The writer of revolutionary chaos
When Victor Serge visited, Pilnyak twisted his great mouth and exclaimed: 'He has given me a list of 50 passages to change outright! Ah, if only I could write freely!'
A novelist of post-revolutionary Russia’s violence and confusion, he made his name with a fragmented prose style in *The Naked Year*. A work alluding to a military leader’s death and his foreign contacts made him suspect; he was ultimately executed during the Great Terror.
Career Timeline
- 1918–1921Published revolutionary-era short fiction
- 1922Published *The Naked Year*
- 1926Published *The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon* amid controversy
- 1926–1927Visited Japan and wrote *The Roots of the Japanese Sun*
- 1929–1930Published *Mahogany* and *The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea*
- 1931–1933Visited the United States and published *O.K. (An American Novel)*
- 1935–1936Co-wrote *Meat: A Novel* with Sergei Belyaev on Mikoyan’s commission
- 1937–1938Arrested, tried and executed
Related historical events
The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon and the Frunze Death Scandal (1926)
In May 1926, Pilnyak published the novella "The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon" (Повесть непогашенной луны) in the literary journal Novy Mir. In the story, Red Army commander Gavrilov is ordered by "the three who lead" to undergo an operation and dies on the operating table. Readers immediately recognized this as alluding to Mikhail Frunze, the People's Commissar for Military Affairs, who died under suspicious circumstances in October 1925 days after the Politburo, then dominated by the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, advised him to undergo surgery. Pilnyak added a preface stating, "I hardly knew Frunze; the reader should not look for genuine facts and living persons in this story," but it was to no avail. The issue was pulled from sale within two days; the OGPU visited subscribers to confiscate copies, later distributing a substitute edition. The June issue of Novy Mir carried a denunciation branding the work "counter-revolutionary" and slanderous toward the Party. Pilnyak was traveling in China and Japan when the storm broke, but upon returning he appealed for help to Premier Alexei Rykov and published a remorseful letter in Novy Mir in January 1927. On 27 January 1927, the Politburo passed a special resolution lifting the ban on his contributions to the leading journals. But the affair permanently marked him as a suspect writer.