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Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All about It!

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Jeffrey Brooks
Jeffrey Brooks*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

The adoption of "socialist realism" by the first All Union Congress of Soviet Writers (17 August-1 September 1934) was a seminal event in Russian cultural history on a par with Peter's embassy to the west or Catherine's Instruction to her legislative commission. Henceforth literature and the arts lost some of their public identification with civil society and gained a formal place in the official culture of the Soviet era and in the overbearing discourse of leading newspapers such as Pravda. Writers and artists had to accept the metamorphosis of public discourse itself, as editors and journalists plunged into a kind of hyperreality in the face of the disjunction between the promises and results of Stalinist policies.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , Winter 1994 , pp. 973 - 991
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1994

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References

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9. Michel Foucault developed the idea of a field of discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972).

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17. Wheatcroft and Davies, “Population,” in The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 74.

18. Robert C., Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: Norton, 1990), 238–54Google Scholar; recent revelations have shown widespread opposition to Stalin at the time of the congress; see Boris, Starkov, “Trotsky and Ryiitin,” The Trotsky Reappraisal, Brotherstone, Terry and Dukes, Paul, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992) 78–82 Google Scholar; and idem, “Narkom Ezhov,” The Stalinist Terror: Netu Perspectives, J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 23.

19. Kemp-Welch (Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 120–32) discusses various attributions of the term, including a statement by Stalin to a group of writers at Gor'kii's house in Moscow on 26 October 1932 in which he used the term to refer to artists who show “our life truthfully, on its way to socialism” (131).

20. The story is “How Robinson was Created,” I. II'f and E., Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1961), 3: 193–97Google Scholar.

21. A. V., Blium, Za kidisami “Ministerstva Pravdy “: Tainaia isloriia sovetskoi tsenzury, 1917–29 (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agentstvo “Akademicheskii proekt,” 1994), 11 Google Scholar.

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23. Brief notes on all the participants in the 1934 writers’ congress appear in Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s“ezd sovetskikh pisatelei: Stenograficheskii otchet 1934. Prilozheniia (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel', 1990), 81.

24. E. Dobrenko points to a conjunction of official heroes and fictional ones during this period in Metafora vlasti, 39–43; so does Stites, Richard in Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 66–72.Google Scholar

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26. During 1936 Pravda devoted roughly ten pages per month to the arts, four times the pre-congress coverage.

27. The slogan “Create a literature worthy of our great epoch” was widely repeated (Trud 8/17/34).

28. Four years later the party leadership decided to name things after Gor'kii, according to Kemp-Welch (Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 124).

29. The odd usage here, of Aleksei Maksimovich Gor'kii instead of the more familiar Maxim Gor'kii (pseudonym for Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov), accords with the pomposity with which these official figures were honored.

30. Jeffrey, Brooks, “Revolutionary Lives: Public Identities in Pravda during the 1920s,” New Directions in Soviet History, ed. White, Stephen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 27–40 Google Scholar.

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32. Cited in Bailes, Technology and Society, 1 17–18.

33. Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Stalinist terror in the Donbas: A Note,” in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, 217; he cites Brodskii, L. I., “Ideino-politicheskoe vospitanie tekhnicheskikh spetsialistov dorevoliutsionnoi shkoly v gody pervoi piatiletki,” Trudy Leningradskogo politekhnicheskogo instituta im. Kalinina, no. 261 (Leningrad, 1966): 73 Google Scholar. On the Shakhty Affair more generally, see Bailes, Technology and Society.

34. Joravsky, Russian Psychology, 336.

35. In mid-1935 these were replaced by “Cadres decide all” (Pravda 5/6/35).

36. Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavskii) points out the importance of the final objective or purpose (tsel') and the path (put') in “Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm,” Fantasticheskii mir Abrama Terlsa (New York: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1967), 409–14.

37. On the passion for records in aviation in early 1934, see Bailes, Technology and Society, 384.

38. Angus, Roxburgh, Pravda: Inside the Soviet Nexus Machine (New York: G. Braziller, , 1987), 29 Google Scholar; he cites Gayev, A., “Kak delaetsyia “Pravda,” OstProbleme, no. 37 (1953): 1567f.Google Scholar

39. Participants writing in languages other than Russian constituted 48% of the Soviet delegates but many of the long speeches were by Russians. Figures on participation are in Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s“ezd, prilozhenie, v.

40. This was much less than their proportion at the congress by nationality (65%) but probably equivalent to their importance as calculated by length of speeches (see Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s “ezd, prilozheniia, 5). Izvestiia gave less front-page space than Pravda to the congress, featuring instead military and political news, but its coverage was also extensive.

41. Gerhard, Simon, Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society, trans. Forster, Karen and Forster, Oswald (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 138–45.Google Scholar

42. Jeffrey, Brooks, “Studies of the Reader in the 1920s,” Russian History, 2–3 (1982): 187–202 Google Scholar; idem. “The Breakdown in the Production and Distribution of Printed Material, 1917–27,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, eds. Abbott Gleason et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 151–74; see also the resolution at the XII Party Congress in Kommunisticheskaia Partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza v rcsoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh, konferenlsii i plenumov TsK 3 (Moscow: Izd-vo polit Miry, 1984), 108.

43. On these new cadres, see: Sovetskaia intelligentsiia (Istoriia formirovaniiia i rosta 1917–65) (Moscow: Mysl', 1968), 141; Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri TsK KPSS, Istoriia komunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza 4, book 1 (Moscow: Izd-vo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1970), 480–81; Sheila, Fitzpatrick, Education and Social. Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–34 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 87–110, 171–73, 241Google Scholar; Moshe, Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 241–57Google Scholar.

44. Sovetskaia intelligentsiia (Istoriia formirovaniiia i rosta 1917–65), 141; Fitzpatrick, Education, 87–110, 171–73, 241.

45. Istoriia kommunisticheskoi partii, 4, book 1, 480–81.

46. There is perhaps no adequate translation for this term but since obshchestvennost' was often linked with activism this seems most appropriate. Edith W. Clothes, Samuel D. Kassow and James L. West discuss the prerevolutionary usage of the term in their introduction to Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 3–9;Joseph Bradley and Gregory L. Freeze also comment on this theme in the same volume 146–47, 228–32.

47. Brooks, “Pravda and the Language of Power. “

48. Slovar' russkogo iazyka, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Russkii yazyk, 1958), 2: 576.

49. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 136.

50. Geldern, James van, “Cultural and Social Geography in the Mass Culture of the 1930s,” in New Directions in Soviet Histoiy, ed., White, Stephen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 64 Google Scholar.

51. On this notion of the dream as a discourse expressing a wish, which Freud developed in The Interpretation of Dreams, see Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B., The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald (New York: Norton, 1973, 1993), 235–36Google Scholar. Jacques Lacan also writes suggestively on this in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 256–61.

52. See Gasparov, Boris et al., Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992 Google Scholar.

53. The phrase is Pasternak's from a 29 April 1939 letter to his parents about Hamlet (quoted in E., Pasternak, Boris Pasternak Materialy dlia biografii [Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel', 1989], 540 Google Scholar).

54. Kornei, Chukovskii, “Iz dnevnika,” Znamiia 11 (November 1992): 16.Google Scholar. See his essay in Pravda on Nekrasov (3/5/39).

55. See, for example, Iu.B. Rumer's defense of quantum mechanics on Mendeleev's 100th birthday, in which he cites Bohr, Heisenberg and others (Pravda 9/10/34); and the article by Ia.K. Syrkin, a chemist prominent after WWII, on Mendeleev in 1937 (Pravda 2/2/37).

56. The words come from his story “Gedali” and are spoken by the saintly character of that name.

57. Gregory, Freidin, A Coal of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 12 Google Scholar.

58. For a discussion of some of these issues, see Svetlana, Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: The Cultural Myth of the Modern Poet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991 Google Scholar; on the cult of one writer in the 1920s and early 1930s, see Barbara Walker, “Maximilian Voloshin's House of the Poet: Intelligentsia Social Organization and Culture in Early 20th-century Russia” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1994).

59. How lasting and diverse these literary cults became is apparent from the response to Avram Tertz's (Andrei Sinyavsky) Strolls with Pushkin (trans. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava 1. Yastremski [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993]) as Nepomnyashchy shows in her introduction and in the special issue of Russian Studies in Literature (Winter 1991–1992) on this subject.

60. M. M., Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Incite Essays, trans. McGee, Vein W., eds. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 60–102 Google Scholar.