Boris Pilnyak
MAHOGANY '
The year
is
1928.
The town is a Russian Bruges and a Russian Kamakura.
~
l.
Pilnyak (the pseudonym of Boris Vogau), together with Zamyatin, was
the object, in 1929, of the first Soviet literary frame-up. Both writers
were accused of having published anti-Soviet works in the bourgeois
press abroad. Pilnyak's "Mahogany," extracted here, had indeed been
published in Berlin in 1929; until this time it had been the standard
practice for Soviet authors to simultaneously publish their works abroad
to establish copyright. In the case of "Mahogany," the work had been
published in Germany without the author's consent. Nevertheless,
this was used as a pretext to smash the quasi-independent R ussian
Writers' Association of which Pilnyak was president. After writing a
groveling submission which was never published, Pilnyak was permitted
to continue working. He revised "Mahogany" which later appeared, in
greatly modified form, in the novel
The Volga Flows into the Caspian
Sea.
Unlike Zamyatin, who refused to submit, Pilnyak was rewarded for
his weakness by arrest in 1938. He was sent to a concentration camp
during the Yezhov period. His ultimate fate is unknown but he did not
survive imprisonment and, like so many other Soviet writers arrested at
that time, he no doubt died in camp.
By a tragic irony, it appears that Pilnyak intended to give "Maho–
gany" an anti-Trotskyist twist, in the spirit of the times. He made a
political miscalculation in believing that the Bukharin "right wing" line
might be followed by Stalin; at the time of writing Bukharin's fate had
not yet been decided. R eaders may note one curious aspect of "Maho–
gany," namely, an anticipation of Burnham's "Managerial Revolution."
"Mahogany," which has never been available to Soviet readers, is a
splendid example of the ornamental style which owes much to Leskov,
Bely and Remizov. This prose style with its thematic repetitions and its
peculiar rhythms was characteristic of the Soviet '20's, and was subse–
quently denounced as "formalistic."
2. An ancient Japanese provincial town which Pilnyak visited
Oil
his travels.
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