Cement (novel)
시멘트 (소설)
A 1925 novel by Fyodor Gladkov. Returning from the Civil War, the Red Army man Gleb Chumalov fights to restart an idle cement works, while his wife Dasha has left home life to build her own as a party women's activist. One of the first models of the Soviet "production novel", it was simplified by its author in edition after edition.
In depth
What is the story?
March 1921, a southern port just after the NEP is announced. Red Army man Gleb Chumalov returns after three years to his factory settlement. The huge cement works where he worked stands idle, its equipment being stolen, and the workers raise goats and make cigarette lighters on the remaining machines. Home has changed too. His wife Dasha is rarely in, busy with the party's women's department; their daughter Nyurka is in a children's home where the children go hungry. Dasha has thoughts, and three years, that he knows nothing about.
Gleb believes only restarting the works can raise people up. Elected head of the party cell, he sets about repairing the tramway for hauling firewood and recruits the old engineer Kleist who designed the plant. When it is nearly done, a "white-green" band from Cossack villages attacks the workers and wrecks it. NEP brings shops and restaurants back to the town, and a boatload of Whites, realising they cannot leave their homeland, ask to be taken back.
The next enemy is within. Specialists from the economic council hold things up by citing instructions. Gleb goes off to confront the bureaucrats and returns to find all work stopped; he calls on the workers to keep restoring the plant without permission from above. Meanwhile Nyurka has died in the children's home. A commission purges the party cell, expelling anyone at the slightest doubt. Polya Mekhova, head of the women's department, is assaulted by the executive committee chairman Badyin. Dasha moves out to look after her, and the couple never recover what they had. The works restart on the fourth anniversary of October, and at a rally of thousands Badyin and Chumalov both speak.
What was new about it?
The hero stands at a reconstruction site rather than a battlefield. Gladkov himself had worked with the party cell of the Novorossiysk cement works during its restoration, was expelled in 1921 "as an intellectual and a Menshevik", and readmitted after the novel appeared. The first 10,000 copies sold in a month, ten editions came out in 1926-1927, and it was published in 52 countries.
Read today, the more interesting strand is Dasha: the new daily life and family the revolution produced run alongside the factory. Gleb's jealousy, a mother losing her child and a woman activist assaulted by a revolutionary leader are all on the page. The present-day scholar N. A. Groznova reads it as a deep tragedy full of human misery.
How did critics divide?
Gorky and Anatoly Lunacharsky supported it, though Lunacharsky, naming it among the best books of the revolution's first decade, noted a mannered style. Osip Brik was merciless: there was a Gleb-Achilles and Gleb-Roland but no Gleb Chumalov, a Joan of Arc but no Dasha; everything the cookbooks recommend was there, he wrote, but the ingredients were not cooked.
Why did the novel keep changing?
It differed edition by edition. Censors removed a passage about famine that went as far as cannibalism as an everyday matter, justified by "still, we have Lenin". All editions up to 1932, several hundred thousand copies, were withdrawn in the mid-1930s. The author made changes himself, simplifying the style and further mythologising the characters in 1934 and 1940, which makes the book a rare record of what Socialist Realism demanded. The early typescript is held to be the richest.
On screen?
Vladimir Vilner's 1927 film does not survive. Aleksandr Blank and Sergei Linkov made a two-part television film in 1973.