Mark Slonim
Mark Lvovich Slonim was a Russian politician, literary critic, scholar and translator. He was a lifelong member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and, in 1917, served as its deputy for Bessarabia in the Russian Constituent Assembly. He joined the Samara Government during the early phases of the Civil War, opposing both the Bolsheviks and the conservative elements of the White movement. Assigned to his party's Foreign Delegation, Slonim lobbied unsuccessfully for the return of Bessarabia to Russia during the Paris Peace Conference. After a short stay in Tuscany, he settled in Czechoslovakia in 1922, an editor of Volya Rossii review.
Slonim, who was also an Italian-trained literary scholar, became Volya Rossiis literary theorist and columnist. From that vantage point, he gave encouraged the liberal-progressive and modernist side of the White émigré intellectuals. Slonim argued, against conservatives such as Zinaida Gippius, that the exiles needed to appreciate changes occurring in the Soviet Union and became one of the first popularizers of Soviet writers in the West. He was also one of the main backers of poet Marina Tsvetaeva.
In 1928, convinced that Russian literature in exile was in fact dead, Slonim moved to Paris and, as an anti-fascist, opened up to Soviet patriotism. His 1930s contacts with the Union for Repatriation were particularly controversial. He escaped World War II and arrived to the United States aboard the SS Navemar, spending the 1940s and '50s as a teacher at Sarah Lawrence College. He continued to publish tracts and textbooks on Russian literary topics, familiarizing the American public with the major trends of Soviet poetry and fiction. He spent his final years in Geneva, where he translated Andrei Bely's Silver Dove and worked sporadically on his memoirs.
Biography
Early activities
Slonim was born in the Russian Empire's port city of Odessa, although some sources mistakenly have Novgorod-Severskiy, Chernihiv Governorate. His elder brother Vladimir was also born in Odessa in 1887. Their parents were upper-middle-class Russian Jewish intellectuals; Slonim's uncle was the literary critic Yuly Aykhenvald. The future critic was also a distant relative of Yevsey Lazarevich Slonim, whose daughter, Vera Yevseyevna, became the wife of novelist Vladimir Nabokov. According to Russologist Michel Aucouturier, Slonim's memoirs show him as an erudite and an adept of aestheticism, whose "socialist sympathies" were only cemented by the Russian Revolution. While completing his secondary studies at a classical gymnasium in Odessa, Slonim came into contact with the Socialist Revolutionaries, and, like his older brother Vladimir before him, became their follower. Their radicalism pitted them against their father, who supported the moderate-liberal Kadet Party.Slonim, who regarded himself as a libertarian socialist rather than a Marxist, worked on establishing "self-instruction circles", circulating banned literature among students, artisans and workers, and traveled to Europe to meet with Osip Minor. As he recalled in the 1960s, the Eser leadership was "appalled to discover than in Odessa and the nearby region most of the work was being done by boys and girls of 16 or 17." According to later sources, he was brought to the attention of the Okhrana and left Russia surreptitiously. From 1911, he studied philosophy and literature at the University of Florence, where he took his Ph.D. In 1914, he published in Italy a translation of Ivan Turgenev's poetry cicle, Senility. By 1918, Slonim was also a graduate of Saint Petersburg Imperial University.
Upon the start of World War I, Slonim followed the "defensist" line of the Eser mainstream, supporting Russia's commitment to the Allies, and served in the Imperial Army. The February Revolution caught him on the Romanian Front, but he soon returned to Petrograd, where "his talents as a propagandist and an orator soon made him one of his party's celebrities". Slonim supported the Russian Provisional Government and its "defensist" policies against the Left Esers, with public disputations against Vladimir Karelin and Maria Spiridonova. According to Slonim, he was one of the youths left in charge of party work: the more senior Esers were either in government or consumed by work in the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.
Constituent Assembly and Paris Conference
In his memoirs, Slonim claims to have foreseen the danger posed by the reorganized Bolsheviks, having heard their leader, Vladimir Lenin, speak. He contrasts Bolshevik unity with the Esers' indecisiveness and factionalism. He was still active after the October Revolution, which placed Russia under a Bolshevik Council of People's Commissars. Slonim became an Eser candidate for the Russian Constituent Assembly in the November 25 election, running in the southwestern province of Bessarabia. He took his seat in the Eser landslide win, and, aged 23, was the youngest parliamentarian. Days after, Bessarabia formed its own government as the Moldavian Democratic Republic, and remained undecided about its future within the Russian Republic. The elections for the Constituent Assembly were chaotic, and the results were never fully recorded.Slonim was present in the Assembly on the morning of January 19, 1918, when the Bolsheviks dissolved it by force and opened fire on the supporting crowds. For a while, he was in the Ukrainian State, helping Gregory Zilboorg put out a clandestine paper which angered both the Bolsheviks and the Ukrainian nationalists. He later fled to Samara, where the Constituent Assembly had formed its own "Committee of Members" government. He joined the latter, then, upon its merger into the Provisional All-Russian Government, moved to Omsk. As the Russian Civil War took hold of the countryside, Slonim followed the Czechoslovak Legion and became friends with its leaders, trailing across Siberia under an assumed name. Nevertheless, he disliked the concept of Allied intervention, and moved closer to the Left Esers. His party sent him abroad as a member of its Foreign Delegation, which originally existed to persuade the West not to recognize Alexander Kolchak as Russia's Supreme Ruler.
In November 1918, Slonim had lost his Bessarabian constituency, as the region united with Romania. The writer became a strong critic of that merger, claiming that the Romanian identity in both Romania and Bessarabia had been recently fabricated by intellectuals, lacking popular support among the Moldavian peasants. Slonim also claimed that the union process had been triggered by the German Empire in late 1917, as an anti-Bolshevik move, and supported by Russians who had discarded "personal and national dignity." Building on such arguments, Slonim depicted the Russian Empire as a functional and organic economic entity, suggesting that Bessarabia had more in common with Ukraine than with Romania. He also argued that Bessarabia had not been renounced by Russia, not truly annexed by the Romanian Kingdom. "Sooner of later", he suggested, "there must come about reunion with the Russian State." Acknowledging that there was a "united front" between the White movement and Soviet Russia on the Bessarabian issue, he proposed to overcome the impasse by organizing a League of Nations referendum in the former Moldavian Republic. Scholar Charles Upson Clark, who sees Slonim's accounts as among "the best from the Russian standpoint", rejects his theory about the German inspiration for the union, noting that it was in fact a traditional Romanian goal.
Slonim joined a self-appointed team of politicians and landowners who claimed to speak for Bessarabia, and attended the Paris Peace Conference to lobby for the Russian cause. Among the other members of this body were Alexander N. Krupensky, Alexandr K. Schmidt, Vladimir Tsyganko, and Mihail Savenco. Slonim, seconded by Tsyganko, circulated rumors of "unheard-of atrocities" committed by the Romanian Army, such as the massacre of 53 people in one village of after the Khotyn Uprising, and the torturing of many others. Interviewed by L'Humanité, the French Communist Party paper, Slonim also claimed the socialists were being repressed, and that unconditional union had been voted on "under the menace of machine guns". These statements were rejected outright by the Bessarabian unionists: Ion Inculeț, the former President of the Moldavian Republic, called the interview "idiotic", while his aide Ion Pelivan wrote to L'Humanité to restate that the union was expressing the free will of the Bessarabian people. In his notes, Pelivan referred to Slonim as a "deserter", an "impostor", and a Belarusian Jew.
Tuscany, Berlin, and ''Volya Rossii''
Slonim spent the years 1919–1922 in Tuscany, becoming a regular contributor to the leftist daily Il Secolo. In an article of August 1920, he opined that only "peace with Russia" and "the complete renunciation of all intervention into internal affairs" could ensure the demise of "Bolshevist imperialism". That year, he published at H. Bemporad & figlio an Italian-language work on the revolutionary ideologies of Béla Kun and the Spartacus League, eponymously titled Spartaco e Bela Kun, and two memoirs: La rivoluzione russa, and Il bolscevismo visto da un russo. The latter was translated into French the following year, as Le Bolchévisme vu par un russe. La Revue Critique des Idées et des Livres described it as "abundant in little facts from experience", a fresco "of the general misery, terror and fright that have been reigning in Russia for these past three years." His thoughts on communism brought him to the attention of Benito Mussolini, leader of the Fasci Italiani, who invited Slonim to write for Il Popolo d'Italia. Slonim explained that he would never write for the right-wing press; in a later reply, Mussolini insisted that his budding fascist movement was not in fact reactionary.Another work, tracing the historical background of Bolshevism and the Esers, appeared in 1921 as Da Pietro il Grande a Lenin: Storia del movimento rivoluzionario in Russia ; a French edition came out in 1933, at Éditions Gallimard. Slonim followed up with an essay on Bolshevik Proletkult and Futurism, taken up by Henri Grégoire's monthly, Le Flambeau. At this early stage, Slonim derided Soviet literary productions, and described the better poets as incompatible with communist dogmas.
After a short stay in Berlin, during which time he issued his own journal, Novosti Literatury, Slonim settled in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he taught at the Russian Free University and joined the local Zemgor. He was also co-opted to write for the Russian-language émigré magazine Volya Rossii. Its editorial board included Slonim, Sergey Postnikov, Evsei Stalinskii, Vasily Sukhomlin, and Vladimir I. Lebedev. The former four were all members of the Eser Foreign Delegation; Lebedev was not.
Occupying a Prague building which had reputedly housed Mozart, and also gathering for conversations at Národní kavárna café, the circle members networked with European policymakers such as Aristide Briand, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and Émile Vandervelde. Although it published noted works of literature, including Marina Tsvetaeva's Rat-Catcher, Volya Rossii had a small readership. It depended largely on Czechoslovak government support, but the subsidies grew thinner by the year. Originally a daily in 1920, it became a weekly in 1922, and a monthly in 1923.
From its relaunch in 1923, Volya Rossii was primarily noted as an exponent of the political left, and as such a rival of the more eclectic, Paris-based, Sovremennye Zapiski. Its acceptance of various Bolshevik reforms made it close to the Mladorossi émigrés, but the magazine saw itself as eminently Narodnik, carrying through the ideology of Alexander Herzen and Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Beyond them, Slonim saw himself as a legatee of the Decembrists. Volya Rossii was explicitly against the Kadet émigrés in Paris, and fought with their leader, Pyotr Struve, for control over the Russian Free University. It also took a secular approach to anti-communism, decrying the émigrés' debt to Russian Orthodoxy—the church, Slonim asserted, was not a true foundation of Russian identity and culture. These positions were summarized in Slonim's sarcastic characterization of Sovremennye Zapiski, a "non-partisan voice of the liberal-democratic broad front, with some tendencies that are sometimes socialist, sometimes religious."