The Makepeace Experiment by Andrei Sinyavsky

First published:Lubimow, 1963 (English translation, 1965)

Type of work: Satire

Time of work: The early 1960’s

Locale: Lyubimov, a fictitious small Russian town

Principal Characters:

• Savely Kuzmich Proferansov, the narrator, the town librarian
• Samson Samsonovich Proferansov, an ancestor of Savely Proferansov who directs Savely’s writing, at times becoming the narrator himself, and who also appeared to Savely as the Professor
• Leonard “Lenny” Makepeace (leonid Tikhomirov), a bicycle repairman who becomes the leader of Lyubimov
• Serafima Petrovna, his wife, a teacher
• Vitaly Kochetov, a government spy, later a loyal supporter of Makepeace

The Novel

In the Prologue, the first narrator, Savely Kuzmich Proferansov, sets the stage by describing the town of Lyubimov as small but progressive, with a number of intellectuals, and characterizes himself as rational and literate, although his timid asides and conclusions reveal his own cowardice and superstitiousness. An avid reader of governmentally approved literature, he finds beginning the narrative difficult and describes his writing as though it were something he is impelled to do.

The first chapter tells how at a May Day parade, the leader Comrade Tishchenko installs Leonard Makepeace (Leonid Tikhomirov), a simple bicycle repairman, as the supreme ruler. No one questions the sudden change; Lenny promises peace and freedom. Tishchenko attempts to escape but is subdued by Makepeace, a struggle which later became a folk legend that the narrator discounts, even though he presents the folk legend rather than the true account.

In the second chapter, the narrator reveals the background of Lenny’s rise to power. To win the love of the beautiful Serafima Petrovna, Makepeace agrees to lay the city at her feet. He begins reading voraciously, and one day a book, The Magnet of the Soul, falls to his feet from the ceiling. The book tells him how to gain mental control over others; Makepeace sees this gift not only as a means to power but also as an opportunity to do good for the town, and, through mind control, he has himself installed as ruler. At this point in his storytelling, the narrator is interrupted by a voice that first appears in the footnotes and eventually dominates the main text. The voice reveals itself as that of the Professor, an acquaintance of Savely who in 1926 urged him to write the story of Lyubimov. The Professor now tells Savely that he is also Samson Samsonovich Proferansov, an ancestor of the narrator and the author of the book that enabled Makepeace to rise to power. From this point forward, Samson controls the narrative, often becoming the narrator himself.

In the regional center of X, Lieutenant Colonel Almazov receives a report from the Secret Police chief Maryamov telling of the revolution. Almazov leads an expedition, disguised as fishermen on vacation, to Lyubimov. Meanwhile, Lenny prepares for his wedding; lacking adequate provisions for the ceremony, Lenny transforms surplus mineral water, pickles, and red pepper into alcohol, salami, and steak (in reality, he merely changes the people’s perception of these substances, using mind control). In a grand gesture, he temporarily turns the local river into champagne. The celebration, however, is marred by the death of a thief who has drunk too much of the spurious alcohol. Lenny’s inability to understand how the man could have died from what was only water, or why, given freedom, a man would want to drink himself to death, hints at the ultimate weakness of his plan to make the people happy by attending to all of their needs. Still, through willpower, Makepeace makes Almazov and others believe that the city of Lyubimov has disappeared, and so he is able to continue with his utopian reforms.

At first Lenny’s reforms and modernization succeed, in spite of the presence of a spy, Vitaly Kochetov, and the attempts of a greedy capitalist journalist to corrupt Lenny’s lofty ideals. Even Lenny’s devout mother accepts his godless zeal, though only to avoid displeasing her son. One day Samson confronts Lenny, and Lenny, befuddled by the specter, asks Savely to explain who this figure is. Savely tells how his ancestor, an amateur scientist and intellectual, had traveled to India, where he obtained a sacred book revealing the purpose of life; unfortunately, Samson died before revealing this truth, but his spirit survived, haunting the estate until it burned in the Russian Revolution.

An unforeseen airplane attack nearly kills Lenny, but he escapes harm and convinces the pilots that they have destroyed the city. The spy Vitaly Kochetov reveals himself, apologizing for his role as informer, for now he sees the superiority of Lenny’s method of reform over traditional governmental methods. Impressed by Vitaly’s sincerity, Lenny makes him Chief Deputy.

Gradually, however, Lenny’s reforms begin to fail. The people are unhappy with their substitute vodka, now rationed, because it cannot give them hangovers, and eventually they start brewing their own. Lenny discovers that his wife has been married before, and he forces her to tell him the truth about her background. Wanting to seem truthful, Serafima fabricates an elaborate history of lovers. Although Lenny had previously ignored his wife while pursuing his reforms, his love now turns into an irrational jealousy. Failing to seduce Lenny’s one faithful companion, Vitaly, Serafima leaves Lyubimov. Samson apparently takes back the book from which Lenny gets his powers, and Lenny begins to lose his control; distraught, he wanders through the town, his random musings and curses wreaking havoc on the villagers. Tanks storm the city, and Vitaly is its only defender, losing his life in the process; Lenny simply wanders off, hoping to set up a bicycle repair shop one day. The old order returns to Lyubimov, with the same figures in command, though demoted. The novel ends with Savely once again in control as narrator; fearing that the authorities will discover his manuscript, he asks the Professor to help him keep the book safe.

The Characters

While The Makepeace Experiment, as a satire on utopian ideals, depicts the conflict between ideology and reality, it does so through its portrayal of conflicts between individualized characters who never become merely representations of abstract ideas; nor does the novel present its characters as morally one-dimensional, simply good or bad. The protagonist of the central struggle, Lenny Makepeace, does at times embody the single-minded fervor of the utopian reformer (a character criticized in the nineteenth century by Fyodor Dostoevski and in the twentieth century by Yevgeny Zamyatin); nevertheless, Lenny is also a complex and contradictory figure. His zeal is essentially benevolent, but in spite of his generosity, he cannot see that the people do not really want an ideal state. His love for Serafima is apparently genuine, but he easily forgets her while working on his programs. His jealousy contradicts all of his assumptions about how easily people can be controlled, for he cannot control either Serafima’s past or his own irrational behavior.

The main narrator, Savely Proferansov, suffers from other contradictions, embracing both a smug rationalism and a cautious superstitiousness, wanting to write an important history and yet fearful of offending the authorities; he is also prone to hypocrisy, moralizing but self-serving, loyal to Lenny but only while Lenny is clearly in charge. In these and other ways he represents many of the forces in the Russian character (and in human nature in general) that perpetually thwart the realization of idealistic schemes such as those of Lenny. Savely also serves as a counterpoint to Andrei Sinyavsky, who seeks in his work to investigate the spiritual nature of the world, and who, by publishing his writings internationally, risks the sort of punishment that Savely avoids at all costs.

To some extent, Serafima Petrovna also represents a selfishness that undermines utopian reform, and at the same time she is an individualized character, sympathetically portrayed as needing the love and attention that Lenny ignores in order to pursue his political goals. The unquestioned loyalty of Vitaly, on the other hand, proves fatal and futile; his hero Lenny remains unaware that Vitaly has given his life for Lenny’s goals.

Perhaps the most ambiguous figure is the mysterious Samson Samsonovich Proferansov. Like his biblical namesake, he is able to confound Soviet philistinism; yet ultimately all of his intervention in the life of Lyubimov is for naught. At best, Samson has inspired his descendant with a bit of courage, but he provides no final solution, even though he has supposedly learned “the purpose of life.” In his endeavors to bring about a utopian state based on the satisfaction of needs, Samson embodies the goals of nineteenth century rationalism, from which Marxism and other reforming philosophies have descended. Makepeace’s failure underscores the futility of such a program in the face of the basic irrationality of the human temperament. At the same time, the more specific political satire on the Soviet government adds another dimension to Samson’s significance: As an uncontrollable and elusive force, Samson Samsonovich also represents the limitations of the materialistic perspective of Vladimir Ilich Lenin and Karl Marx. Any government that fails to acknowledge the spiritual realm will appear shortsighted and ridiculous, as do the bumbling attempts of the Soviet bureaucrats. Still, the ease with which Vitaly Kochetov changes from an orthodox Marxist to a follower of Makepeace, paralleled by the narrator Savely Proferansov’s immediate repudiation of Makepeace’s philosophy once the cause proves futile, shows how willingly people embrace a dogma rather than seek to understand the complex reality of the spiritual world.

Critical Context

Like Sinyavsky’s first novel, Sudidyot (1960, as Abram Tertz; The Trial Begins, 1960), The Makepeace Experiment treats complex political and artistic themes with satire and irony. Less conventional in form, however, The Makepeace Experiment develops in more detail the problem of art and the role of the artist in the modern world. Sinyavsky’s first critical work, the book-length essay Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm (1959; On Socialist Realism, 1960), had pointed out the contradictions and limitations of Socialist Realism, such as its preference for ideology (especially the positive hero) over true realism; the essay proposed a new art, one which would reveal truth through fantasy and the grotesque, as does The Makepeace Experiment. The collection of aphorisms and sketches Mysli vrasplokh (1966; Unguarded Thoughts, 1972) continues Sinyavsky’s experimentation with form, and at the same time it represents a step forward in the spiritual search begun in The Makepeace Experiment. Golos iz khora (1973; A Voice from the Chorus, 1976), written during Sinyavsky’s imprisonment for heretical writings, combines and contrasts various phrases and sayings from his fellow prisoners with the fragments from the more literary and self-conscious letters to his wife; A Voice from the Chorus, in its search for form and meaning, also signals the author’s move toward Christianity.

As an anti-utopian satire and an attack on the preference for happiness over freedom, The Makepeace Experiment recalls the short novels of Fyodor Dostoevski; its more specific criticism of Soviet ideology also owes much to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s My (1952, written 1920-1921; We, 1924). Whereas its philosophy is clearly in the tradition of Russian anti-utopian literature, the novel’s innovation with structure and its complex layers of meaning mark it as an important step forward in the modern novel’s quest for a form that can capture the complexity and variety of the twentieth century experience.

Bibliography

Aucouturier, Michel. “Writer and Text in the Works of Abram Terc,” in Fiction and Drama in Eastern and Southeastern Europe: Evolution and Experiment in the Postwar Period, 1980. Edited by Henrik Birnbaum and Thomas Eekman.

Brown, Deming. “The Art of Andrei Siniavsky,” in Slavic Review. XXIX (1970), pp. 663-681.

Brown, Deming. Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin, 1978.

Dalton, Margaret. Andrei Siniavskii and Julii Daniel’: Two Soviet “Heretical” Writers, 1973.

Lourie, Richard. Letters to the Future: An Approach to Sinyavsky-Tertz, 1975.