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Timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Olga Forsh, the AST publishing house published a reprint of The Crazy Ship, a novel written in 1930 with a key about the life of the Petrograd intelligentsia, a strange and underestimated book from the era of the great turning point.
Olga Forsh is a rather unusual character in Russian literature of the 20th century. Daughter and daughter-in-law of two famous tsarist generals, cousin of Pavel Florensky, a theosophist, member of Volfila (Free Philosophical Association, almost all members of which either emigrated or were repressed). All this, it would seem, was not at all conducive to a career in Soviet literature and, in general, to survival in Stalin’s time. However, Forsh has found herself a relatively safe, but worthy and quite honorable niche – historical novels and plays. Mainly – about the fate of representatives of the Russian democratic intelligentsia (Radishchev, the Decembrists, etc.). She wrote them from the 1920s until the end of her days. She outlived all the significant writers of her generation and died peacefully in 1961 at the age of 88, surrounded by good-natured respect: in the memories of Forsh of her younger colleagues, the image of a smart and cheerful grandmother arises. Her books were published until the end of Soviet power, and then they were practically forgotten – with the exception of The Crazy Ship. This novel, devastated by criticism and not republished until perestroika, was an eccentric bend in her writing career, but outlived all Forsh’s other things.
The Crazy Ship is usually mentioned as the third in a short list of novels with clues about the life of the Leningrad bohemia of the 1920s, after Konstantin Vaginov’s The Goat Song (1927) and Veniamin Kaverin’s Brawler (1928). Forsh does write after these two books. This is an interesting moment: Forsh is 26 years older than Vaginov, Kaverina is 29 years older, but she obviously adopts the manner, the position of younger prose writers. The same environment is described here, partly the same people (Kaverin himself appears in Forsh; Vaginov is not in her novel for some reason, but he could easily be: he was a member of the Gumilev circle “Sounding Shell”, about which Forsh writes). The basic approach is the same. Forsh hides acquaintances behind transparent ironic nicknames, but sometimes, like her predecessors, she interferes with the features of prototypes, turning portraits into collective images. (It is worth saying that the new edition contains a commentary by the philologist Oleg Lekmanov, who for the first time tried to decipher all the prototypes in the novel, including very episodic characters.) Most of the main characters are easily guessed: the romantic genius Gaetan – Blok, the brutal and noble Yeruslan – Gorky, utterly ecstatic Mikula – Klyuev, thoughtful Sokhaty – Zamyatin, who believes in socialism and at the same time cynical Zhukanets – Shklovsky, but with a Komsomol admixture, mischievous Genya Chorn – Evgeny Schwartz and so on. There is also an auto-cartoon – the emancipated writer Doliva, prone to comical ecstasies.
Actually, the main Crazy Ship is the House of Arts, DISK, a writers’ hostel organized in 1919 by Gorky and Chukovsky in the mansion of the merchant Eliseev, which became the center of Petrograd cultural life in the era of war communism and the early NEP. However, Forsh does not tell the story of the House of Arts, the narration leaves and returns to it, from time to time switching to things that seem to have nothing to do with the plot (for example, the author’s recent trip to France and Italy, which is in stark contrast to the hunger and cold of the disk times ). The chronology will fall apart, the crumbs of the plot will interfere in the chaos of associations. The same thing happens with the manner of writing: the novel switches unpredictably between a piercing memory, a scabrous anecdote, a literary essay. At times, Forsh seems to try on the stylistic masks of his characters: he inserts into the text absolutely Zoshchenko’s scenes, witticisms in the spirit of Shklovsky, symbolist grotesques imitating Bely (in the novel his name is Alien Tourist). These imitations are often brilliant, but their hodgepodge is confusing. Even among the most benevolent contemporary readers, Forsh’s novel caused slight confusion. Meanwhile, it is obvious that this is not just a heap of exercises in style, but an extremely reflective work, it just hides its tasks.
Between the novels of Vaginov and Kaverin on the one hand and Forsh on the other, there are only a couple of years of difference, but this couple of years matters. Both Vaginov and Kaverin write in fresh footsteps, sometimes literally writing down yesterday, they document the crisis of the intellectual consciousness of the 1920s, its searches and failures, attempts to find a place in Soviet reality and save oneself. Forsh writes history. There is a gap between the events she describes and the moment of writing. Some heroes died, others emigrated, others grew up and changed. The era of the DISK is a closed book, a complete piece of the history of the Russian intelligentsia — the same as, say, the history of the Decembrists or spiritual quests of the middle of the 19th century (shortly before The Ship, Forsh published the novel The Contemporaries about Gogol and Alexander Ivanov).
In 1930, when Forsh writes The Crazy Ship, socialist realism has not yet been proclaimed, but it is finally clear that the air of the 1920s is drying up, we must prepare for new times. Unlike many of her younger colleagues, friends and acquaintances, Forsh could describe this end without torment, anger and predilection, without breaking herself, finding a saving distance. She gave the eyes of the participant and the observer to the historian. At the same time, she clearly understood that now is not the best time for a balanced history of the spiritual searches of the revolutionary era. Therefore, the impartial mirror here is broken into hundreds of fragments, whimsical arabesques take the place of the report. The purpose of the book is destroyed by its style—and there is, of course, a great deal of futility here. This note of futility, of the brilliant futility of writing in The Crazy Ship is great, but it does not make it any less intelligent and subtle book.
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From the feeling of fragility and tension, ordinary everyday life was no more, and life itself became not at all this or that accumulation of facts, but only the art of living these facts. Neither the usual norms in the relationship between work and leisure, nor the need to wear one or another mask caused by position or hitherto familiar hierarchy of intellectual assessments. And at the same time, it was precisely in these years, as on the edge of a volcano, the richest vineyards, that people bloomed in their best color. All were heroes. All were creators. Who created new forms of society, who – books, who – an entire school, who – boots from cardstock.
Olga Forsh. Crazy ship. M.: AST; Edited by Elena Shubina, 2023
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