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From New International, Vol. XXI No. 1, Spring 1955, pp. 60–63.
Marked up up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Fall of a Titan
by Igor Gouzenko
Published by W.W. Norton and Co., Inc.
There are certain novels in which the characters escape the author’s intentions to one degree or another, coming to life not because they realize the writer’s design but in spite of it. The Fall of a Titan by Igor Gouzenko is such a novel. The people who move through the pages of this book mean less than the author intended and express more than he meant. Since The Fall of a Titan is what the French call a roman à la thése, this is all the more damaging to the artistic integrity of the novel. We accept the reality of the characters, but we reject the ideas as false and banal.
Stated briefly, Gouzenko’s main ideas are that Stalinism is the legitimate offspring of Bolshevism whose grievous crime was to set an abstract love of humanity above love of one’s fellow-creatures in the flesh; and that Lenin was ready to sacrifice the Russian people to the messianic idea of Russia as the savior of the world through revolution. Thus, Russia’s redemption can only come when each person begins to bind himself to others by individual acts of kindness and love.
Within this framework, Gouzenko establishes his theme – the downfall of the generation of intellectuals who justified Bolshevism. Gouzenko’s titan, the internationally famous writer, Gorin, socialist and humanist, is the symbol of this doomed generation. Morally, he is as responsible as Lenin and Stalin for the calamities that have befallen Russia. And he must suffer the consequences of his crime. Under Lenin, brute force placed itself at the disposal of radical dogma. Now, under Stalin, radical dogma must submit to brute force. Gorin is called upon to renounce his moral and social ideals and engage in the naked, shameless glorification of Stalin’s despotism.
The plot of the novel is simple, dramatic, and derives much of its power from a certain correspondence to actual events, particularly the fate of Maxim Gorky after his return to Stalinist Russia. A typical careerist, Novikov, who is a young professor of history at the University of Rostov and an agent of the secret police, is ordered to win over Gorin (Gorky), the great Russian writer, to complete acceptance of Stalin’s policies during the dread period of forced collectivization, when famine and terror darken the landscape.
With the help of the secret police, Novikov gains entry to Gorin’s household and begins the terrible process of corruption. For Novikov, failure means disgrace and exile to a slave-labor camp, perhaps even death; success means unlimited opportunities for advancement. Under these circumstances he permits nothing to stand in his way, not even his love for Gorin’s daughter, Nina. When his superior, the second secretary of the Rostov party organization, Veria (Beria), indicates his displeasure, Novikov breaks off relations with the girl. In this mission, as at every stage of his career, Novikov must renounce everything decent, honest and human, if he is to succeed in pleasing his masters.
Up to a point, he succeeds. He insinuates into Gorin’s mind the idea of writing a play which idealizes Ivan the Terrible. The world will not fail to draw the analogy with Stalin. Novikov succeeds because the troubled Gorin, living in secluded, luxurious surroundings, wants to be corrupted, wants to believe the revolution has not gone awry, and that Stalin’s harsh measures are as transitory as they are necessary. Gorin writes and publishes the play. Yet Novikov’s success is incomplete and is really the prelude to ultimate failure.
The story moves to its fatal climax with a struggle of wills as the basically incorruptible Gorin begins to face and accept his doubts and dissatisfactions. When Gorin stops writing altogether, Stalin demands a series of articles praising the regime. The old writer refuses, and having failed to completely corrupt him, Novikov is left with no other alternative than to placate Stalin by killing him.
An interesting sidelight on the authenticity of Gouzenko’s portrait is the fact that in real life Gorky never wrote such a play. A novel about Ivan the Terrible was written by that cynical, corrupt talent and former white- guardist, the spurious Count Alexei Tolstoy.
The heart of the novel and the test of Gouzenko’s ideas comes in the final confrontation between Novikov and Gorin. The latter is now a prisoner on his estate, and his jailor is none other than Novikov. The young Stalinist professor realizes that Gorin is intractable and must be killed. And although there is no need for him to personally carry out the execution, he willingly, nay, eagerly, assumes the role of assassin.
In the nightmarish dialogue that leads up to the murder, Novikov accuses Gorin of being a hypocrite, a man who is only interested in his reputation and historic role, not in the fate of the suffering Russian people. He is moved, Novikov charges, by vanity, and vanity alone. He does not love men individually, he loves man in the abstract. Gorin’s false ideal of abstract socialist humanism inspired and justified the crimes of Bolshevism- Stalinism. Novikov consciously acknowledges himself the twisted and aborted child of Gorin’s ideas, a monster without the slightest trace of humanity. Because he is no longer a human being, out of sheer revenge and despair, Novikov wants to kill the author of all his ills, Gorin. It is the voice of one generation passing a terrible judgment on another.
The only trouble with Novikov’s explanation in this climactic scene is that it rings false. It is not only historically false, it also violates the logic of the novel. For example, Novikov’s accusation against Gorin – that he loves humanity in the abstract corresponds neither to the real Gorky nor to the fictional Gorin whom Gouzenko presents. Gorin (Gorky) is depicted as a man who, above all, has a feeling for people in all their individual complexity. It is precisely this sensitivity which is his saving grace and leads to his break with Stalin. Precisely because he senses what is happening to the people around him Gorin is driven to realize that something is seriously wrong.
Furthermore, when he measures the debilitating influence of Stalinism on his socialist and humanist ideals he is compelled to break. It is his genuine and irrevocable devotion to these ideals which drives Gorin to the point where he is ready to die rather than submit to Stalin. Consequently, Gorin retains all our respect as a symbol of socialist humanism, despite the unflattering portrait Gouzenko draws of a weak, vain, self-deceiving man, whom the author means to condemn as the intellectual accomplice of Lenin and Stalin. Gorin’s last-minute conversion to Gouzenko’s pseudo-Tolstoian doctrine of an all-embracing love for one’s fellow human being remains a mere novelistic device, detached from the Gorin who emerges in the main body of the novel.
As for Novikov’s explanation of his own behavior, this is another great and glaring defect in the novel. As a symbol of the Stalinist careerist, of a demonic force unleashed by Stalinist society, Novikov is perfect. But when he berates Gorin for betraying him and his generation, he fails to convince. A brief review of Gouzenko’s treatment of Novikov’s character in its historical setting explains the failure.
Novikov’s personality is shaped in the first chapters of the book which introduce him as an adolescent in the midst of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Almost from the outset, Novikov is presented as a cynic and careerist. The decisive experience for the adolescent is the disastrous discovery that the woman of his dreams, his ideal love, has the coarsest of animal appetites. From that point on, Novikov’s character determines his fate. He vows to believe in nothing.
The October Revolution does not restore Novikov’s faith in humanity. The revolution is seen by the young cynic (and Gouzenko) as a mass orgy, a carnal explosion of the discontented and thievish lower depths. As for the ideals of socialism and humanism, we meet their humble representative in the person of the Red Guard, Akimov, who is stationed in the house from which the bourgeois Novikov family has been expelled. Akimov, the devoted Bolshevik, ready to kill friend or foe at Lenin’s behest, spouts an illiterate mixture of Slavic messianism and Russian imperialism. In one conversation with the young Novikov, he says, “Russia is only the beginning! For the Russian, half the world is too little ... It is not the country that matters, but that the Russian nation must save the world, humanity. That was written by fate at its birth.” (This theme, sounded at the very outset of the novel, reappears in the very final pages in a more polished form as the historical explanation for the driving force of Stalinist imperialism. Novikov is rewarded for his part in the Gorin affair by being assigned to the United States nominally as ambassador but in reality as a spy. Veria, his superior, now one of the Kremlin rulers, informs him that the “time will come” when the Stalinist secret police will take over America.)
Novikov is not drawn to the Bolsheviks because he shares their vision of creating a new society. Indeed, their liberating ideas are nowhere to be found in this novel. What draws Novikov to the Bolsheviks (as they are presented by Gouzenko) is his adolescent cynicism, his attraction to those who have power and seem to know how to use it ruthlessly. At no stage in his career does the young intellectual Novikov evince the slightest concern or anxiety over socialist ideas. The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin is presented as a vulgar fight for power. Novikov sits coldly and silently until he sees who is winning and then joins the victorious side.
His denunciation of Gorin, therefore, is misplaced because it does not flow inexorably from his past pattern of behavior, his character, or his ideas. How could Gorin have seduced him with a false set of ideals when Novikov demonstrates that he never had any? Because Novikov is what he is from the very beginning of the book – a careerist – his assassination of Gorin cannot mean what Gouzenko says it means – the final and symbolic act of Bolshevik degeneration – intellectual parricide and the triumph of brute force alone.
HAD GOUZENKO GIVEN US an honest picture of the October Revolution, of Bolshevism and its authentic representatives, with all their virtues and faults; had he shown a young Novikov who absorbed the ideas of Lenin and a Gorin, and then degenerated into an opportunist, he would have at least prepared the artistic ground for his argument that Gorin (Gorky) is responsible for Novikov as Lenin is responsible for Stalin. But then, Gouzenko would have had to write a different kind of novel. He would have had to present the real struggle of men and the ideas they represented. He does nothing of the sort, however. The caricature he does present reveals Gouzenko is still the intellectual child and victim of Stalinism.
However, if The Fall of a Titan fails as a novel, it succeeds as a series of vignettes about the horror of life in the bureaucratic jungle. Whenever Gouzenko tears away the mask of deceit and lays bare the faces of horror, fear and terror, he writes like a man possessed. In these moments he even overcomes his simple inability to write well.
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