PILNYAK, BORIS

born 1894, Mozhaisk, Russia died 1937 pseudonym of Boris Andreyevich Vogau, Pilnyak also spelled Pilniak Soviet writer of Symbolist novels and stories, prominent in the 1920s. Pilnyak spent his childhood in provincial towns near Moscow, in Saratov, and in a village on the Volga river. He attended high school in Nizhny Novgorod and a commercial institute in Moscow. In his autobiography he stated that he began writing at the age of nine, but it was the publication of his novel Goly god (1922; The Naked Year, 1928) that brought him popularity. This book was a panorama of the Revolution and Civil War, seen through a series of flashbacks and close-ups encompassing all levels of society. Its fragmentary, chaotic style matched the character of the times he portrayed. In 1926 he caused a scandal with his Povest nepogashennoy luny (The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon), a scarcely-veiled account of the death of Frunze, the famous military commander, during an operation. The issue of the magazine in which the tale was published was withdrawn immediately, and a new issue omitting it was put out. Pilnyak was compelled to recant, and the editorial board of the magazine admitted that it had committed a gross error. Pilnyak was again in trouble in 1929, when he permitted an migr publishing house in Berlin to publish his novel, Krasnoye derevo (Mahogany). The book, which included an idealized portrait of a Trotskyite Communist, was immediately banned in the Soviet Union. Pilnyak's doubts and distaste with respect to Communist goals and methods were increasingly visible in his novels and stories. By the late 1920s he was the object of harsh official censure. In an attempt to redeem himself he wrote Volga vpadayet v Kaspiyskoye more (1930; The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea, 1931), a novel glorifying the five-year plan on the theme of the construction of a Soviet dam. Pilnyak's ambivalence did not escape the authorities, and he fell into deeper disfavour. During 1937at the height of the Stalin terrorhis name and his works completely disappeared from Soviet literature. Nothing definite was learned concerning his fate until after Stalin's death, when official Soviet sources acknowledged that he had been arrested in 1937, placing the date of his death in the same year. Although Pilnyak was posthumously rehabilitated, only in 1976 did a volume offering a very limited selection of his works appear.