From a cosmic perspective it was not that long ago that Russian novelist Boris Pilnyak was widely read. By 1927, the year his novella Ivan Moscow was first published in the Soviet Union, Pilnyak was second only to Maxim Gorky as the most read living Russian writer. Victor Serge, in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, describes Pilnyak at the height of his fame:
He was childishly pleased with his fame and material comforts...Thirty-five years of age, books like The Naked Year, Ivan and Maria, and Machines and Wolves behind him, a love for and familiarity with the lands of Russia, goodwill towards the powerful... He was tall, an oval head, strong features, a Germanic type, very egotistical and very human
Ten years later, in 1937, he was dead, having been executed by the Stalin regime after being accused of being a Japanese spy. Pilnyak is not entirely forgotten of course, but he has fallen into obscurity. A youtube video of a lecture on him has garnered an impressive 67 views. A 57-page essay on Pilnyak by Ronald D. LeBlanc, Professor of Slavic Languages at the University of Washington, has most of its source list in Russian. Notable exceptions on this source list include Serge’s memoirs and Max Eastman’s Artists in Uniform which has a chapter on Pilynak. These two references reoccur again and again in the English language literature on Pilnyak. Robert Conquest, in his study of the Stalinist purges, The Great Terror, devotes half a page to Pilnyak and his plight.
It is strange that such a luminary has returned to us – by which I mean anglosphere citizens of the 21st century - after years of neglect. Ivan Moscow has just been republished by Sublunary Editions as part of their Empyrean series. Yet stranger still is that decomposition is the great theme of Ivan Moscow. The book follows, after a chapter establishing its six “conditions”, the growing delusions of the titular and syphilitic protagonist. That a book on decay should see life again forces us to ask critical questions behind the vision of Ivan Moscow and an easy cosmic nihilism the book’s opening paragraph establishes.