Cynics

This satirical novella, published in 1928, chronicles life in the early years of the Soviet Union. Set in Moscow, it focuses on the relationship between the two central characters, Vladimir and Olga. It is divided into four sections, covering the years 1918, 1919, 1922 and 1924, and within each section by short numbered factual paragraphs and longer narrative passages. The factual paragraphs document the civil war, famine and developments in Soviet policy. It was first published in Berlin and was not available in Russia. This, however, did not prevent it from being severely opposed by the Soviet authorities and media.

The author, Anatoli Marienhof (born 6 July 1897), left school in 1914 and was later conscripted into the army, serving on the Eastern Front. In 1918 he co-founded a Moscow-based literary movement called Imaginism. His early publications were books of poetry. He progressed to novels and screenplays. As Michael Stein outlines in his 2012 article about Cynics, Marienhof wrote the novel with many of the devices of a screenplay.

Early in the novella, Olga sees her brother, Goga, leave home to join General Alexiev's anti-Bolshevik volunteer army in the Don region. She view him as “a charming, handsome lad of 19. His lips were always petulant and pink. His hair was golden, like melted butter from the cows of the steppes. His eyes were large, green, tragic.” The expectation is that this gentle young man will not return alive: “Poor angel! He will be shot like a partridge.”

One of the characters is sarcastically said to be suffering from shell-shock that, “according to precise information from the Soviet Revolutionary Army” is “not very severe”:
“Perhaps in three years... he will be able to hear with his left ear, and his head may stop shaking even sooner.”
Later there is a further reflection on this war-related debility:
“I was shell-shocked at the front, my ear drums burst, my noodle jerks and twists — what luck! Just think, that same nice little shell might have blown me into a 124 pieces!”

Another character, Ilia Dokoutchaev, in 1914 went from being an errand boy in a wholesalers to wartime service emptying bedpans in a hospital in Pskov near the Eastern Front:
“From boredom, [he] began to tabulate curious statistics of the relation between deaths and bed-pans. From these it appeared that for every ten pans, one dead body was carried out. In three years of war, Dokoutchaev emptied 26,000 urinal bottles.”