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From Platonov to Aitmatov; from Eisenstein to Abuladze
to that, also the world. According to K. Clark, Gorbachev shared this belief.20 Before the convention of the Union of Writers in 1986, he even addressed a group of authors and asked them for help in his fight against conservatives and bureaucrats. But during the time of Gorbachev, literature had already begun to lose its former significance. It was primarily film which paved the way for changes at the peak of glasnost (1987–1988). The Repentance by Tengiz Abuladze was put in countrywide distribution in January 1987. However, sometime around 1990 all the existing values began to collapse, and parody developed. In 1995 Timur Kibirov in his novel When Lenin Was a Child (Когда был Ленин маленьким) transformed the story of the “idol of the revolution” into a post-modernist pastiche.21 But let us go back to the October Revolution and its reflection in literature. The rage of the revolution and the horrors of the civil war written about by Vsevolod Ivanov (1895–1963), for instance, in Coloured Winds (Цветные ветра, 1921): They brought locksmith lathes captured in the town to the Foxes’ Den … Bombs were being prepared … The time has come that killing is inevitable. I don’t know why but it is so. It was also a subject for Artyom Vesolyi (1899–1939), real name Nikolai Ivanovich Kochkurov, a victim of the Stalinist repressions. The best novel of his is Russia Washed with Blood (Россия, кровью умытая, 1932), which he constantly expanded and worked on until his death (he began writing it in 1920). Gorky considered Vesolyi one of the most competent writers to have employed the topic of the history of the civil war in literature. Wooden fences cracked under the weight of decrees: “Martial law … next time … strictly drunkenness … looting … culprits … shot dead.” […] The heads of the locals, who had never boasted of special courage, were spinning … Vesolyi also mentioned that a clever man knows what to do even in times of revolution. Boris Pilnyak (1894–1941) in his novel The Naked Year (Голый год) wrote the following about the Bolsheviks: leather men in leather jackets; each of them leatherly handsome, leatherly firm … – Do you actually know what’s going on in Russia? – I sure do – the power has been taken by the riff-raff, people have nothing to eat and racketeering is rife. – Could our Russia face the whole world?
20 Ibidem, p. 387. 21 Ibidem, p. 378.
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