His name may have been largely forgotten for most of the twentieth century, but Gustav Gustavovich was once widely known and admired. A professor of philosophy at the University of Moscow, a brilliant lecturer and a feared polemicist, he introduced into Russian intellectual life Husserl’s phenomenology with its emphasis on subjective experience and structures of human consciousness. Coming from a family of the impoverished Polish aristocracy, Gustav Gustavovich belonged to the tradition of philosophers known as polymaths, homo universalis – he spoke seventeen languages, cared deeply about theatre and arts and was well-acquainted with leading actors, writers and poets of his time.
He was, in other words, precisely the kind of man who was never going to be Lenin’s cup of tea when the Revolution came, not with his aristocratic roots, rabid cosmopolitanism and his appraisal of historical materialism as suffering from ‘poverty and narrow-mindedness’. ‘Down with syntheses, integrations and unities! Long live separation, differentiation and disorder!’ Gustav Gustavovich wrote in the early 1920s in Aesthetic Fragments. This might seem an appropriate statement from a philosopher urging on his new nation engulfed in revolutionary violence, a nation determined, in the words of The Internationale, to wipe the slate of the past clean. No. Shpet was actually sounding like a class enemy, suggesting, if you were to read between the lines, that philosophy’s role was not to present a unified worldview intolerant of any difference or opposition, but to move towards a greater understanding of humanity precisely through the study of friction, disorder and paradox.
In complete opposition to the emerging philosophical monoculture, Gustav Gustavovich believed it utterly wrong for philosophy to channel ideology – after all, at its core philosophy was science, not ‘morality or a sermon or a worldview’. Thus the separation of philosophy and ideology ( just like the separation of Church and State) was a prerequisite for social advancement. Not surprisingly, considering how seriously he took the pursuit of knowledge in any field, Gustav Gustavovich was a sworn enemy of amateurism, his views on the matter a complete twist on Lenin’s famous dictum about every cook having the capacity to govern the country. (Lenin used kukharka, a feminine version of ‘cook’, to emphasise his point.) ‘My dad,’ Marina Gustavovna once commented ironically, ‘was very strict when it came to scientific pursuits. He could not stand amateurs. He was much more tolerant towards a cook or a kukharka, than towards an engineer or a doctor holding forth with their opinions on philosophy.’ Shpet never hid his aversion to the omnivorous and know-it-all dilettantes desperate to have their fingers in every pie. In no time, those dilettantes would come to take over the country Shpet had refused to abandon.
As an unambiguously non-Marxist philosopher, he was supposed to be expelled from the Soviet Union on the so-called ‘philosophers’ ship’, which sailed to Germany in the autumn of 1922, carrying some of the country’s most prominent philosophers, writers, scientists and engineers. The famous Russian philosopher Nikolay Berdyaev, another professor of philosophy at Moscow University, was aboard, as was Nikolay Losskiy, the professor of philosophy at St Petersburg University (the former professors, that is). The mass deportation of the nation’s intellectual elite was, to a large degree, a preventive measure – while its members were not openly opposed to the regime (the ones who were had by that stage exiled themselves voluntarily), they were seen as dangerous because of their innate intellectual autonomy and potential power over young minds. So dear was the deportation project to Lenin’s heart that even the stroke he suffered in May 1922 did not stop the Great Leader’s close involvement in painstakingly compiling the lists of those to go. Trotsky too thought that the deportation was an altogether humane gesture on the part of the Soviet government. ‘In view of the fact that the professors and their ilk have not been able to make peace with the Soviet regime during the last five years,’ he wrote, ‘they must be regarded as enemies.’ In other words, they would have to be put up against a wall and shot in the event of a coup or a serious conflict. Shpet’s name was on the list, and he had to use every scintilla of influence at his disposal, including his friendship with Anatoliy Lunacharsky, the first Soviet People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, in order to stay.
Soon enough, however, Gustav Gustavovich’s philosophical ideas were attacked in the papers for being ‘infused with reactionary mysticism’, meaning that as far as the leadership was concerned, they belonged in the now overflowing dustbin of history. In 1929 it was Shpet’s time to be dismissed from academia. Between 1929 and his arrest in 1935, no longer able to pursue academic research to which he had dedicated his entire life, he translated Shakespeare, Byron and Dickens, as well as classic intellectual texts such as Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. He was one of a pantheon of brilliant translators the Soviet Union produced, more by accident than intention. Some of the best writers and philosophers, unable to publish their own work, survived by turning out heartbreakingly magnificent translations of foreign classics (as well as good translations of countless mediocre texts). Many of us, who came to a reasonable mastery of one or several foreign languages either through intense education, emigration or both, have struggled to read these classics in their original languages, and not for deficiencies of vocabulary. I know I am not alone in discovering that Boris Pasternak’s translations of Shakespeare’s tragedies (Hamlet, particularly) and of Goethe’s Faust could make the originals themselves feel like translations – distant echoes of life-changing masterpieces. Pasternak, who Gustav Gustavovich knew personally, was one of the most famous of these translators. From the 1930s this was how the future Nobel Prize winner for literature made a living for himself and his family.
Marina Gustavovna was finishing school when her father was arrested in 1935 and given his first, initially lenient, sentence of five years’ exile in Yeniseysk. Yeniseysk was a place in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, to which exiles had been sent since well before the 1917 Revolution. From the Decembrists, the unsuccessful Russian revolutionaries of 1825, to the anti-tsarist dissenters and agitators of the early-twentieth century, they all came here. The Revolution and the subsequent purges, of course, had inflated the numbers of political exiles, as well as those deported on the basis of their undesirable ethnicities (Lithuanians and Germans, for instance). It also turned the town’s much-admired cathedrals into boiler rooms, garages, factories and residential quarters for the special deportees. By the end of that year, in response to pleas from influential friends, Shpet was transferred to Tomsk, another Siberian town with a centuries-old tradition of exile. (One of the founding fathers of anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin, had been sent there in the nineteenth century.) But Tomsk had the distinction of being a university town, and Gustav Gustavovich could once again work. A good thing or a bad thing? ‘If he had not been transferred,’ says Marina Gustavovna, ‘maybe he would have survived.’ She was there in Yeniseysk visiting her exiled father when he learned of the transfer. She had just finished high school but could not get into a university course because of her father’s arrest as an Enemy of the People. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, the nearest relatives of political prisoners were not simply a pitiful handful of shocked women and kids – they were the wife of an enemy and the mother of an enemy and the children of an enemy, all enemies in their own right. ‘And one who abetted an enemy was also an enemy. And one who continued his friendship with an enemy was also an enemy.’