The Novel of a Novel

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 Sink 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. Sink and his wife travelled to the home of socialism with great hopes. He had just completed his novel Optimists on the Hungarian Revolutions of 19181919 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. Sink's optimism however soon gave way to grave doubts. Fearful publishers kept him in limbo and starving despite the support that Sink had from Bla Kun and Alfred Kurella of the Comintern. Sink 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 Sinks 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 Sink's understanding of the Terror. The Sinks were fortunate to be expelled from the country. But even back in France, Sink 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.