Platon Kerzhentsev, Falsification of the National Past (about Demian Bedny's "Heroes"). November 15, 1936

Original Source: Falsifikatsiia narodonogo proshlogo (o Bogatyriakh Dem'iana Bednogo). Pravda, 15 November 1936, pp. 3-4.

When the Chamber Theater staged Borodin's old comic opera, it commissioned a new libretto from Demian Bednyi.

Viktor Krylov's old text, written as a parody of pseudo-folk operas, needed a replacement. But Demian Bednyi's reworking of the text not only did not improve it, it was significantly worse than the previous version.

The new version added the theme of the robbers, absent before, it introduced a totally unmotivated vulgar treatment of the baptism of Russia "in a drunken state, and the characters of the Russian folk heroes were grossly overpainted. Demian Bednyi's primary and grossest error was the attempt to eulogize the "robbers" of Kievan Rus' as a positive and even revolutionary element in our history. According to Demian Bednyi's own declaration, the heroic element in the play was to be the "robbers brave, heroes of the forest."

The foundation for this concept of Demian Bednyi, which has nothing in common with history, is the comment in the Primary Chronicle about the number of robbers in Russian lands. But do we not already know who these robbers were? They were people concerned with their personal welfare, far from revolutionary fighters. As we know, the epics (byliny) gave a stark representation of the type in the figure of the Robber-Sparrow (Solov'ei-Razboinik).

But that is not the only matter. For Demian Bednyi, elevating of the robbers and turning them into revolutionary heroes is the entire foundation of his historical understanding of our past. It is not a new concept. In the booklets, brochures and proclamations of Bakunin, Nechaev and other anarchistical types you often meet with the elevation of robbers to bearers of the revolutionary principle for the Russian people. This outlook could later be found among all sorts of déclassé elements, among the "righto-leftist" muddleheads and suchlike.

But with an unexpected cornucopia of naiveté, Demian Bednyi creates his "robber" theory of Russian history, evidently attempting to depict the robbers as some sort of "true" revolutionaries of Kievan Russia, and trying to build a bridge from them to the present.

Thus, the fundamental political tendency of the play HEROES is false through-and-through.

In the folk epic the heroic elements comes not from the robbers, but from the heroes (bogatyri), who come in for such unfettered blackening and slander in the play, produced with such voracious appetite by Tairov in the Chamber Theater.

Unfortunately, our wonderful folk epics are not of much interest to our publishers nowadays. In recent years not a single collection of the epics has come out, not even a two-volume work of the type in the "Monuments of World Literature" series. Our literary scholars can do only either a purely formal analysis of the epic, or some piece of sociologizing. For instance, they label the epic hero Mikula Selianinovich as a kulak (Literary Encyclopedia, vol. II, pg. 16).

Meanwhile, the figures of the folk heroes manifest the hopes and thoughts of the people. They have lived among the people over the centuries precisely because they embody the people's heroic struggle against foreign invaders, popular gallantry, laughter, courage, cleverness and bigheartedness, which have found particularly vivid manifestations at axial historical moment of the people and their struggle for a better lot in life. No wonder that the epics remained an oral form for so many years, while written forms recorded the images of princes, saints, sheriffs and boyars.

In their unique form the epics reflected the historical past of our people, the heroic pages of their struggle.

Il'ia Muromets, who is reputed in the epics to have been the son of a peasant, or a simple Cossack (i.e. somebody close to the people), is renowned for defeating Robber-Sparrow and for his clashes with the Tatars. The epic poems sing the glories of his fight with Mamai, his feats during the Kama battle, etc.

Dobrynia Nikitich liberates the country from Tsar Batur and frees it from paying tribute. Dobrynia is noted in the epics as a man of valor, strength, and a master of clever diplomatic tricks.

Alyosha Popovich (who is mocked by Demian Bednyi) is glorified in popular songs for vanquishing Tugarin Zmeevich, and that contest symbolized the struggle of Rus' against Asian nomads. We know that a certain historical prototype of the epic hero was Aleksandr Popovich, who beat the Pechenegs during the reign of Prince Vladimir (Soloviev, History of Russia, Vol. 1, pg. 210). The people also commend the sly cleverness of Alyosha Popovich, thanks to which he was victorious in his fight with the most dangerous and powerful opponents. It was Alyosha Popovich who first challenged the unearthly foe. ...

The names of the enemies of the epic heroes (Mamai, Tugarin, Batur-Batyi, etc.) show that the subject was the fight of the Russian people against Tatar incursion and the attacks on our country of other Asiatic peoples.

And this heroic tale of the Russian people, this heroic epic, which is as dear to us Bolsheviks as all the most heroic traits of the peoples of our country and other countries, is turned by Demian Bednyi into material for the shameless mockery of the heroes.

How right Maksim Gorky was when he said at the First Congress of Writers: "I direct your attention, comrades, to the fact that the deepest, most striking and artistically most perfect heroic types have been created by folklore, the oral art of the working people," and Gorky listed these figures: "Hercules, Prometheus, Mikula Selianinovich, Sviatogor, Doctor Faust, Vasilissa the Wise, etc."

The great proletarian writer did not fear compare to Hercules and Prometheus figures created by the epics, because he correctly saw in them the images of folk heroes.

Under the pretext of mocking all sorts of Anik-Warrior and Kupils, who deserve contempt and mockery, Demian Bednyi depicts the epic heroes as drunks, cowards and brawlers. Showing folk-epic heroes in this way means to warp folk poetry, slander the Russian people and its historical past.

This is particularly inappropriate at a time when the party and government are devoting such attention to the issue of studying our historical past and encouraging folk arts.

Demian Bednyi did not just stop with warping the folk epic. For some reason he also had to warp history. He depicts the baptism of Russia as if it was a drunken prank, without any sense or thought behind it.

The old faith was a drunken one,
And the new one even worse.

The adoption of a new religion, which was one of the great historical events of Kievan Rus', is depicted by Demian Bednyi as a drunken revelry of idiotic nitwits. This scoffing version of our country's past is above all historically inaccurate. It has been fairly accurately established that the acceptance of the new faith went through several complicated stages, after negotiations, discussions and comparisons of the various faiths. It is known that Vladimir was baptized two years before the mass baptism of Russia. But most important is the fact that the false treatment of the history of Kievan Rus' by Demian Bednyi distorts the historical past.

Marxists are far from being adherents of feudalism, and certainly not of capitalism. Yet still, how many times did Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin remark in their works that at certain historical stages feudalism and later capitalism were progressive epochs in human history that raised the productivity of labor, culture and science.

It is also well-known that the baptism of Rus' was one of the main conditions that facilitated the contact of the Slavs and Byzantium, and then with the countries of the West, that is with countries of a higher cultural level.

It is well-known that the clergy, part of it the Greek-born clergy, significantly helped the spread of literacy in Kievan Rus', of book learning, foreign languages, etc. The first translation of foreign books, including secular books, for instance history books (chronographs) was done in connection with the transfer of the Slavs to Christianity.

Thus too in its historical part, Demian Bednyi's play is a distortion of history, a model not only of an anti-Marxist but also of an empty-headed attitude toward history, a slur on the people's past. Long ago, after all, did Demian Bednyi not call Russian history "rotten."? He only recollected the folk heroes when he "heard their snore," he wrote about Russian culture that "the old Russian woe-culture is a fool, and he depicted the Russian people as "dozing on the stove." The sad reflection of these old adages, alien to Bolsheviks and to plain-old Soviet poets, can be heard in this play.

The main director and inspirer of the production, Aleksandr Tairov, tried to portray this stinking outrage of the Chamber Theater as the "creation and confirmation here of the comic folk opera." Tairov "dared" declare that the show "is based on folk culture and the folk epic," as if the inspirers of this theatrical production were in some way related to the people, and did not place themselves in the position of rejecting the people. It is well known as well that this is not the Tairov theater's first such venture under the mask of Soviet art. Certain misguided "critics", for instance O. Litovskii in the journal SOVETSKOE ISKUSSTVO, repeating someone else's words, were in agreement so much as to say "Demian created an entirely new, organically whole popular satirical play," that the theater achieved "a truly popular comic opera." But the woe-critics echoing of someone else's voice can in the end not be read at all.

The play of Demian Bednyi in Tairov's staging, which showed an exceptional effort to blow up the falsest aspects of the lackluster libretto,--this is not at all a folk or popular play, but a pseudo-folk, anti-folk production, which warps the history of the people, and is false in its political tendencies. Both the author and the theater of this of this production did service not to the peoples of the Soviet Union, who are building their socialist art, but to some other people.

Such plays are alien to Soviet art--they bring joy only to our enemies.