The Novel of a Novel

Abridged Diary Entries from Moscow, 1935–1937

Ervin Sinkó - Edited and translated by George Deák

One of the first critiques of Stalinism from within the communist movement, The Novel of a Novel is a memoir in the form of a journal. It was first published in Yugoslavia in 1955 based on the journal, letters, clippings, and other materials kept by the Hungarian-Jewish novelist Ervin Sinkó during his two years in Moscow between 1935 and 1937, years in which the Soviet cultural policy of the Popular Front was giving way to the Great Terror. Sinkó and his wife travelled to the home of socialism with great hopes. He had just completed his novel Optimists on the Hungarian Revolutions of 1918–1919 but could not find a publisher for it in Depression-era Paris. He went to Moscow at the urging of Romain Rolland and at the invitation of VOKS, both promoters of the Soviet Union as the center of a new civilization. Sinkó's optimism however soon gave way to grave doubts. Fearful publishers kept him in limbo and starving despite the support that Sinkó had from Béla Kun and Alfred Kurella of the Comintern. Sinkó deplored the over-centralization of cultural policy, attacks against the avant-guard, the forcing of Socialist Realism, the cult of Stalin, the reverses on abortion, the development of a privileged class of managers and Stakhanovist workers, and finally, the advent of the show trials. He tried to understand these developments through conversations with a great many people of the German and Hungarian communist diasporas, the visiting French Left, and local Russians among whom he was allowed to live. In the second year of his stay, the Sinkós shared an apartment with the writer Isaac Babel and his wife, Pirizhkova. The story of the tragic misunderstanding that ensued between the two men reveals much about Babel's difficult situation and about the limits of Sinkó's understanding of the Terror. The Sinkós were fortunate to be expelled from the country. But even back in France, Sinkó was prevented by his fear of the fascist threat from openly criticizing the Soviet Union. It was a miracle that the couple survived both the terror and the Holocaust.

Lexington Books

Pages: 380 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-4636-2 • Hardback • March 2018 • $136.00 • (£105.00)

Subjects: History / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union, History / Europe / Eastern, Literary Criticism / European / Eastern, Literary Criticism / Russian & Former Soviet Union

The Novel of a Novel

Abridged Diary Entries from Moscow, 1935–1937

Hardback

Summary

One of the first critiques of Stalinism from within the communist movement, The Novel of a Novel is a memoir in the form of a journal. It was first published in Yugoslavia in 1955 based on the journal, letters, clippings, and other materials kept by the Hungarian-Jewish novelist Ervin Sinkó during his two years in Moscow between 1935 and 1937, years in which the Soviet cultural policy of the Popular Front was giving way to the Great Terror. Sinkó and his wife travelled to the home of socialism with great hopes. He had just completed his novel Optimists on the Hungarian Revolutions of 1918–1919 but could not find a publisher for it in Depression-era Paris. He went to Moscow at the urging of Romain Rolland and at the invitation of VOKS, both promoters of the Soviet Union as the center of a new civilization. Sinkó's optimism however soon gave way to grave doubts. Fearful publishers kept him in limbo and starving despite the support that Sinkó had from Béla Kun and Alfred Kurella of the Comintern. Sinkó deplored the over-centralization of cultural policy, attacks against the avant-guard, the forcing of Socialist Realism, the cult of Stalin, the reverses on abortion, the development of a privileged class of managers and Stakhanovist workers, and finally, the advent of the show trials. He tried to understand these developments through conversations with a great many people of the German and Hungarian communist diasporas, the visiting French Left, and local Russians among whom he was allowed to live. In the second year of his stay, the Sinkós shared an apartment with the writer Isaac Babel and his wife, Pirizhkova. The story of the tragic misunderstanding that ensued between the two men reveals much about Babel's difficult situation and about the limits of Sinkó's understanding of the Terror. The Sinkós were fortunate to be expelled from the country. But even back in France, Sinkó was prevented by his fear of the fascist threat from openly criticizing the Soviet Union. It was a miracle that the couple survived both the terror and the Holocaust.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 380 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-4636-2 • Hardback • March 2018 • $136.00 • (£105.00)

Subjects: History / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union, History / Europe / Eastern, Literary Criticism / European / Eastern, Literary Criticism / Russian & Former Soviet Union

Author

Ervin Sinkó (1898–1967) was a Hungarian writer and intellectual.

George Deák received his PhD in history from Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Translator’s Introduction: Ervin Sinkó and the Dilemmas of an Optimist, George Deák
Acknowledgments
Note on Conventions
Part I
Chapter 1: By Way of Introduction
Chapter 2: As if By Miracle
Chapter 3: Károlyi Goes into Action, and Two Letters from Switzerland in Quick Succession
Chapter 4: Comrade Arosev and the Strange Parisian Career of Optimists
Chapter 5: The Journal Europe and Further Friendly Letters from Villeneuve
Chapter 6: The Dream Come True: On The Way to Moscow
Chapter 7: Idyllic Intermezzo: From Rouen to Leningrad
Chapter 8: On the Way to Moscow, The Same Night on the Train
Part II
Chapter 9: Preliminary Explanation
Chapter 10: Growing Amazements, Growing Concerns
Chapter 11: Béla Kun
Chapter 12: The Adventures of Optimists and of its Author are Just Beginning
Chapter 13: The Happy Life and Gratitude
Chapter 14: Gorky, Rolland, and a Word about Barbusse
Part III
Chapter 15: Nighttime Thoughts, or Letter to My Yet Unborn Friend
Chapter 16: While the Censors Write
Chapter 17: My Incurable Individualism and an Unforgettable Lesson
Chapter 18: In Black and White
Chapter 19: “One Must Get Used to Life"
Chapter 20: In a Foreign Land...
Part IV
Chapter 21: Commentary on Three Months, which are Only Summarized by the Journal
Chapter 22: "Degenerate Art"
Chapter 23: Comrade Bukharin Must Correct his Views
Chapter 24: Andor Gábor, the New Censor of Optimists
Chapter 25: André Malraux and the Marxist Encyclopedia
Chapter 26: I am Beginning to "Understand" Babel
Chapter 27: The Optimists Makes Propaganda for Zinoviev
Chapter 28: The Screenplay for Mosfilm
Chapter 29: A Human Trait Has Been Lost
Part V
Chapter 30: The Last But Most Eventful Part, Ending in Paris
Chapter 31: Brief, Happy Excitement but "The Times Are Unfavorable"
Chapter 32: The Soviet Union, Seen from the Perspective of Madame Lupescu's Kingdom
Chapter 33: "These Mad Dogs Must Be Shot"
Chapter 34: Proof of the Author's Blindness
Chapter 35: Funeral
Chapter 36: The Friendly Visits of Comrade Lopuhina
Chapter 37: My Witness, I. E. Babel
Chapter 38: "Now Nothing Can Be Know For Sure"
Chapter 39: Two Years Later
Chapter 40: On the Meeting of Romain Rolland with Stalin
Epilogue
Postscript
Another Postscript
About the Editor and Translator

Reviews

An astonishing book. It is astonishing that Ervin Sinkó kept such a witheringly sincere diary during the purges in Moscow, and astonishing that he was able to preserve it. His endless, forbidding, and frustrating encounters with Soviet bureaucrats slowly erode his faith in Soviet rule and stoke his disillusionment, just as arrests, trials, and a corrosive fear enveloped his circle of friends. Sinkó's meetings with several iconic figures, among them Isaac Babel and Mikhail Koltsov, the visiting Romain Rolland, along with glimpses of Sergei Eisenstein and Solomon Mikhoels, are a unique source of insight and information about life in Stalin's ruthless kingdom. Faced with the rising threat of fascism, Sinkó wanted to hold onto his faith in the Soviet Union but he was too honest with himself to disregard the reality that never stopped slapping him in the face.
— Joshua Rubenstein, Harvard University

Ervin Sinkó’s combination of diary and memoir is a riveting and insightful read about life in Moscow during the early years of Stalin's terror. Many of the prominent acquaintances he writes about became victims of the ‘chistka,’ or Soviet purge. The historian George Deák’s masterful abridged translation does justice to the original work, which is an important eyewitness contribution to the understanding of a crucial era.
— Peter Pastor, Montclair State University

A frank and sober witness testimony by a Western revolutionary writer written in the Soviet Union in 1935–37, in the days of growing repression and political purges. Ervin Sinkó’s contemporary diaries were written under unique circumstances, as the writer struggled in the Kafkaesque maze of the Soviet ‘cultural’ and literary labyrinth. Sinkó has put on record controversial public and private debates about the Moscow Trials amongst the major Western supporters of the Soviet Union—Romain Rolland, André Malraux, Jean-Richard Bloch, and others. His account of the fear-induced behaviors by the Soviet cultural elite—Maxim Gorky, Isaac Babel, Sergey Eisenstein, Mihail Koltsov, Sergey Tret’yakov, and the ‘cultural ‘ institutions leaders official Alexandr Arosev (VOKS) and Mikhail Apletin (Foreign Commission of the Soviet Writers’ Union)—is particularly striking. A new light is shed on the actions of the Western Comintern members Bela Kun, Alfred Kurella, and other foreign communists as the Comintern was heading towards a massive purge.
— Ludmila Stern, University of New South Wales

‘It is not easy to be a revolutionary in the country of the victorious revolution.’ Ervin Sinkó’s diary of the two years he spent in Stalin’s Moscow at the time of the show trials is a jewel, offering a very rare account of the dilemmas and contradictions faced by a Central European anti-fascist intellectual confronted by the realities of Soviet life and politics. Sinkó analyzes with great lucidity how the regime molds its citizens’ behavior and worms itself into their minds. A denizen of Moscow’s literary and cinematic world, he also gives the reader a vivid picture of the anxiety, compromise, and defiance involved in surviving as an artist and a human being. With a brilliant introduction by translator George Deák, this is an essential book on the utopian hopes invested in the Russian Revolution, and their disappointment.
— Brigitte Studer, University of Bern

. . . . Ervin Sinkó's The Novel of Novel a thought-provoking journey into the psyche of a man, who, through all his self-questioning struggles, provides us with an invaluable insight into the "how"s and "why"s of twentieth-century history. It is a novel that more people around the world should read, and George Deák’s fine English translation might help it accomplish this goal.
— Hungarian Cultural Studies