Writing for the desk drawer

This is a topic I raised quite a while ago when I was discussing authors and their last works.  No question there are a few books that are written and sort of forgotten or, perhaps more frequently, end up in someone else's hands. This can actually be a good thing as it might save a novel or novella from being destroyed (Malcolm Lowry's In Ballast to the White Sea, for example). Sometimes the publisher just holds onto it too long and it is forgotten. There are quite a few of these, but the most recent case I am aware of is José Saramago's Skylight, which I expect to get to one of these days.

In the West, writing for the desk drawer is basically a personal choice. Most of the time it is employed when the author simply doesn't feel the work is up to snuff, although there are probably a few cases where the author doesn't want to confuse the buying public if he or she already has a strong brand writing in a different style or genre. Still, this is what pseudonyms are designed for, although the secret virtually always gets out.

In the Soviet Union and other places with limited freedom of expression, the expression takes on a much more problematic dimension where authors, even those who had published extensively before, knew that certain stories and novels would run afoul of the censors, and, particularly under Stalin, might lead to exile to Siberia.  So they were only left in the desk drawers, though in fact, for some of the bolder authors, their works were circulated clandestinely as samizdat or were even smuggled abroad.  I'm not terribly well versed in the details of the times and generally don't know how which authors treated which works.  I believe Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita did circulate to some extent, as well as did Anatoly Rybakov's Children of the Arbat (which I have not read -- but some day should).  I wonder whether I would have had the courage/conviction to be an underground writer in Soviet Russia.  Perhaps but most likely not.

As it happens, three of the authors from my Russian list wrote for the desk drawer, though in at least two cases they even did submit some of their work periodically to the censors. Tsypkin seems to have been the only one who didn't try to publish his major fiction (Summer In Baden Baden) but he wrote scientific articles.  It was the anti-Semitism of the U.S.S.R. that really did him in.

Andrey Platonov was by far the most published of the three, and quite a few of his stories straddle the line of Soviet realism and more naturalistic modes uneasily.  He did eventually fall out of favor (with Stalin!) and it became all but impossible for him to place his stories, particularly when the avant garde journal that published him as well as Mayakovsky went under and/or was suppressed.*  He actually did submit Happy Moscow to the censors, but it is hard to imagine they would accept it, given that it depicts among other things a disaster while the Moscow Underground is being built.  In that sense, he may have been his "own worst enemy" to some extent, sending in material that would just put him further in the dog house.  I'll have more to say on this subject in an upcoming post.

Finally, Krzhizhanovsky seems to have submitted quite a few of his pieces to different journals without success, and he basically made his living as a lecturer on literature but wasn't published.  More than a few of his stories have quite negative portrayals of editors.  It wasn't clear to me when he gave up, but I wonder if he even tried to publish the novella "Memories of the Future," or if that was truly written for the desk drawer.  One sort of hopes for his own sake that it was the latter.  This is a story about a young man who is driven to understand time and builds a time machine.  He is immediately swamped with requests to take people back before 1917, so that they can cash out their now confiscated estates and send the money abroad to relatives (or perhaps they themselves would leave Russia, though that would set up a terrible time paradox).  Even as a pure fantasy, I can imagine the authorities would look upon this work extremely suspiciously.

I'd have to do additional research to go on at any greater length, so I think I'll stop there.  I have myself been taking a few steps to get my work back out of the desk drawer (as I definitely do not have such an excuse!), so I'll just have to keep chipping away at it.  

* The afterword to The Foundation Pit goes into the most detail about this, indicating that Platonov -- and Vassily Grossman -- seemed to fall out of favor when they were among the only writers/intellectuals that realized and would say anything about Stalin crushing the peasants in the later half of the 1920s.  This is covered directly in Grossman's Everything Flows (also on the NYRB imprint) and somewhat obliquely in Platonov's Soul and The Foundation Pit.