Isaiah Berlin, visiting Moscow in 1945, complained of the “remarkable pall of total inertia” that hung over Soviet writers. Most had been reduced to the confines of prescribed socialist realism, a genre of homily derided as “boy meets tractor”. Bulgakov had died censored in 1940, Pasternak was translating Shakespeare and working on Doctor Zhivago in secret, Mandelstam and Babel had been killed in the purges, lost in the same gulag system as Solzhenitsyn’s fictional Ivan Denisovich. Stalin corralled the liriki (writers and poets) to match the efforts of the fisiki (engineers and architects), to serve the breakneck industrialisation of the 1930s. By the 1940s Soviet literature had collapsed into the banality of paean. Even Akhmatova was reduced to writing poems in praise of Stalin to try and get her son released from the camps.

Westerman, a Dutch journalist who lived in Moscow in the late 1990s and is the author of several books — only one of which, Ararat, has previously been translated into English — admits that he has worked “selectively” in this book, sketching “a route of personal enthusiasms”. This is not the comprehensive account of Soviet literature that his subtitle suggests. Instead Westerman found himself “fascinated by the… hangers-on, the converts, the backsliders and doubters”. Chief among them, a colossus of Soviet literature, with parks and streets and a whole city named after him (and a man who died, luckily enough, in 1936, exempting himself from the purges that destroyed so many of his colleagues), was Maxim Gorky.

Gorky, hard-luck orphan turned folk hero, had become famous writing stories of the downtrodden under the tsar. A fundraiser for the Bolsheviks, he became disillusioned with the revolution and wrote of Lenin: “He is a fantasiser, a thinking guillotine.” Sensibly, he spent most of the 1920s in exile in Italy, but Stalin, wanting to co-opt him as a figurehead, flattered him with fat publishing advances, awards and fake fan letters, seducing him back to Moscow. Gorky’s transition, from champion of the indigent to godfather of the subversion of literature to the efficacies of the Five-Year Plan, carries about it more than a whiff of Animal Farm. “If workers can pour concrete in brigades, why can’t brigades of writers produce a collective book?” he asked. Under his watch, style was reduced to exhortation with many exclamation marks. “From now on cheerfulness is mandatory!”

Gorky aside, Westerman eschews the more obvious literary figures of the period and concentrates instead on half-forgotten writers who lied and flailed their way through a career of pandering and pastiche just in order to eat and try to get published. He follows the prevarications of authors unknown in the West, such as Konstantin Paustovsky, who managed to survive through the Stalin years, writing in half a room in a communal flat, to enjoy plaudits and prizes during the Khrushchev thaw. He reads between the lines of ellipse and falsity and travels to the sites of gulags and vast hydro-engineering projects that these writers described. On the banks of the infamous White Sea canal in the Baltic he traces the Soviet 20th century through a gently humorous conversation with a couple of old-timer hunters. In Turkmenistan, over a lunch of bony carp with an eminent ichthyologist, he discusses the Soviet “gigantomania” that sought to divert Siberian rivers to water the central Asian steppe.

Westerman is a very fine writer and his stories, characters and digressions are as delicately wrought as a watch mechanism. He reminds me of Bruce Chatwin and the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. Like them, he has elevated the authorial journalist-traveller into a brilliant, magic storyteller; like them he seeks out the smaller, human-sized epics that play out their tragedies against the backdrop of history. He resists passing judgment and remains sympathetic to the compromises and context of the 1930s. He explains the agonies of self-justification of one of the writers: “He has forced himself to believe what he is about to conjure up for his readers.”

Westerman threads his stories full circle to make a noose. Canals silt into malarial swamps, chemical defoliants deployed against the algae wash down and kill thousands of hectares of planted cotton. His book is rich with denouements that involve among other things (I don’t want to spoil them too much) the mystery of a disappearing goose population, Brezhnev’s son-in-law, and an imaginary voyage to a flamingoed, salt-pan bay on the far Caspian shore of the Karakum desert. Throughout, the writing is warm and subtly comic. Out of the terror of those years, Westerman has fashioned an unexpectedly delightful series of fables that trip between farce and pathos.

Engineers of the Soul: in the Footsteps of Stalin’s Writers by Frank Westerman

Harvill Secker £14.99 pp306

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