Anatoly Lunacharsky

REVOLUTIONARY SILHOUETTES

A COMPARISON OF THE EDITIONS OF
LUNACHARSKY’S SILHOUETTES

The main text of this book is a translation of the 1923 edition of Lunacharsky’s Revolutionary Silhouettes published by ‘Transposektsiya’ of Moscow, a trades-union publishing house, in an edition of 10,000 copies. The same work, or variants of it, was also published in three other editions before and after 1923.

The original version appeared in what was to have been the first book of a four-volume history of the October Revolution entitled Velikii Perevorot (The Great Revolution) published in Petrograd, 1919, by Grzhebin. At this time, two years after the revolution, private-enterprise publishing was still allowed. Grzhebin was a serious liberal publisher of the highest reputation and his 1919 nonfiction list contained, alongside Lunacharsky, memoirs and chronicles of the events of 1917 by authors from a relatively wide range of political allegiance: the Menshevik leaders Dan and Martov figure in it, Chernov the leader of the Right SRs, Potresov, Sukhanov and Liber, the Bundist leader. Numerous works of theology and non-Marxist philosophy also figure in the list. Soon afterwards Grzhebin emigrated to Berlin where he continued publishing in Russian well into the thirties. This move was made as much for purely practical reasons – shortage of paper and binding materials, labour problems – as on political grounds. In the early twenties not only were émigré-published books allowed into Soviet Russia with relative freedom but many official Soviet organizations wishing to distribute their books within Russia were actually obliged to have them published abroad, out of pressing economic and technical considerations. As a result of the disruption caused by the Civil War, the papermaking and printing industries – like the rest of the Russian economy – were in a very bad state.

This is the background to Lunacharsky’s remarks in his Foreword to the 1923 edition, in which he finds it necessary to explain his choice of Grzhebin as a publisher in 1919. He also complains that Grzhebin rushed the book into print without his knowledge and was continuing to publish it abroad ‘without my permission’. These protestations should be taken with a pinch of salt. It is most improbable that the publication of The Great Revolution took place without his knowledge and even in 1923 there was nothing unusual in having one’s books appearing under the imprint of such a respected émigré publisher as Grzhebin. It is much more likely that Lunacharsky had offended some highly-placed Party colleagues, perhaps by being too frank in his political autobiography which forms the longest chapter of the 1919 book, perhaps by not only omitting a profile of Stalin but even failing to make any more than one passing reference to him in the whole book.

In the enlarged and rewritten 1923 edition Lunacharsky cut out his political autobiography (which leads one to suspect that this was the offending portion in the 1919 edition), cut out a short profile of Kamenev and from various sources (listed in the Foreword) added his profiles of Plekhanov, Sverdlov, Volodarsky, Uritsky, F.I. Kalinin and Bessalko. Still not a mention of Stalin.

The next version, published in Kiev by the Ukrainian State Publishing House in 1924, is similar in content to the 1923 edition. The only differences are purely editorial: the style has been polished up, punctuation altered here and there, misprints corrected. After that this book never again saw the light of day in a complete form. It is reasonable to assume that Stalin took care of that.

In 1965, however, a very much truncated version was included in a volume of Lunacharsky’s selected biographical works, in the series The Lives of Remarkable People published by ‘Young Guard’, the Komsomol Publishing House in Moscow. This selection was compiled by Lunacharsky’s daughter Irina and edited by I. Satz. Textually based on the 1924 edition, it omits the profiles of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Martov, F.I. Kalinin and Bessalko. The first three were obviously dropped because they are still ‘unpersons’; F.I. Kalinin and Bessalko probably do not figure because they are both so deservedly obscure as to be of no interest in a volume intended for a young, non-specialist readership. The texts of those profiles which have been retained are significantly cut. To make the differences clear, a comparative table of contents of the four editions is given below:

The 1965 edition does not contain any interpolations into the 1924 text, but the editor does state that it ‘is published ... with minor omissions and with corrections of obvious mistakes’. This is nothing more than a euphemism for suppressio veri. Some of the cuts are marked thus: (...). Others are not indicated at all. The minor stylistic variations between the 1923 and 1924 texts do not affect the sense and are not worth recording.

The cuts in the 1924 text made in the 1965 edition are of two sorts: those referring to tabu figures such as Trotsky and Zinoviev, and those which mention Lenin in terms of anything less than total admiration. As a result Lunacharsky’s profile of Lenin in the 1965 edition reads as flatly and uncritically as any other hack piece of Leninist hagiography, robbed of those mild hints about Lenin’s inadequacies and errors which give Lunacharsky’s account of the Bolshevik leader a degree, rare in Soviet writing, of humanity and credibility.

Revolutionary Silhouettes

Last updated on: 23.8.2011