaries then becomes a hermit; he flies into a rage, then grows calm; he is eternally indebted to his parents, whom he doesn’t understand; he pours tenderness over his head, like fir trees: all this is childish babble. When painting his portrait of the artist as a young man, Joyce got so carried away by the subject of sanctity and lust that he forgot about the most important thing of all: the fact that the writer is neither lusty nor saintly. He is a sheet of paper. Otherwise he amounts to nothing more than perpetual masturbation.

Hastily changing into the clothes of his double, Bunin torments the reader with an endless description of nature, which he links to his childhood: millions of sunsets, roads covered by blizzards, the moon above the fields. But his greatest talent is for incredibly vivid descriptions of dead bodies in coffins. His neighbor, his father, a great prince, a child — all of them deceased. All the signs of their decay: the color of their

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