In the mid-1960s, as a visiting student in the Soviet Union, Geoffrey Hosking became a devoted reader of the “thick journal” Novyi mir. In later years he came to admire the poetry of its fabled editor, Aleksandr Tvardovskii. Hosking has now authored the first English-language biography of Tvardovskii, whose appearance should be welcomed by scholars of twentieth-century Russia. This eminently useful and highly accessible book is based primarily on Tvardovskii’s diaries and letters as well as his Sobranie sochinenii (1977–83). Hosking’s is expressly “not a work of literary criticism”; rather, it is an exploration of his protagonist’s “personality, outlook, and habits,” while still, in the view of this reader, offering sensitive interpretations of poetics (xii). “The result is a work of love,” Hosking writes, “but also an attempt to unearth the truth” (xi).
The story begins in the Smolensk countryside, where Tvardovskii was born in 1910. Aleksandr came from an unusual peasant family, as his father, Trifon Gordeevich, was literate and enjoyed poetry. In 1931, a fateful year for the family, Trifon Gordeevich was branded a kulak and exiled, together with his wife and Aleksandr’s siblings, to the Ural Mountains. Aleksandr, already a published poet, renounced his father and remained at liberty. As Hosking explains, the decision tormented Tvardovskii, but, a convinced communist, the young poet understood that Iosif Stalin, not Trifon Gordeevich, was his true father.
Tvardovskii’s complicity in his family’s exile was a source of unabating trauma, yet he drew on his resilience, a quality instilled in him by the trials of a rural Russian childhood. In the 1930s, often condemned as a kulak’s son, an ambitious yet sensitive Tvardovskii would cultivate a singular strength of will, buoyed by his faith in communism. In Hosking’s telling, World War II was a turning point for Tvardovskii: the setbacks of the early war led him to pursue “a somber reckoning with truth” (106). He thus gravitated to the realist pole of socialist realism. The fruit of this move was Vasilii Tiorkin, which would establish him as a leading Soviet poet and consequently less vulnerable to pillory as his father’s son.
After the war Tvardovskii began to fashion an aesthetic—“a modified socialist realism” (280)—that helped him wrestle with his country’s as well as his own past. To his newfound realism Tvardovskii added a desire to chronicle memory rather than praise the glorious future. The resulting aesthetic combined memory and truth, both of which were to be informed by “all-human values” (164). This aesthetic would also come to define his program as the storied editor of Novyi mir.
At Novyi mir (1950–54, 1958–70) Tvardovskii promoted a broad agenda but was devoted particularly to revealing the truth about the Stalin-era Russian countryside, the site of his trauma as a young man. With characteristic resilience, he deftly navigated the reform and reaction of post-Stalinism. Tvardovskii’s greatest achievement at the journal was, of course, the publication, in 1962, of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the hero of which was a Russian peasant. Later that decade, he found the courage to confront his own past. In By Right of Memory, published in the USSR only in 1987, Tvardovskii finally was able to openly admit the role he had played in his father’s repression.
Until the end—he died in 1971, a year after his dismissal as editor—Tvardovskii remained a Leninist, believing that truthful memory would lead his country to a better socialism. Yet, for Hosking, he was a “contradictory figure” (462); notably, the poet and editor failed to recognize the tension between his attachments to Leninism and free speech. Still, Tvardovskii “did perhaps more than anyone else to change the course of Soviet culture in the decade or so after Stalin’s death” (2). Hosking’s book is a fine testament to the life and work of his subject, and a useful reminder that the Stalinist aesthetic, socialist realism, bore within itself the seeds of change. At the same time, that aesthetic, at least as presented, can explain only so much of Tvardovskii’s story. Unclear, for example, are the origins of Tvardovskii’s all-human morality.
In several places Hosking notes that Tvardovskii moved “close to” European social democracy (275, 415, 454, 465). Yet, if Tvardovskii remained a Leninist, this conclusion does not seem quite right; it is to remove this Soviet poet and intellectual from his own history and to deposit him in another, as if to round out the edges of a contradictory man. It may be productive, instead, to ask whether the tension between Tvardovskii’s allegiance to control and freedom might be a general characteristic of Russian intellectual history. For this reviewer, what is remarkable about Tvardovskii’s story is the humanity with which he navigated that tension—and the inhumanity that, nonetheless, was inescapable. For authoritarian politics, no matter the solvent, is the unsteady friend of benevolence.
In discussions with colleagues at Novyi mir, Tvardovskii “could overdo it,” Hosking writes (149). Nowhere does the author draw a line from Tvardovskii’s politics to his everyday behavior (or the other way around), and perhaps it is facile to do so. Yet the less respectable side of that politics does seem to have inflected the milieu of Novyi mir. With sympathy, Hosking quotes the writer Fedor Abramov on Tvardovskii: “Supreme. The most authoritative Judge” (2). Paradoxically, such language echoes the “cult of personality” with which Tvardovskii and Novyi mir did battle, effectively yet, it would seem, incompletely.
