Cement by Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov

Cement by Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov

Russian fiction

Original title – Цемент

Translator – A S Arthur and C Ashleigh

Source – Personal copy

I am on to the second book for the 1925 club. This jumped out at me as I had planned to read a lot more classics in translation. This was the sort of book I had in mind when doing that. This is a writer, a little lesser known now and this is a book that, when it came out, was well received and considered the first piece of socialist realist fiction. He had fought in the Red Army during the Russian Revolution and was expelled from the communist party. After this book came out, he was taken back in, and this was held up as an example of what soviet literature should be. He was the secretary of the journal Novy Mir and later became the director of the Maxim Gorky Institute. This is one of the two of his books that seemed to have been translated.

He immediately recognised two of them. The old woman was the wife of Loshak the mechanic; the laughing one was the wife of Gromada, another mechanic. The third was a stranger whom he had never seen before.

As he approached them on the narrow pathway he stood aside in the high grass and gave them a military salute.

“Good morning, Comrades! “

They looked at him askance as though he were a tramp and stepped past him. Only the last one, the laughing one, gave a screeching laugh like a scared hen: “Get on with you!

There’s enough scamps like you about. Must one say ‘ Good-day to everybody? “

” What’s the matter with you, wenches? Don’t you recog-

nise me? “

Loshak’s wife looked morosely at Gleb-just as an old witch would do—then murmured to herself in her deep voice:

“Why, this is Gleb. He has risen from the dead, the rascal !” And went on her way, silent and sullen.

The first day or so as he returns Gleb

Cement depicts the main character in the book, Gleb, as a soldier who fought in the Russian Revolution for the Red Army. He has returned to his hometown and to take up his job in the Cement factory, only to find that since he has been at war, the way the factory is run has changed, as it is now part of the soviet machine. Added to that, his wife Dasha has, since he left, become the head of the women’s section of the communist Party in the factory. She is the new woman of those soviet posters. Added to this is Polya, another strong woman, but she is more drawn to Gleb as the returning hero from the war. She has sacrificed having a husband to fight for the party and is drawn when Gleb returns to this man especially as Gleb and his wife seems to have grown apart Added to this there is Kleist a man that sold out Galeb during the war sold him out to the white guard Gleb has to accept he is been taking back in and the fact that he is a scientist. The book sees how Gleb adjusts to the return to civilian life and the soviet era.

In the morning, Gleb, still asleep, felt that the room was not a room but an empty hole. A breeze was blowing between the window and door, whirling in gusts, redolent of spring. He opened his eyes. It was true; the sun was blazing through the window. Dasha was standing at the table, adjusting her flaming headscarf. She glanced at him and laughed. An amber light shone in her eyes.

“We don’t sleep as late as this here, Gleb. The sun is beating down like a drum. I’ve already worked out a report for the Women’s Section on the children’s crêches and the estimate for the linen and furniture. I’ve got it worked out, but where’s the money coming from? We’re so beggarly poor.

Our Party Committee should be given a jolt, so they’ll squeeze something out of the bourgeois. I’m going to kick up a row about it from now on. And you, remember you haven’t seen Nurka yet. Do you want to go with me to the Children’s Home? It’s close by.”

The party runs everything he finds out !

This has it all, really: a hero returning to a post-war landscape of Soviet-era Russia to find a different world. The fact that his wife has changed is significant. I was reminded of the books and films I have seen about the post-World War II era, when women had to return to domestic life. This is the other side where they didn’t have the conflict between the scientist Kleist, a white guard man who had sold out Gleb, but now back in the factory, adding to Gleb’s woes, then the two women, his wife, who has changed without him, and the two of them adjusting to his return. Then Polya, a woman who had given up a relationship, is drawn to the returning hero. Add to this the party line on everything as we see one man trying to find his place in soviet era in the cement factory, trying to find his place and be part of the whole maybe the choice of the Cement factory was a good metaphor for what they wanted a bond workforce  Post the revolution of men and women working along side enemies alongside one another. I enjoyed this. I have read a couple of other soviet realist novels, but if you know of any others, let me know!