Lenin is like emptiness

Andrey Babitsky about the book by Lev Danilkin

“Gorky” continues the series of materials about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Historian Alexander Shubin spoke about the evolution of the biographies of the leader of the Russian revolution, and from the anthology “Lenin on Culture and Art,” prepared in 1938 by Mikhail Lifshits, we selected Lenin’s thoughts on literature. We are publishing a second review of Lenin’s biography from Lev Danilkin, written by Andrei Babitsky.

Several very compelling biographies have been written in recent years—the lives of Humboldt (Andrea Woolf), Turing (Hodges), Robert Oppenheimer (Monk), Stalin (Oleg Khlevnyuk and Montefiori), Abraham Lincoln and Steve Jobs (Isaacson). Ronald Chernow's academic study of Alexander Hamilton became Broadway's most successful musical. There will be more biographies, what other work of writing gives so much power over history and so many opportunities for sympathy. What could be more pleasant than reinterpreting an entire life, especially an outstanding life.

I really don’t like Lenin, but I can’t help but admit that we really lack a normal biography of him, and the abundance of specialized literature here is more of an obstacle than a help. Most people do not have the patience and interest to read hundreds of primary sources and academic publications, or do research work on their own. I would like to have a book that says the most important things. A book that one could recommend to a friend to read regardless of all possible ideological differences. An item on a list of top 10 books about something. Danilkin failed to write such a book.

First of all, because the book tells us not only about Lenin, but also a little too much about Danilkin himself, who fills the text with his own views and politically loaded metaphors (“strikes, romanticized in Soviet times, were a brutal event; their closest modern analogue is the Maidan events in the republics of the former USSR, when undesirables are stuffed into trash cans and rolled into burning car tires"), fights his current opponents and solves his own problems. In a sense, “Pantocrator” is a personal odyssey of the author, with whom the reader does not end up in the attic of a Simbirsk house (excluded from the inspection route) and conducts unsuccessful negotiations with the administration of the prison on Shpalernaya to be allowed into the cell. The conversation is literally given in the text.

When it comes to biography, the author should not, of course, hide himself, but what is of interest is not his everyday troubles, but his view of the hero, his own interpretation of a significant fate. And here there is no doubt about the main engine of biographical interest: Danilkin admires his character to the point of trembling and never escapes his charm, not even on a single page. Some passages of the book, which should—in the 21st century the reader expects this from a biography of Lenin—should at least partly align with Soviet Leninism, are uncritical to a comic degree. Excitedly discussing a six-hundred-page work on “The Development of Capitalism,” Danilkin writes: “It is clear that each page cost the author a week of work,” although simple arithmetic suggests that this cannot be. Moreover, in parallel with “The Development of Capitalism,” Lenin and Krupskaya were translating the Webb couple’s book about labor movements. The author spends a paragraph and a half perplexed at how the exiles were able to cope with the translation of a complex text without properly knowing the English language, and literally in the next sentence he notes that Lenin also had a German edition with which he could “consult.” Seriously?

These little things are just examples; the whole book does not deify Lenin (who, before acquiring a pseudonym, is called “VI” in the text). Even Shushenskoye is becoming a kind of heaven on earth - a rare place where “five-story buildings and the private sector are not at war with each other,” and “Cheburashka sculptures made from car tires in kindergartens look like witty installations” (tires again!). Lenin is always smarter, more principled and more insightful than everyone else, he sees the future like Laplace’s demon, and, like on a drawing board, dialectically deduces the entire history of the 20th century from Marxism. This is not an exaggeration: Lenin, according to Danilkin, predicted the modern history of China. I would like to ask whether Deng Xiaoping or the principle of “one family, one child” were included in this prediction, but let’s not let it be completely meaningless.

Love for the hero quite predictably leads to the fact that there are no other characters left in the book. There is a little bit of Krupskaya, and everyone else - colleagues, opponents, subordinates - are completely disembodied, desubjectivized and without ideas. The biggest role they can hope to play is to be spies, witnesses and objects of constant ridicule. Two exceptions - unjustified biographical inserts about Ivan Babushkin and Nikolai Bauman - only confirm the rule. Lenin constantly laughs at the stupidity and indecisiveness of his comrades and enemies; bursts of this laughter pass through the text, like off-screen laughter through sitcoms.

All this would probably not be so offensive if Danilkin was a hack. But no - even if he did not find new important primary sources, there is no doubt about his familiarity with secondary literature, curiosity, diligence and talent. He put a lot of effort into ridding Soviet biographies of Lenin of their most noticeable shortcomings - censorship emptiness and utter mediocrity, but he repeated their main shortcoming. What he produced was not a biography, but a life.

Because the book is vividly written, the strange feeling that Danilkin went to explore the pyramids and fell under the power of mummies only intensifies. Some phrases look as if Danilkin’s pen was drawn by the cold fingers of members of the RSDLP. Thus, one of his characters “to the chagrin of his comrades, died of tuberculosis,” and another, “having greatly complicated the lives of his comrades... attacked his mother with a knife and died in a mental hospital.” The tragic episode reveals the location of the author, who already in the first chapters looks at what is happening from the point of view of revolutionary expediency. Lenin had not yet become a great and cynical politician by this time, but Danilkin had.

What you expect from a biography is not a story about how someone’s life turned out, but an idea of ​​what they did with their life. Lenin was who? Was he a brilliant politician? Great philosopher? Power-obsessed schemer? A utopian ruthless in his aspirations? Neither the story about Lenin nor his apology (if Danilkin set himself such a task, and, apparently, he set it too) are impossible without this idea. But the trouble is that Danilkin’s Lenin is precisely that, the pantocrator of solar motes, and behind this messianic formulation lies not what you might think, but a postmodern emptiness. There seems to be a reference to Hegel, but the pages devoted to philosophy are the weakest. “A great cyclist, philosopher, traveler, joker, athlete and cryptographer” - this is how the book cover characterizes the hero; that is, no one. Some biographies are guilty of telling us on the first page that the butler is a murderer. But it’s much worse when the book is read, but who the butler is is still unknown and who the murderer is too. It’s as if Danilkin was looking for 700 pages of his Lenin and couldn’t find it.

Both the scale, talents, and atrocities of Lenin require a commensurate biography.