"Pinocchio and his friends go underground." Excerpt from the book “Soviet Trickster: The Cultural Heritage of Cynicism” by Mark Lipovetsky

material: Mark Lipovetsky
illustrations: Sofia Khananashvili

The publishing house “New Literary Review” is publishing a new book by Mark Lipovetsky, “The Soviet Trickster: The Cultural Heritage of Cynicism,” dedicated to popular characters of the Soviet era - from Julio Jurenito and Ostap Bender to Woland, Venichka and the heroes of Leonid Gaidai’s comedies.

The trickster is the embodiment of the inextricable link between chaos and freedom: creative disorder and destructive self-will. In the 20th century, he becomes a parodic double of the “new Soviet man” - a homunculus painstakingly cultivated by official Soviet culture and ideology. Because a trickster is someone who must break the rules, break them, and combine the official and the unofficial. But developing the theoretical concept of this trope and the typology of the Soviet trickster, Doctor of Philology, Professor at Columbia University Mark Lipovetsky, as a result, writes a book about the history and theory of Soviet culture in general.

With the kind permission of UFO, we are publishing part of the chapter “Between Modernism and Socialist Realism: Alexei Tolstoy’s Pinocchio” - about why the story of the “Golden Key” is not only a children’s fairy tale, but also a plot about how the avant-garde artists of the Silver Age move into the underground in the 1930s.

Utopia Pinocchio

E. D. Tolstaya defines the central theme of “The Golden Key” as “the plot of a stupid but happy wooden man who escaped into the freedom of art from the evil puppet ruler - a kind of alter ego of the author.” What Tolstaya calls “freedom of art” is embodied in “The Golden Key” by the motif of his own theater , acquired by Pinocchio as a result of all his adventures. This motive directly correlates with the metaposition of the trickster - it is precisely to the “institutionalization” of the trickster perspective that Pinocchio strives. Or rather, its creator. It is no coincidence that in Tolstoy’s mind the theme of his theater is paradoxically connected with Stalin. This is clearly visible in the manuscript of the play “The Golden Key,” which Tolstoy was working on in parallel with his work on “Bread” - in 1936. Tolstoy writes the play in a thick notebook on one side of the page. The left side of the spread is generally left blank, with drawings appearing on it only a few times. For the first time, opposite Malvina’s words (released in the final version): “I miss the theater. If only we could start our own puppet theater... We would write plays ourselves, sell tickets ourselves... Without Karabas’s whip,” the profile of a mustachioed man appears.

Drawings by A. Tolstoy on the pages of the manuscript of the play “The Golden Key”

A similar profile, but already equipped with a characteristic pipe, appears in the manuscript again, almost a hundred pages later, opposite the opening scene of the very theater that Malvina dreams of: “ Voices of children : Pinocchio, Pinocchio, / The cheerful Pinocchio himself / Opens his own theater, / The best in the world for children. / Entertaining plays <…> / The dolls compose themselves / They dance and sing themselves” (this scene is also excluded from the final text of the play).

The repeated association between the motif of his theater and the image of Stalin suggests that Tolstoy mentally turns to Stalin the dream of his own theater - of a guaranteed metaposition. It is Stalin, as the personification of absolute power, who is able to free the artist from the petty control of the “barabas-barabas” and provide freedom of creativity - on certain, however, conditions. This expectation itself is paradoxical: the dream of creative freedom rests on the supposed support of a tyrant. (Let us remember that this is how many interpreted the creation of the Writers' Union, which at first glance freed “fellow travelers” from the terror of RAPP.) The entire “Pinocchio” project from this point of view can be read as a kind of utopia - an oxymoronic utopia of a free puppet .

Tolstoy's researchers have noticed the smallest differences between The Golden Key and Collodi's fairy tale, but for some reason few people pay attention to the colossal and almost declaratively emphasized difference between Pinocchio and Pinocchio: although Pinocchio, like Pinocchio, is born with a long nose, Pinocchio's nose elongates even more at the moment when he lies, which makes the initial size of his nose relatively small. This motive is completely absent in The Golden Key, and not because Pinocchio is not lying. Quite the opposite: precisely because lies initially characterize this character!

If we accept E.D. Tolstoy’s version of Pinocchio as Tolstoy’s alter ego, then Pinocchio’s long nose becomes a sly declaration of the artist’s purpose, which Tolstoy sees not at all in the obligation to be a herald of truth, as the Russian cultural tradition requires, but quite the opposite - in lying, in the ability to captivatingly compose fables. Tolstoy replaces the artist-prophet with the artist-Pinocchio, who always remains in the space of the game, in the space of fictional reality. The only thing he needs is the right to lie freely, not from under the whip, but for his own pleasure [ author’s note : Even in the 1930 collection “How We Write,” Tolstoy insisted: “The word “fiction” (I am addressing the readers) should not be treated as something unserious, for example, like this: it was written off from life, which means it’s true, and this is made up, which means— “literature”…” (Tolstoy A.N. Collected works. T. 10. P. 136). It is interesting that in a completely official speech at a meeting with young writers, which took place in April 1934, Tolstoy quite openly formulated similar ideas: “In general, the more fiction, the better. This is real creativity <…> It is impossible to write without fiction. All literature is fiction” (Ibid. p. 247)]. Tolstoy's puppetry is completely devoid of tragedy: if life is a theater, then this is the most suitable place for play - mischief, mischief, fables and adventures, what Pinocchio is best suited for. This was precisely stated by E. D. Tolstoy: in Tolstoy

the doll “finds itself” in the fact that it is a doll, an actor, it is, as it were, framed by a double frame, playing itself, and on this magical path it gains freedom of action - or rather, its illusion. Self-realization does not occur at the exit from the world of conventions into the world of immanent values, as in Pinocchio, but in the creation of a second-order convention and domination over it - this is a post-symbolist solution, it is in it that the novelty of the fairy tale lies, and not only in the purely adventurous depsychologized plot.

The features of a clown and a mediator appearing in Pinocchio illuminate Tolstoy's utopia in a new way. Pinocchio is a trickster artist who freely plays with the circumstances of polar systems and realities. He is not subject to any moral court, since he does not belong entirely to any of the systems, but only fools around, turning the conditions of existence into the conventions of the game. Such self-realization of the artist does not pose any threat to the authorities, who fear the truth and revelations most of all. That is why Stalin’s profile appears in Tolstoy’s manuscript - as the embodiment of hopes for a power capable of granting an artist the right to his own reality, to his own theater, subject to pure and unalloyed lies, in other words, the artist’s non-interference in the affairs of this very government.

This utopia can be understood as a unique attempt of its kind to reconcile modernism with the conditions of the “Soviet night.” After all, what is the view of art as a lie, if not a deliberately primitivized (according to the laws of children's literature) modernist concept of the autonomy of art? Doesn't this sound like an understanding of art as a free game, not related to the political, social, ideological aspects of reality? From this point of view, the numerous associations with the culture of the Silver Age present in The Golden Key take on a completely different meaning. M. Petrovsky was the first to identify this powerful associative layer in Tolstoy’s fairy tale, which, it turns out, refers to Meyerhold, and to Blok’s “Showcase,” and to Bely, Bryusov, “Satyricon,” Maeterlinck, and the occult hobbies of the beginning of the century.

However, it is not entirely clear why Tolstoy needed to write a veiled parody of the Silver Age in 1935, when modernist experiments were officially branded as formalism and bourgeois degeneration. Petrovsky, for example, interprets the Karabas-Barabas theater as a parody of Meyerhold with his theory of the actor-super-puppet and even sees in the lightning on the curtain of the Buratino theater a hint of the seagull on the curtain of the Moscow Art Theater. But Tolstoy, close to Meyerhold's circle in his youth, openly polemicized with him in the 1920s and early 1930s. The secret , disguised attacks on Meyerhold, who by 1935 had already become almost the main target of the official campaign against “formalism,” allegedly hidden in the “Golden Key,” look like a strange anachronism.

Perhaps, however, another assumption: Tolstoy needed veiled associations with Meyerhold and symbolism in order to reconcile modernism with socialist realism - in other words, to create mediation between the cultural tradition of the Silver Age and Soviet culture, between the official and the unofficial. Irony in relation to such characters as Pierrot and Malvina arises in Tolstoy's fairy tale as a reaction to the too serious implementation of the modernist program. It is this seriousness that leads to the artist’s conscious isolation (internal or external emigration), escape from the cruel theater of life, comically represented in “The Golden Key” by Malvina’s doll garden or the cave where Malvina and Pierrot are hiding from their pursuers. Tolstoy’s poems by Pierrot sound like an evil parody not only of Blok, as M. Petrovsky believed, but also of other great Russian poets who chose the path of emigration, both external and internal:

We'll live all summer
We are on this hummock,
Ah, in solitude,
To everyone's surprise...

According to the logic of Tolstoy’s fairy tale, Pinocchio is from the very beginning freer than Malvina and Pierrot: “a brainless, gullible fool with short thoughts” accepts the most unpleasant circumstances as the conditions of the game, and if he plays, then at full strength, extracting maximum theatrical effects from any situation. He doesn't take the situation seriously, his motto is: Enjoy the show! - and that is why he is rewarded in the end not with real wealth or power, but with his theater .

However, the contrast between Buratino and Malvina and Pierrot is not absolute, but relative: it is not for nothing that Buratino “would give even a golden key to see his friends again.” In the same way, Tolstoy’s irony over modernist themes and motifs borders on an attempt at self-justification - before himself, before his past, before the circle of ideas and people with whom he was close and from whom he so decisively moved away, moving along the path of official Soviet recognition.

"Land of Happy Children"

In a notebook from 1936, in which Tolstoy collected historical materials for “Bread,” an entry suddenly appears relating to “Pinocchio”:

This is a follow-up - you need to place leeches three times.

Candles sparkle brightly
Little men are dancing
Why am I not having fun [crossed out]
I hung my head [crossed out]
Our owner is quick
Pulling the strings.

In this poem, which was not included in either the play or the film script for the film “The Golden Key,” the identification of the author’s “I” with Pinocchio—both as a hero and as a puppet—is clearer than anywhere else. In these lines, written after the completion of the prose text of the fairy tale, recognition of the bitter failure of what constituted the central plot line of “The Golden Key” breaks through: liberation from the power of the tyrannical puppeteer, the acquisition of his own theater turns out to be imaginary: despite the appearance of fun, the puppeteer is still “nimbly pulling the strings.” (A strange irony is also felt in the fact that the first letters of the title of Tolstoy’s fairy tale coincide with the abbreviation ZK - prisoner canal soldier, which arose on the White Sea Canal, where, as we remember, Tolstoy visited in the summer of 1933, before the start of negotiations on the “Golden Key”.)

It is also significant that this poem appears in Tolstoy in close proximity and even, it seems, as an unexpected offshoot of the thought about leeches, and therefore about Duremar. The semantics of this image is quite transparent in a fairy tale, a play, and a film script: a servile intellectual, a bearer of some kind of learning, willingly selling himself to someone who has strength and power. While working on “Bread,” Tolstoy, apparently, cannot escape the thought of what role he accepted, agreeing to insert a custom-made and completely false story into a novel dear to him. In other words, has he not turned into the corrupt cynic Duremar, having ceased to be the cheerful Buratino, leading his game in his theater?

Of course, the word “master,” and even in the context of work on “Bread,” directly points to Stalin as a parallel to Karabas-Barabas. One should not, of course, assume that Karabas is a direct parody of Stalin. Moreover, as we have seen, in the manuscript of the play, Stalin’s profile appears in conjunction with the dream of his own theater, that is, to a certain extent, as the antithesis of the power of Karabas. But at the time of work on “Bread”, Stalin seems to merge with the image of Karabas. Why?

In the text of The Golden Key, written mainly before Tolstoy’s conversation with Voroshilov, the characters find behind a secret door a magic theater, on the stage of which a garden , Africa and a city successively appear - and a city devoid of any signs of a social structure, a city in general (“frosted street lamps… a toy tram… an ice cream man… a newspaperman”). In addition, the toy nature of all these worlds is invariably emphasized:

On small trees with gold and silver leaves, clockwork starlings the size of fingernails sang.

A teddy bear with an umbrella waddled along on its hind legs.

A rhinoceros galloped along; for safety, a rubber ball was placed on its sharp horn.

A cyclist passed by on wheels - no bigger than a jam saucer. A newspaperman ran by - four folded sheets of a tear-off calendar - that's how big his newspapers were.

These toy worlds are the perfect space for play, completely isolated from political reality.

At the same time, entry into this “toy” reality, in which Pinocchio and his friends can finally find their own theater, is ordered for Karabas-Barabas and his associates:

Karabas Barabas jumped up to the secret door and pounded on it with his fists and heels:
- Tra-ta-ta-ta!
But the door was strong.
Karabas Barabas ran up and hit the door with his back. The door didn't budge. He stomped on the police:
- Break down the damned door in the name of the Gibberish King!..
The police felt each other's skin, some for a bump on their nose, some for a bump on their head.
“No, the work here is very hard,” they answered and went to the head of the city to say that they had done everything according to the law, but the old organ grinder was apparently being helped by the devil himself, because he went through the wall.
Karabas Barabas pulled his beard, fell to the floor and began to roar, howl and roll around like mad in the empty closet under the stairs.

Pinocchio and his friends go through the door located in Carlo's closet, then go down a steep stone staircase into the dungeon for a long time. This is a strange underground - bathed in the light of the sun - but underground nonetheless:

Buratino lifted the decayed felt with both hands; it covered the hole in the stone wall. Blue light poured from there. The first thing they saw when they crawled through the hole was the diverging rays of the sun. They fell from the vaulted ceiling through the round window. Wide beams with dust particles dancing in them illuminated a round room made of yellowish marble. In the middle of it stood a wonderfully beautiful puppet theater.

Then, in the very last chapter, the Buratino Theater gives a performance in the city, and not underground. But this is a rather strange plot twist, because it is not clear how the almighty Karabas did not prevent Pinocchio from opening his theater. Or maybe many years have passed since the moment when Pinocchio and his friends found a puppet theater in the dungeon?

At the risk of being accused of exaggeration, I still want to offer an anachronistic interpretation of this ending: Buratino and his friends go not underground, but to the underground - it is there, in the underground, that modernism, preserved by Buratino’s troupe, will live. Of course, Tolstoy could not have known about the future of uncensored literature and culture, but it was in the mid-1930s, after the creation of the Writers' Union and the introduction of the “fundamental method,” socialist realism (1934), that the first underground phenomena emerged, the first sprouts of the “second culture” of the 1960s–1980s.

If the heroes of “The Golden Key” do not go underground, then they will certainly be absorbed by socialist realism. This is clearly evidenced by the play and film script written by Tolstoy based on the “novel for children.”

At the end of the play - which, as already mentioned, Tolstoy worked on simultaneously with Bread - first appears the image of a magic book, the words of which come true and the pictures come to life. The magic book sends Karabas-Barabas and his ilk “to hell,” and provides Pinocchio and his friends with an airship that takes them to the “land of happiness.” The description of the country of happiness, “the country of happy children” is absolutely unambiguous: “here is the sea, and a pioneer camp in the mountains, and fields where they reap, and planes in the sky... at the top are towers similar to the Kremlin, behind them are the rays of the sun” (314). Here Tolstoy deliberately destroys the boundary between the theatrical reality of the game and what is beyond its boundaries: Pinocchio addresses the audience, asking what the name is “the country of happy children,” and, having received the answer “USSR,” asks for permission to “stay with you, study, have fun.”

Pinocchio turns from a theatrical clown with his lazzi into a messiah, and not even an ironic one, but a completely solemn one. Here Tolstoy’s text moved from the space of the game into the space of official mythology, and in it Pinocchio, of course, could not lay claim to such an exalted role. Hence the subsequent metamorphoses of the finale of “The Golden Key” - they take place in the film script that Tolstoy wrote in 1937 for a film subsequently shot by the great storyteller Alexander Ptushko. This ending is in many ways similar to the ending of the play, but here an important detail appears that gives completeness to the model of myth that displaces the utopia of fairy-tale freedom. From the magic book, instead of an airship, a “steel red-winged bird” appears, from it “three people in all leather” emerge, who “give a click” to Karabas and Duremaru and take Pinocchio and his comrades to the “happy country”. The airplane and the idiomatic “leather jackets” associated with the Cheka symbolically represent power , which uses violence to ensure the triumph of heroes. In full accordance with this logic, in Ptushko’s film, based on this scenario, a mustachioed captain with a pipe stands out among the pilots, even visually reminiscent of Stalin. As Alexander Prokhorov notes:

The clear hierarchy of Pinocchio's mentors defines the Soviet mythological aspect of Ptushko's film fairy tale. The film's action is based on the hero's journey to the magic door, during which Pinocchio changes several mentors and eventually finds the real one, who came for him from the Kremlin, wears a mustache and smokes a pipe.

In other words, Tolstoy’s attempt to create a hybrid of modernist and socialist realist aesthetics, to put into practice the utopia of a free puppet, reprimanding and fencing off the space of play within Soviet regulations, is destroyed by the colossus of Soviet mythology. This happens as soon as the Pinocchio project enters the field of theater and especially cinema - as we know, the most popular and most politicized of the Soviet arts. However, within the framework of literature, Buratino remains himself, and Tolstoy’s utopia of a free puppet rises as a brilliant example of a successful trickster strategy within the framework of official culture, which resonated for a long time in various areas of Soviet cultural history.