Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeyev - Legacy

Legacy

In her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam, after describing Fadeyev's seemingly affectionate farewell to Osip Mandelstam just before his final arrest, wrote: "Liuba has told me that Fadeyev was a cold and cruel man — something quite compatible with emotionalism and the ability to shed a tear at the right moment. This became very clear, according to Liuba, at the time of the execution of the Yiddish writers. Then also it was a case of tearful farewell embraces after he had signified his formal agreement to their arrest and liquidation — even though the Yiddish writers, unlike Mandelstam, were his friends." And Korney Chukovsky wrote the following in his diary entry after Fadeyev's suicide:

I feel very sorry for dear Alexander Alexandrovich: one could sense a man of stature, a Russian brand of natural genius under all the layers — but, good lord, what layers there were! All the lies of the Stalinist era, all its idiotic atrocities, all its horrific bureaucracy, all its corruption and red tape found a willing accessory in him. An essentially decent human being who loved literature “to tears” had ended by steering the ship of literature into the most perilous, most shameful of waters and attempting to combine humaneness with the secret-police mentality. Hence the zigzags in his behavior, hence the tortured conscience of his final years. He wasn't born to be a loser; he was so accustomed to being a leader, the arbiter of writers' fates, that having to withdraw from the position of literary marshal was agony for him. None of his friends was willing to tell him that his Metallurgy was worthless, that the articles he had been writing during the past few years — cowardly, turbid, and full of normative pretensions — could only lower him in the eyes of the reading public, that reworking The Young Guard to suit the powers-that-be was shameful. Conscientious, talented, and sensitive as he was, he was floundering in oozy, putrid mud and drowning his conscience in wine.