In medical science, and in common usage in both English and Russian, a prosthesis (protez) is an artificial limb; in rhetoric, it is an addition or supplement to a word. In his book “Prosthesis” David Wills lists a string of activities that suggestively unite the philological and the orthopedic usage of the term: “placement, displacement, replacement, standing, dislodging, substituting, setting, amputating.”^[1] My discussion of Soviet Socialist Realist war literature relies on this double meaning of the prosthetic, having to do with bodies, violence, and pain, on the one side, and literary devices and strategies of representation, on the other. I focus in particular on Boris Polevoi’s 1946 “Story of a Real Man” (Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke). Well known in its time, the novel had over 2.34 million copies in print within ten years of its initial publication in 1946.^[2] It became the subject of an opera in 1947 and a film in 1948, directed by Aleksandr Stolper. The film in particular emphasizes the individual heroism of the “Soviet person.”
Polevoi’s “Story” is prosthetic because its hero is a double amputee who resumes his mission as a bomber pilot. The importance of the prosthesis in this text and others like it, however, goes beyond orthopedically enabled heroism. “The Story of a Real Man” is a supplement to Polevoi’s journalistic account of the Nuremburg trials; the testimony of what was not called the Holocaust reattaches itself to the story of the amputee-pilot. In addition, the literary prosthetic works as a technology that reshapes the human being, remaking the victim of wartime violence into a weapon who inflicts more violence. The prosthetic transformation of the individual’s injury and pain into an instrument of national victory is itself a tool of violence, masked by the rhetoric of human triumph and perfectibility.
Freud serves as a useful point of departure for the link between technology and prosthesis, although he was not the first to note the significance of this interaction.^[3] In “Civilization and Its Discontents” Freud describes the numerous technical and mechanical means by which the defects and limits of human capacities, for example, of sight, hearing, movement, and memory – can be overcome:

“With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. Motor power places gigantic forces at his disposal, which like his muscles, he can employ in any direction; thanks to ships and aircraft neither water nor air can hinder his movements; by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance; by means of the microscope he overcomes the limits of visibility set by the structure of his retina. In the photographic camera he has created an instrument, which retains the fleeting visual impressions, just as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting auditory ones; both are at bottom materializations of the power he possesses of recollection, his memory.”^[4]

The use of artificial instruments and technical devices transforms humanity into a higher form of life. Freud concluded, but not without irony: “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent.”^[5] Written in 1930, Freud’s essay critically reflects on the love affair with technology that was central to his time.
Viktor Shklovsky is another important 20th century thinker who even earlier than Freud registered the impact of technology as prosthesis. In “Zoo, Or, Letters Not about Love” (ZOO, ili pis’ma ne o liubvi), first published in 1923, Shklovsky describes the impact of the “tool” on the human being:

“A tool not only extends the arm of a man; but also makes him an extension of itself. I do not experience any particular attachment to my shoes , but they are, all the same, an extension of me; they are a part of me. What changes a man most of all is the machine.”^[6]

To make his point, Shklovsky cites the scene from Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in which the gunner Tushin enters “a new world created by his artillery” (Shklovsky’s language). Tolstoy writes that Tushin “imagined himself as a powerful man of enormous height, who hurled canon at the French with both hands.” Instruments and, in particular, the instruments of war transform ordinary human beings into Freud’s prosthetic gods. Even more than Freud, however, Shklovsky sees human beings as constructed by technology: “the machine gunner and the double bass player are extensions of their instruments.”^[7] He concludes: “Underground trains, construction cranes, and automobiles are humanity’s prostheses” (protezy chelovechestva).
Shklovsky’s notion of art as device is linked to his model of the human being as prosthetic extension. In his “Theory of Prose”, the device is the supplement that replaces character, emotion, biography, history, psychology, and everything else that up until the Formalists was taken as the central core of the artistic work. When Shklovsky says “skorost’ trebuet tsel’” – velocity demands a purpose – the attribution of agency to “velocity” decenters the human subject. Shklovsky writes in a similar way about the artistic device that “creates content.” In both cases the mechanism, whether linguistic or physical, takes over and extends the function previously attributed to the human author.
There is a distinction, to be sure, between the medical prosthesis attached to an injured or disabled body, and the technological extension of the human being as conceived both by Freud and Shklovsky. What the therapy and the technology share, however, is the fundamental shift of the boundary between nature and culture, the human and the machine. Violence, as in Shklovsky’s use of the war scene from Tolstoy, plays a key role in this shift. The use of prosthetic or technological devices to enhance human capacity, whether for creativity or destruction, is, however, double-edged. What is added on always implies a capacity that is limited or has been destroyed. Central to the idea of the prosthetic is the interrelation of loss and (improved) restoration: the artificial limb indicates the loss of the amputated limb.^[8]
The connection between enhancement and loss is central to the prosthesis of writing, which, according to Freud, and later, Derrida, is a device that replaces a missing voice; for Derrida, however, voice is always already absent and not merely missing. Speech, writing, and narrative, the entire symbolic order functions in absence and differentiation, and not presence and identity. Soviet war literature, however, disavows both foundational absence and contingent loss.
In his important article “Trauma, Absence, Loss” Dominick LaCapra distinguishes between absence and loss and shows the pitfalls of conflating the two. He defines absence as constitutive of the human condition, as in the absence of metaphysical foundations, the absence of a unitary community and an integral self. Loss, in contrast, whether of an individual, a group, or a culture, is historically contingent. Mistaking loss for absence can lead to endless, paralyzing melancholy. Confusing absence (of foundations, for example, or of the unitary community) with loss may lead to “utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community.” Conventional narrative, according to LaCapra, may also be guilty of confusing absence with loss, because the beginning of a conventional narrative, “construed as a variant of full presence, innocence, or intactness – is lost… only to be recovered at the end.”^[9] The happy endings of conventional literature and popular culture turn tragedy into triumph. Eric Santer’s analysis of German war stories of the 1980s identifies what he calls “narrative fetishism... the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called the narrative into being in the first place.”^[10] Prosthetic narratives such as Polevoi’s, however, not only deny foundational absence; they refuse to recognize even contingent loss. The prosthetic operation – hyperfetishism, if you will – reattaches the missing limb to the injured hero, whose new body is not only intact, but even better than it was before.

THE SOVIET CONTEXT OF THE PROSTHETIC HERO

The prosthetic hero was not new in 1946. The transformation of the human being into a super being made of metal was a central trope of Soviet proletarian poetry of the twenties.^[11] The proletarian poets’ glorification of the new artificial man of metal and construction novels of the thirties celebrating the transformation of landscape and the human being under industrialization also relied on notions of technology that prosthetically extend human agency.
In the Soviet context of the 30s and 40s, the cult of Stalin is a crucial factor in the prosthetic transformation of the individual. It is not just technology that empties out individual human agency, but the power of the masses, embodied in the leader, to which individuals must subordinate themselves.^[12] In Itsik Fefer’s poem “Stalin,” for example, Stalin is the one name that replaces all personal pronouns: “I say Stalin – I mean us… I say Stalin – I mean you/ I say Stalin – I mean myself” (Zog ikh Stalin – meyn ikh mir… Zog ikh Stalin – meyn ikh dikh, / Zog ikh Stalin – meyn ikh zikh).^[13] In Fefer’s poem, there is no “I” or “you;” there is only Stalin, the universal prosthetic pronoun. To use the language of Polevoi’s story, there is only one “real man” (nastoiashchii chelovek).^[14] This one real man, Stalin, fills in all the gaps.
The transformation of testimony into national prosthetic is remarkable for the substitutions and slippages it entails, especially the operation that makes the body in pain into the national Soviet superbody, the “great feat of the Soviet people.” This prosthetic operation can be found all over Soviet war literature, including not only Ehrenburg’s propaganda articles, but also works such as Kazakevich’s “Zvezda” and Grossman’s “Za pravoe delo”. Itsik Fefer’s poem “Di shvue” (The Oath) is a particularly important example. Published in 1942 in the first issue of the Soviet Yiddish newspaper “Eynikayt”, the organ of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, it was translated into Russian as “Kliatva” and published in the journal “Znamia” in the same year. The poem, which ultimately derives from Psalm 137, simultaneously produces the horribly mutilated body of the soldier and traces his transformation into a cyborg warrior. The poet swears that his hatred and wrath will not be spent until he feels his enemy’s blood on his own flesh, and vows to fight on even if he loses both arms:

And if the dark whirlwind tears off my arm
I will choke off the enemy’s hateful breath with my other arm
And if a shell destroys my other arm,
My sacred hatred will dull the pain.
[...]
If the night darkens my eyes with blindness
My hatred – my sister in battle will not let me
Bow my head. The eye of my heart will discover the enemy
The flame of my hatred will obliterate his memory forever.^[15]

The Russian translation, appearing in “Znamia” in 1942, reads:

Klianus’ ia pri solnechnom svete, pri svete mertsaiushchikh zvezd,
[...]
Moia nenavist’ ne istechet, moi gnev do tekh por ne ostynet,
Poka na rukakh ne pochuvstvuiu krovi vraga svoego.
I esli vo mrake mne ruku odnu otorvet,
Ia drugoiu rukoiu dykhan’e vraga zadushu;
I esli kovarnyi snariad vtoruiu ruku otorvet,
Ia v gneve sviashchennom svoiu bol’ zaglushu!
[...]
I esli mne noch’ slepotoiu potushit glaza,
Sestra moia – nenavist’ – ne dopustit, v boiu chtob sognulas’
Moia golova. Glazom sertsa povsiudu naidu ia vraga,
Ogon’ moei nenavisti navsegda ego pamiat’ sotret.^[16]

The list of injuries could be extended; each successive injury transforms the body into an ever more powerful fighting machine. The prosthetic production of the national superbody depends on the continuous infliction of violence.
Shklovky and Freud’s reflections on the relation between humans and their instruments and indeed both earlier and later critical elaborations of the model of the human as already constructed, not natural, but worked on, or made by technology, including technologies of gender or of power – reveal the broad sweep of the human as prosthetic extension. The romance of the artificial man goes at least as far back as the legend of the Golem, and continues in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Olesha’s “Ophelia”. The Golem was reanimated in American comic books of the 1940s in the guise of various superheroes. The utopian projections of the human-machine of the 1920s and the deconstructive models of the 1990s, are distinct; the latter seeks to dismantle the autonomy and mastery of the human agent. What is unique, however, about Soviet war literature is the use of this prosthetic transformation of pain and injury into weaponry as a tool of war mobilization. The production of the national body depends on the excision of the injured limb that nonetheless persists in phantom form as an always available source for the continuous production of prosthetic national narrative. The violence, however, the unspeakable traumas of the twentieth century, remain unredressed. The “Story of a Real Man” and the story of the writing of “The Story of a Real Man” are caught up in the multiple dimensions by means of which the prosthesis operates.

POLEVOI’S “REAL MAN”

“A Story of a Real Man” does not refer to Stalin directly, but stages his presence through the undead figure of the “commissar.” In his moribund condition, (his face “looked as if wax had been poured into it”) the commissar brings a breath of “Moscow spring” to the hospital ward where the injured pilot Meres’ev receives treatment, inspiring him to try to fly again after his double amputation. The commissar reads the wounded pilot Ostrovskii’s “How the Steel Was Tempered”, the story of a civil war prosthetic hero who loses his vision, the use of legs, and the use of one arm, but continues to serve by writing novels.
When the commissar himself, who is gravely ill and cannot leave his bed, finally dies, one of the men in the ward gives him the honorific name of “a real man.” It is only in death that he attains this status. His entire stay in the hospital ward is a temporary reanimation, framed on all sides by death. Polevoi’s initial description of the commissar emphasizes his resemblance to a corpse:

“A round head, shaved bare, lolled about on the pillow. The broad, lifeless face, yellow and puffy, looked as if wax had been poured into it.
Na podushke pokachivalas’ kruglaia, nagolo vybritaia golova. Shirokoe zheltoe tochno nalitoe voskom, odutlovatoe litso bylo bezzhizenno.”^[17]

Later, when Meres’ev remembers the commissar repeating his designation, “He was a real man” (On byl nastoiashchim chelovekom), he remembers his “big swollen body, yellow against the white sheets” (Aleskei vspomnil komissara Vorob’eva, ego bol’shoe, raspukhshee telo, zheltevshee na belykh prostyniakh).^[18] The Gothic horror overtones of the commissar’s descriptions jar against his epithet, “a real man.” The contradiction between the commissar’s deathlike state and with his normal and normative Soviet mood of bodrost’, cheerful optimism, also underscores his relation to an automaton.^[19] To copy him requires superhuman powers that extend the hero’s life beyond his death and at the same time undermine his humanity. The commissar, the “real man,” is a copy of the one real man, and Meres’ev, the real man, is only a copy of the commissar: “And Aleksei very much wanted to become a real man, just like the man who just now was being taken on his last journey” (I ochen’ zakhotelos’ Alekseiu stat’ nastoiashchim chelovekom, takim zhe, kak tot, kogo seichas uvezli v poslednii put’).^[20] The strange duality of the fascination with the dead body and yet the disavowal of any real pain or loss that it involves typifies the prosthetic aesthetic of socialist realism.
Just as the commissar is a “real man” as a waxen, reanimated corpse, Meres’ev becomes a real man only when his humanity is replaced and supplemented by the power of a machine. The process begins in the hospital ward. When the example of Pavel Korchagin fails, the commissar finds an article about a pilot who learns to fly again after losing a foot. Meres’ev, however, objects that his own case is different. The commissar replies, “But you are a Soviet person,” giving the hero a verbal talisman which ultimately leads to his recovery and restoration to his former profession, flying a bomber plane.^[21] Meres’ev “mechanically repeats” this phrase over again (“sovetskii chelovek” mashinal’no povtoril Aleksei). Mechanical repetition is the first phase of the hero’s recovery. Meres’ev recovers the use of his legs, but it is not until he feels himself merging with his plane that his recovery is complete.
Meres’ev gets his wish when he flies his plane again. Polevoi writes, “He was fused with his machine, he sensed it as a continuation of his own body” (On slilsia so svoei mashinoi, oshchutil ee kak prodolzhenie sobstvennogo tela).^[22] He names himself a “real man” precisely in the last moment of a desperate battle with a German plane, when he is very nearly out of fuel (“he became a real, yes, a real man,” stal nastoiashchim… nu da, nastoiashchim chelovekom).^[23] Meres’ev feels the motor change as the fuel drops: “the pilot felt this in his whole body, as if it were not the motor, but he himself who was choking.”^[24] Polevoi’s hero loses all sense of the distinction between himself and his plane. He becomes a cyborg in the sense that the originators of the term defined it, that is, a “self-regulating man-machine system.”^[25] Just as the commissar is a “real man” as a waxen, reanimated corpse, Meres’ev becomes a real man only when his humanity is replaced and supplemented by the power of a machine. Meres’ev becomes, as another character in the novel says, “a winged god” (krylatiyi bog), language that calls to mind Freud’s picture of man as a magnificent “prosthetic God,” only without the irony.^[26] As a cyborg, his body is impaired, but the emphasis is on its enhancement: the hero transformed into an extension of a fighter plane. By the end of the story, the terrible pain, exhaustion, isolation, and despair that Meres’ev suffered no longer have any weight or meaning for the narrative. The ordeals of surviving the plane crash, crawling for help, and undergoing the double amputation are not even bad memories any more. They are simply erased. Catherine Merridale writes of the blockade cemetery outside St. Petersburg, whose massive geometry “suggests colossal sacrifice without evoking agony or disorder”.^[27] Polevoi’s verbal monument to the pilot Mares’ev accomplishes the same end.

FROM ATROCITY TO TRIUMPH

Polevoi’s “real man” depends, as I have shown, on earlier Soviet literature, and on the ideology of the leader, Stalin. His “real man” most crucially depends on the war itself and the campaign of hatred of the enemy, a theme that Evgenii Dobrenko emphasizes in his work. Il’ia Ehrenburg was the chief architect of this campaign. His numerous propaganda articles that appeared (in Russian) in “Pravda” in the spring and summer of 1942, among which were included “The Justification of Hatred,” “They Must Not Live,” and “Kill!,” rely on a prosthetic series of substitutions while at the same time demonizing technology as particular to Nazi atrocity. In “The Justification of Hatred,” for example, Ehrenburg describes German soldiers as “monsters” and “savages armed with the latest technology.” He provides both a genealogy of and an incitement to hatred of the German enemy, affirming “hatred did not come to us easily, We paid for it with whole cities and provinces, with hundreds of thousands of human lives.”^[28] In Ehrenburg’s article, hatred supplants every other emotion: “Death to the German occupiers – these words sound like an oath of love… The death of every German – this is a pledge that children will no longer know grief.”^[29] As in Fefer’s poem, the “oath” is also important in this work, where it is offered as security against all future evil. The prosthetic structure of the narrative works in a series of steps, each replacing what came before: (1) hatred for the enemy replaces the awareness of loss; (2) hatred becomes attached to love; and (3) hatred is a guarantee of future happiness. In the immediate postwar period the campaign of hatred for the German enemy eventually disappears, to be replaced by the manufactured emotions of the Cold War. The transition to Cold War rhetoric clearly emerges in later versions of Polevoi’s account of Nuremberg.
In 1945-1946, Polevoi was one of a team of Soviet journalists, artists, and photographers, including Vsevolod Vishnevskii and Leonid Leonov, who reported on the Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg. Robert H. Jackson served as the chief prosecutor for the US and Lieutenant-General R. A. Rudenko for the Soviet Union. The twenty-four defendants included Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Alfred Rosenberg, among others. The charges fell into three categories: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Articles and images by Polevoi and others appeared in “Pravda” nearly every day during the first trial; Polevoi’s titles were sensationalistic. For example, his account of Hitler’s plan to invade and occupy the Soviet Union was called “The Devil’s Kitchen” (December 21, 1945); his article describing medical experiments at Dachau was named “Vampires at Dachau.” One of the articles that departed from this overblown style was the remarkable “In the Name of Humanity” (“Ot imeni chelovechestva”, published in March 1946 in “Pravda”). As its title suggests, the article recounted the testimony of witnesses who spoke about Germany’s crimes against humanity. Among the Soviet witnesses was, as Polevoi wrote, “the Yiddish poet Abram Sutskever, an inhabitant of Vilnius, a person with a European reputation” (evreiskii poet Abram Sutskever, zhitel’ Vil’no, chelovek s evropeiskim imenem). Polevoi, noting that Sutsekever was one of the few people to survive the “Jewish ghetto, organized by the fascists,” summarizes Sutskever’s account of the murder of his own family, including his newborn child. The same article paraphrases the testimony of Severine Shmaglevskaya, who described the murder of children at Birkenau.^[30]
In 1969 Polevoi’s “Pravda” articles were published in a separate volume, titled “V kontse kontsov: Niurnbergskie dnevniki”; an English translation appeared in 1978. The preface addresses the world situation of its time, using the Nuremberg charter to condemn the American conduct of the war in Vietnam; in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the condemnation also includes “what Israel is now doing on the territory of Arab countries.”^[31] The volume also featured drawings of the defendants and witnesses by Nikolai Zhukov; Sutskever’s portrait is among them. In comparison to the 1946 version, however, the text undergoes a significant change. Sutskever is Russified; Polevoi describes him as a “poet with a European reputation” (poet s evropeiskim imenem) without the adjective “evreiskii” (which means both Yiddish and Jewish) and moreover, adds that Sutskever has “the face of a great martyr from old Russian icons” (u nego litso velikomuchenika so staroi russkoi ikony).^[32] Polevoi’s 1969 description of Sutskever severs him from the Jewish people and reattaches him to the Russian in a retroactive re-nationalization. The operation of the prosthesis always indicates what has been excised: the Jews remain as a phantom limb, just beyond the surface of the text.
As Polevoi himself said, he wrote “Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke” during a nineteen day period in the coverage of the trial in the spring of 1946. The connection between the novel and the trial, while noted in the critical literature, has not been analyzed. Polevoi’s novel is prosthetic because it is a supplement to his journalistic account of the Nuremburg trials; it both excises and reattaches accounts of Nazi atrocities to the heroic Soviet tale it tells. Polevoi, who served as a war correspondent, first met Aleksei Mares’ev in the summer of 1943 during the battle of Kursk. As Polevoi recounted for Soviet television in 1976, Mares’ev had destroyed two enemy planes and was exhausted. He asked that the interview be conducted the next day. The correspondent spent the night with the pilot in his dug-out and was awakened by strange bumping noises at night. When he reached for his pistol, the pilot started laughing at him, and explained that the noises were not caused by the enemy, but by his prostheses: “eto zhe protezy, moi protezy.”^[33]
“V kontse kontsov”, the story of the first Nuremberg trial, is also the story of how Polevoi came to write “The Story of a Real Man”. The account of the writing of “Story of a Real Man” supplements the account of the proceedings against the Nazi war criminals. The process did not go smoothly at the beginning. One of the early essays in the Nuremberg book, titled “An Invisible Witness” describes Polevoi’s initial failure to decide what genre – essay, tale, or novel – he should use. In one of the Dachau articles, the author recounts his ongoing difficulties with his writing: even though he had a photograph of Mares’ev on his desk and could hear the sound of his raspy voice, as soon as he sat down to write, every impression seemed to vanish and there “was nothing” (pustota). As Polevoi complains, “my legless pilot just wasn’t coming” (beznogii letchik mne vse ne daetsia).^[34] In “The Ambassadors of the Sixth Great Power,” Polevoi complains, as if unaware of the pun, “my legless pilot stubbornly keeps on running away from me” (moi beznogii letchik vse eshche uporno ubegaet ot menia).^[35] The turning point comes in response to a statement made by Göring, who claimed that the invasion and conduct of the war in the USSR was not a “crime,” but a “mistake,” the consequence of the ever-present “enigma” of the East (chelovek Vostoka vsegda byl zagadkoi dlia Zapada), and furthermore, that the resulting catastrophe for Germany was the result of “fate.” It is at this moment that Polevoi suddenly sees before him the tired, unshaved face of the pilot and hears his voice; that very evening he returns to his quarters and begins to write.
After the author overcomes his block, the story writes itself. Even though Polevoi is not sure of his hero’s true name (Meres’ev or Mares’ev), and even though he cannot say where his hero is now, or what became of him, there is no need for notes, or an additional meeting with him because:

“he is always with me… In the courtroom, at evening parties in the press camp, at some gangster film that the press watches on occasion, I never part with him. I hear and note down some piece of monstrous testimony, and I think of him, about this Russian man from the lower Volga, and when during the trial there is a discussion of the great feat of the Soviet people, about the valor of the Red Army, I see him before me – simple, guileless, frank, so Russian.”^[36]

The legless pilot is “always with” Polevoi – just as Stalin is “always with us” – both in the courtroom during the day and in the evenings, when Polevoi relaxed with other reporters, including reporters from the US, smoking, drinking, and watching American gangster movies. The phantom “real man” is both an analgesic and a prophylaxis: analgesic against the pain of the “monstrous testimony” of Nazi atrocities and a prophylaxis against the temptations of the capitalist West.
The problem is that the analgesic and the prophylaxis prosthetically replace the very thing that they are supposed to guard against. The “real Soviet man” is supposed to stand for everything the Nazis were not, but the story of how the real man came to be the real man reads very much like the testimony of how the Nazis produced what Vasilii Grossman and Hannah Arendt called “living corpses.” Polevoi’s account of the Nuremberg trials includes testimony of the medical experiments conducted at Dachau. The first part of his story of the legless pilot’s eighteen day journey on broken feet in German occupied territory reads like the account of the Dachau experiments to test the limits of pain, hunger, cold, and exhaustion. When he catches sight of his reflection in a frozen pond, Meres’ev is startled at what he sees, “It looked like a skull over which dark skin had been stretched. From dark hollows huge, round, wildly bright eyes looked out.”^[37] Later descriptions emphasize his moribund state: the pilot is “a human skeleton covered in dark skin, with sharply protruding kneecaps, with a round and sharp pelvis, with a completely sunken belly.”^[38] Meres’ev resembles the emaciated Nazi concentration camp inmates that Polevoi heard testimony about in Nuremberg and about which he himself reported on in his articles for “Pravda” in 1945. Remember that Polevoi says he writes “The Story of a Real Man” without reference to his notes about the pilot’s ordeal and without recourse to interviews with him. Polevoi transforms the Nuremberg trials, the scene of testimony into the stuff of prosthetic narrative. The story of the cyborg-superhero completely absorbs the testimony of crimes against humanity into a narrative of Soviet triumph. Reading the buried layers of testimony in the fiction requires an act of reading that is tantamount to an archaeological dig.
It is of singular importance that Shklovsky sees war as the key transformative element in the prosthetic remaking of Captain Tushin. Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” served as the model for countless Soviet literary works dedicated to the “Great Fatherland War.” Tolstoy, however, could hardly have imagined the trauma caused by the Second World War, with its unthinkable numbers of victims – more than 25 million Soviet civilian and military deaths, and at least 2.5 million Jews killed on Soviet soil.^[39] These deaths and their consequences, especially the official failure to mourn and memorialize the dead and the injured, operate at the hidden core of Polevoi’s novel. Its silences and gaps are uncannily filled with the horrors of Hitler’s “Operation Barberossa,” the Holocaust, and Stalin’s “not one step back.” The question of injured war veterans is particularly important, given the subject matter of “Story of a Real Man”. In the years immediately following the war, the Soviet government made concerted efforts to remove the sight of maimed soldiers from major urban centers.^[40] The celebration of Mares’ev’s heroism belies the general cover-up of the problems of countless other, similar “real men.”
The question of what happens afterwards, how memoralization looks back and revisits the phantom pain, displacing it in new ways, is beyond the scope of this paper. I would like to leave you, however, with an image from an important postwar work, Ehrenburg’s “The Thaw” (Ottepel’, 1954) that gives some indication as to the fate of war time prosthetic superheroes – not the real life amputee veterans who were exiled from the capital cities, but their symbolic counterparts, the ordinary Soviet “real men,” as represented in literary fiction.
The characters in Ehrenburg’s novel live in the bright future of happiness achieved, however, their illnesses, hysterical outbursts, and difficulty in speaking to one another indicate the weight of an intolerable burden. In “The Thaw”, the war is a closed topic. When, for example the young engineer Koroteev and Zhuravlev, the factory director, talk about their experiences during the war, Koroteev “felt that closeness which arises between former front-line soldiers: they knew something that others did not see and did not experience.”^[41] The war transcends ordinary conversation and approaches something like the sublime in its indescribability and overwhelming power. Those who experienced that sublimity, however, are left incapacitated by it. The men and women of steel, who had been reforged in the early years of the Soviet Union, and who were mobilized into human weapons during the war, appear a decade later as “half-finished” products (nedodelannyi polufabrikat).^[42] Whatever Ehrenburg’s flaws as a writer are, his novel lays bare the device that he himself helped to create, revealing the abject body that is the twin of the prosthetic hero, both created by the overwhelming violence of the twentieth century.