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Conclusion

Katharine Hodgson

in Voicing the Soviet Experience: The Poetry of Ol′ga Berggol′ts

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. Part of the purpose of this study has been to recover a sense of the range and scope of the work of just one of the writers generally thought to be ... More

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. Part of the purpose of this study has been to recover a sense of the range and scope of the work of just one of the writers generally thought to be part of the world of official Soviet literature. Berggol′ts is known first of all for her wartime poetry; that work deserves to be placed firmly in the context of her writing before and after the war. Its importance should not be denied, but it should not be seen as a sudden, unprecedented outburst of creativity. In its exploration of Berggol′ts's writing, this study has shown that life and art became tightly entangled in her poetry and prose; the poet's own conviction that the two should be intimately connected is demonstrated by her texts. Yet it would be wrong to lose sight of the fact that we have been dealing with literary texts which must be viewed in relation to other literary texts. While much of what Berggol′ts wrote displays its connection with events in her life and in the life of her society, her writing also reveals its awareness of how others wrote. Russian literary tradition and the poetry of her contemporaries helped to form Berggol′ts's work.Less

“Let Us Learn from the Soviets”

Tatiana Gabroussenko

in Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early History of North Korean Literature and Literary Policy

This chapter examines the Soviet intellectual influence on North Korean literature in the nascent years of North Korean Communism. It begins with a discussion of Soviet literature in Korea in the ... More

This chapter examines the Soviet intellectual influence on North Korean literature in the nascent years of North Korean Communism. It begins with a discussion of Soviet literature in Korea in the late 1940s and early 1950s and goes on to consider the major conventions of Soviet socialist realism developed by the “soldiers on the cultural front” during the Soviet era. It then explores pro-Soviet works of literature produced by North Korean writers in various genres as form of accolades to Soviet–Korean friendship and eulogies to the Soviet liberators and the Soviet way of life. The chapter focuses on two important channels of Soviet influence: Soviet fiction and Ssoryŏn kihaenggi, travelogues written by North Korean intellectuals who visited the Soviet Union in 1946–1955 as members of specially arranged official delegations.Less

From Thaw to Freeze: Party History and Soviet Literature, 1956–57

Polly Jones

in Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70

This chapter examines how the increasingly stricter limits in late 1956 and 1957 were negotiated and contested within two of the main professions shaping public memory: Soviet literature and party ... More

This chapter examines how the increasingly stricter limits in late 1956 and 1957 were negotiated and contested within two of the main professions shaping public memory: Soviet literature and party history. The chapter travels backward and forward from this turning point in the thaw of 1956, exploring the internal debates within these two institutions and the professions that they represented, along with their interactions with the party leadership. It traces the emergence of these agendas and “errors” back to the Secret Speech, and reveals their persistence up to, and even beyond, December's shift in the party line on the cult of personality. It also examines the complex processes of regulating and punishing these agendas after the closed letter.Less

Soviet Beginnings

in From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener

In 1926, Meir Wiener immigrated to the Soviet Union for economic and ideological reasons. While in Kiev, he worked as a research fellow at the Department for Jewish Proletarian Culture of the ... More

In 1926, Meir Wiener immigrated to the Soviet Union for economic and ideological reasons. While in Kiev, he worked as a research fellow at the Department for Jewish Proletarian Culture of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in April 1927. Wiener then transferred to the Kiev Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture, where he was appointed as the head of the Section of Ethnography and Folklore, and published in Di royte velt a long essay reviewing two collections of poetry by the American Yiddish author H. Leyvick (Leyvik Halpern, 1888–1962). In 1929 a series of high-profile ideological campaigns were waged, first against prominent Russian writers such as Evgenii Zamiatin and Boris Pilnyak, and subsequently against Yiddish literature. The Communist Party's efforts to consolidate control over Soviet literature from 1929 to 1934 did not spare Yiddish literature and scholarship. This chapter, which focuses on Wiener's time in the Soviet Union and his adjustment to Soviet conditions in Kiev, also examines the “Leninist Period” in Soviet literary criticism and Wiener's move from Kiev to Moscow.Less

Introduction: The Fiery Revolutionaries Series and Late Soviet Culture

Polly Jones

in Revolution Rekindled: The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography

This chapter introduces the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ (Plamennye revoliutsionery) series of over 150 biographies and historical novels, published by Politizdat throughout late socialism until the ... More

This chapter introduces the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ (Plamennye revoliutsionery) series of over 150 biographies and historical novels, published by Politizdat throughout late socialism until the Soviet collapse. It contextualizes the decision to create the series, and to target sophisticated literary and historical writers regardless of their ‘official’ reputations, within the party’s urgent and persistent post-Stalinist demands for more emotionally and intellectually engaging revolutionary propaganda. At the same time, it suggests that this ‘historical turn’ was not just a top-down initiative, by highlighting the passionate interest in historical investigation and reflection shared by many post-Stalinist writers and ordinary Soviet readers. It also introduces key conceptual frameworks to understand the series’ operations within Politizdat, Soviet publishing, and the Soviet (and unofficial) literary worlds: ‘niches’ and ‘oases’ within official institutions; ‘in between’ and ‘grey zone’ literature; and the complex ‘circuit’ of Soviet writing, publishing, and reading.Less

Soviet Literature and Theory

in From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener

Meir Wiener applied Marxism primarily as an analytical method in his historical studies of Yiddish literature and as an ideological worldview in his Soviet literary criticism. He sought to construct ... More

Meir Wiener applied Marxism primarily as an analytical method in his historical studies of Yiddish literature and as an ideological worldview in his Soviet literary criticism. He sought to construct an idealized general concept of Soviet Yiddish literature in which conflicts and contradictions were nonexistent, and in which Marxist critical analysis was canceled by socialist realism as a “creative method,” giving rise to a utopian vision of reality. Wiener turned to theoretical criticism for the first time after 1932 at a time when Soviet literature was undergoing a radical transformation and socialist realism was getting institutionalized. This chapter focuses on his attempts to develop a comprehensive synthetic concept of modern Yiddish literature in the context of Marxist theory. It examines Wiener's response to the proletarian critics concerning Soviet literature and theory, his analysis of Perets Markish and David Bergelson, and his views about poetry and socialism as well as the Soviet Yiddish literary canon.Less

The Abrek in Soviet Chechen Literature

Rebecca Gould

in Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus

This chapter traces the emergence of the anticolonial bandit (abrek) in Chechen Soviet literature. Beyond mapping this institution onto its broader social context, it studies how the sanctification ... More

This chapter traces the emergence of the anticolonial bandit (abrek) in Chechen Soviet literature. Beyond mapping this institution onto its broader social context, it studies how the sanctification of social banditry in Soviet literature recalibrates the dialectic between colonial and indigenous law in the nineteenth-century Caucasus. This dialectic is further complicated by the plurality of local legal norms, which oscillated between indigenous law (ʿādīt) and Islamic jurisprudence (sharīʿa). Rooted in precolonial traditions, the abrek functioned as the dominant idiom of indigenous insurgency during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century as the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus confronted the overwhelming force of Russia's imperial army. During the Soviet period, representing the abrek was one of the most powerful ways for the indigenous literary elite to contest imperial law. Drawing on Chechen, Russian, and Georgian literatures of anticolonial insurgency, the chapter reverses the causal relations between base and superstructure that obtain in Ranajit Guha's “elementary aspects of peasant insurgency” to document how the literary imagination mediates the memory of popular insurgency.Less

Authors, Editors, and the Niches of Late Soviet Literature

Polly Jones

in Revolution Rekindled: The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography

This chapter traces the formation and evolution of the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ community in the Brezhnev era from three points of view: of writers as they decided whether and how to collaborate with ... More

This chapter traces the formation and evolution of the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ community in the Brezhnev era from three points of view: of writers as they decided whether and how to collaborate with it; editors, as they struggled to recruit writers and develop a distinctive culture for the series; and Politizdat’s managers and their party-state overseers, who were consistently suspicious of this unusual ‘niche’ and often interfered in it. Despite heavy censorship, political interference, and a large dose of conformist writing ‘to order’, the series sustained an ‘oasis’ or ‘niche’ within late Soviet literature, though this term fails to capture the effort involved in maintaining this sense of difference. In employing a very wide range of writers throughout late socialism, it also blurred the boundaries between Soviet and dissident literature, and compels us to reconsider the notion that ‘thaw’ writers, literary experimentation, and historical reflection migrated entirely into unofficial publishing after 1964 or 1968. Instead, such fragile niches kept late socialist literary identities and practices in flux throughout the Brezhnev period.Less

The Translation of Soviet Literature: John Rodker and PresLit

Ian Patterson

in Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: From Melodrama to Modernism

In 1933, John Rodker became the London agent for the official Soviet literary agency, the Press and Publisher Literary Service (PresLit). Until 1939 he was engaged with finding publishers for Soviet ... More

In 1933, John Rodker became the London agent for the official Soviet literary agency, the Press and Publisher Literary Service (PresLit). Until 1939 he was engaged with finding publishers for Soviet books, essays, short stories, screenplays and music in Britain and the United States, arranging their translation, and editing the short-lived magazine Soviet Culture (1934). This chapter traces Rodker’s central, complex and unacknowledged role in the Soviet Union’s self-presentation in Britain, drawing on the PresLit materials in Rodker’s archive at the University of Texas, Austin. Rodker’s negotiations between PresLit and British translators brings to light key figures in the dissemination of Soviet writing, whose influence in British interwar literary culture, especially its left-wing networks, has all but been eclipsed.Less

Conclusion: Soldiers on the Cultural Front versus Engineers of the Human Soul

Tatiana Gabroussenko

in Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early History of North Korean Literature and Literary Policy

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's major findings and reconsiders the commonalties and specifics of North Korean literature in comparison with the Soviet model. It discusses the newly born ... More

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's major findings and reconsiders the commonalties and specifics of North Korean literature in comparison with the Soviet model. It discusses the newly born North Korean Communist regime's decision to “learn from the Soviets” by adopting the theory and practice of Soviet “socialist realism” as a political and artistic strategy. Through various channels of influence, including large-scale translations of Soviet literature and the activity of Soviet Koreans as living carriers of Soviet values, the North Korean literary and political world was able to absorb the Stalinist principles of managing culture and intellectuals. This transformed the North Korean literary cadre into yet another example of “engineers of the human soul,” or “soldiers on the cultural front.” This chapter also highlights some disparities between the literary politics of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the USSR.Less

Introduction: The shape of the period

Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler

in A History of Russian Literature

Part V explores the relationship between the dramatic history of the twentieth century and the transformations of Russian literary culture and poetics, arguing that the story is one of unexpected ... More

Part V explores the relationship between the dramatic history of the twentieth century and the transformations of Russian literary culture and poetics, arguing that the story is one of unexpected continuities as much as rupture. The Part outlines the development of Russian modernism and the avant-garde in the Silver Age (1890s–1917), moving on to the avant-garde poetics and institutions reinvented in late Soviet (1960s–early 1980s), and treating underground and post-Soviet literature (since 1991), as well as the émigré literature of Russia Abroad. Émigré and Soviet literature are shown to follow some similar patterns and themes, just as official and underground literature alike explore ways to represent the century’s catastrophes, and to test the responsibilities of the intelligentsia. The desire to break with the past emerges as a theme, as does a struggle over forms of cultural continuity. Women writers play key roles across multiple time periods, locales, and aesthetic forms. Part V analyzes the workings of political and aesthetic censorship during the domination of Socialist Realism, and it explores poetry as a discourse of subjectivity. It includes attention to utopian/dystopian and national narratives, and ends with an account of the intelligentsia’s cultural and historical self-identification.Less