Ulbandus 17: A Culture of Institutions; Institutions of Culture (2016), ed. Bradley Gorski.

Ulbandus, The Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Review of Columbia University

© 2015 Ulbandus ISSN: 0163-450x

Editor-in-Chief: Bradley Gorski

Managing Editor: Holly Myers

Assistant Editors: Molly Rose Avila, Marlow Davis, Irina Denischenko, Erica Stone Drennan, Michael Gluck, Genevieve Guzman, William Hanlon, Robyn Miller Jensen, Inna Kapilevich, Dominic Leach, Holly Myers, Brendan Nieubuurt, Emily Traverse

Administrative Assistants: John Lacqua, Elsie Martinez

Cover Image: Henrik Glauber, Cover of MA 1923, vol. 9, no. 2, courtesy of the Kassák Museum, Budapest, Hungary

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This issue of Ulbandus is lovingly

dedicated to the memory of

Frank J. Miller

ULBANDUS 17 | 2016

A CULTURE OF INSTITIONS / INSTITUTIONS OF CULTURE

Editor’s Introduction BRADLEY GORSKI i

PART ONE:

CRITICS AND CENSORS

Literary Criticism and the Censor in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russia: Problems of Interaction KIRILL ZUBKOV 3

Fidelity and Testimony: Publishing, Censorship and Commentary in József Lengyel’s Confrontation GÁBOR DANYI 17

(Re)Defining a Literary Genre: How Italo Calvino’s Postmodern (Hyper)Novels became “Philosophical Allegories” in the USSR ILARIA SICARI 42

PART TWO: MARKETS AND CULTURAL CONSUMPTION

When Theory Entered the Market: The Russian Formalists’ Encounter with Mass Culture BASIL LVOFF 65

Mythologizing the Past to Survive the Present: Trauma and Cultural Memory in Timur Bekmambetov’s Imperial Bank Commercials (1992–1997) ELIZAVETA MANKOVSKAYA 86

Whose Ghosts Are These Anyway? MARINA KAGANOVA 108

PART THREE: PROCESS AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION

Zdesizdat and Discursive Rebellion: The Metropol Affair SOPHIE PINKHAM 127

The Paradox of Thick Journals: The Place of “Thick” Literary Journals in Contemporary Russia EVGENIYA VOROBYEVA Translated by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

146

“A Corporation Called Aleksei Ivanov”: Aleksei Ivanov on Local Identity, Writing, and Success Interview by BRADLEY GORSKI 158

BOOK REVIEWS

Maria di Salvo, Daniel H. Kaiser, and Valerie A. Kivelson (eds.), Word and Image in Russian History: Essays in honor of Gary Marker reviewed by BRITTANY PHEIFFER NOBLE 180 Sibelan E.S. Forrester and Martha M.F. Kelly (eds.), Russian Silver Age Poetry: Texts and Contexts. reviewed by ALANA HEIN 182 Alexander Cigale, (ed.), Atlanta Review, Russia Feature reviewed by GENEVIEVE ARLIE 184 Viktor Pelevin, Smotritel' reviewed by SERHII TERESCHENKO 185 Douglas Rogers, The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism reviewed by BRADLEY GORSKI 187 Irina Sandomirskaia, Blokada v slove: Ocherki kriticheskoi teorii i biopolitiki iazyka. reviewed by IRINA DENISCHENKO 190

Editor’s Introduction

Always institutionalize!1 This slogan—following on Fredric Jameson’s call to “always historicize”—could be the mantra of the following issue of Ulbandus. Each of the essays presented here works against an oversimplified model of culture, against a clean duality of artists and audiences. That imagined duality tends to focus on the internal dynamics of works of art, on the one hand, and their reception by an aesthetically sophisticated reader or viewer, on the other, skipping everything in between. The authors featured here add nuance such a picture, arguing that what we call “culture” emerges not simply from the internal complexities of artworks, but also out of the entanglement of institutional and personal interests. These authors are concerned above all with the in-between spaces, the backroom power plays, market forces, or (self-)censorship practices that do not necessarily write words on a page or put brush to canvas, but that are nevertheless integral to how culture is produced, distributed, received, and remembered. In fact, the English word “culture” contains two definitions which are worth separating here: first, culture as a synonym for “the arts,” and second, culture as a grouping of people, institutions, and interests with shared or similar values. In these pages we see how culture (in the first definition) emerges from and interacts with a culture (in the second).

Take the cover image for this issue. Look closely and you’ll see a set of initials inscribed on the lower right. They indicate the original creator, a minor graphic artist named Henrik Glauber. Glauber produced relatively few works in his lifetime and never rose to cultural prominence. His work has never been collected, and he appears only as a footnote, if at all, in histories and anthologies of the various movements around him. But this image was printed on the cover of a 1923 issue of the Hungarian avant-garde journal MA (“Today”), published by Lajos Kassák. One of Hungary’s most prolific and connected artists of the twentieth century,

1 NB: Also (though with a slightly different meaning) the unofficial policy for dealing with late-Soviet dissidents.

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Kassák was an institution in and of himself. He carried on correspondence with artists and writers from France to Russia and collected pearls of the pan-European avant-garde in the pages of MA. Today he is so associated with the broader movements of his time that the Lajos Kassák Museum in Budapest has become a center for the study of the avant-garde at large, both within Hungary and beyond. It is this museum that holds the cover image made by Glauber, and it is through the museum’s generous cooperation that it appears on the cover of Ulbandus. This reprinted image, and your contemplation of it, represents a discrete instance of cultural reception, and one brought about almost entirely by institutional forces. The piece was printed on the cover of MA, distributed as a part of the journal, and preserved in the archives of a museum whose mission is entirely unrelated to the actual human artist who created the original piece. So who is the author of this image and its appearance on our cover? Is it Henrik Glauber, who arranged lines and blocks of colors into a compelling composition, or is it all the various forces that brought those lines and colors to us?

By raising such questions, an institutional perspective destabilizes the centrality of single-subject authorship in our understanding of art and the process of meaning-creation. For this reason, the essays in this issue are organized thematically, rather than by the chronology or geography of their subject matter. Opening the issue are three essays by Kirill Zubkov, Gábor Danyi, and Ilaria Sicari about the mutual dependencies of criticism and censorship. Next come essays by Basil Lvoff, Liza Mankovskaya, and Marina Kaganova that explore market forces and their influence on various forms of cultural reception and consumption. The final section looks at the process of cultural production, with essays by Sophie Pinkham, Evgeniya Vorobyeva and myself focusing on the transformations of the various mechanisms that bridge conception and reception, creation and publication. Each thematic section collects a variety of subject matter from various eras and cultures within the expanded region our journal now considers. The thematic organization presented here is only one possible way to shuffle these themes. Each essay speaks to many others in various and unexpected ways. This introduction, for instance, suggests a different set of connections, considering each essay as it connects to a larger argument about decentering single-authorship in received notions of cultural production.

Though some essays in this volume do focus on a single author, even these undermine the notion of authorial control, pointing out how censors, critics, and broader cultural forces subvert meanings or redirect interpretation. In Ilaria Sicari’s article on the reception of Italo Calvino’s works in the Soviet Union, for instance, the original novelist is mostly

Editor’s Introduction iii

absent, preferring to stay home in Italy. Instead, the true subjects are the editors, critics, and publishers who remade Calvino into the author that Soviet readers needed at the time. Sicari discusses how one Soviet editor even took the bold step of writing an introduction in the voice of one of Calvino’s characters. This introductory vignette, signed with the character’s name in place of the editor’s, radically blurs the line between text and paratext, between author and critic. The resulting volume, with introduction and translated text both in the voice of a single character, can hardly be considered Calvino’s work alone. Instead it is a coercive reframing which derives its authority from the very image of single-authorship that it simultaneously undermines.

Such convoluted entanglements, often found under the various iterations of state socialism, provide an especially rich field for institutional investigations. It is perhaps no coincidence that many of our authors chose to focus on the Soviet Union and its satellite states. For much of the twentieth century, pervasive state structures with explicit ideological agendas dominated the institutional landscapes of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Many kept careful records, which have been preserved in accessible archives, and which have informed and enriched the studies presented here. In this way, the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian experience casts the role of cultural institutions in especially sharp focus, bringing to the surface many of the forces that lurk just out of sight in much of the rest of the world.

At the same time, socialism created unique institutional and cultural contexts that in many ways contrast with practices elsewhere in the world, especially in the capitalist West. As an explicitly revolutionary and populist ideology, state socialism, and especially its Bolshevik incarnation, attempted to counteract market forces. Soviet cultural institutions—followed by those of other socialist states—worked to bring together mass and elite cultures into a unified aesthetic that would entertain while also explicitly shaping the psychologies and life practices of a new type of citizenry. For this reason, many of the most influential analyses of Western cultural institutions, from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s critique of the culture industry to Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, require adjustments as they cross the iron curtain. Careful attention to the specifics of cultural practice under socialism can complicate these models in productive ways and push us to consider alternatives.

For instance, as Gábor Danyi investigates the pre-publication vicissitudes of József Lengyel’s novel Confrontation (1966), he finds himself moving away from Bourdieu. Proposing an alternative, Danyi frames censorship as a “social interaction” that can produce contested

Bradley Gorski iv

and mutually contradictory readings of a text before that text reaches print. In the case of Lengyel’s novel, three such contradictory readings eventually produced three separate texts—one printed as tamizdat, another in fragmentary form, and a third in what was called “official samizdat,” that is, a private printing only for party elites. Here, censorship negotiations did not produce a single version, what Bourdieu called a “compromise formation,” but rather produced three distinct compromise formations, reflecting the fractured nature of censorship practice.

Basil Lvoff’s reconsideration of the Formalist critics also leads him away from familiar Western models of mass culture towards the formulation of an alternative methodology. Too often remembered as a Russian version of New Criticism (close reading, intentional fallacies, literature as divorced from the world), the Formalists, in Lvoff’s retelling, actually have a much more expansive approach to offer. Shklovsky’s early focus on internal textual devices should not be seen as the arrogance of an essentialist, but rather the caution of a careful scholar: “We just do not discuss that which we do not (yet) understand,” he wrote in 1919. In the following decades, Shklovsky and colleagues Boris Eikhenbaum and Yuri Tynianov widened their lens, investigating not only meaning-creation within texts, but also the extra-textual mechanisms that brought certain works to prominence. Lvoff suggests that the Formalists’ investigations of the 1920s and 1930s can be seen as a potential alternative to more familiar Frankfurt School studies of mass culture. Going even further, Lvoff argues that, considering the challenges facing humanities scholarship today (especially digital humanities and big data), the methodologies developed by the Formalists might be best poised to lead us into the future.

Alongside Lvoff’s, several other contributions are immediately relevant to contemporary issues. Evgeniya Vorobyeva’s look at the state of “thick” literary journals in today’s Russia suggests a paradoxical situation in which such journals are all but disappearing from the literary landscape, but are still seen as exercising an outsized influence on the field. Based on an extensive survey of journal editors and authors, Vorobyeva finds these journals to be an institution that “no one needs anymore,” but that is still “essential for literature.” Marina Kaganova’s evocative and lyrical essay on the development of tourism in a Georgian mountain region shows how the ghosts of past ways of life and past traumas still haunt Svaneti. The neoliberal tourist industry, Kaganova demonstrates, has not so much chased away the ghosts of Svaneti’s past as it has coopted them towards its own ends, refashioning an often painful history as a bright and Westernized vision of the future.

Editor’s Introduction v

As Eastern Europe and Eurasia move away from the explicit ideology of state socialism towards more fragmented, subtle, and differentiated institutional landscapes, it becomes more difficult, and therefore all the more important to pay close attention to how institutions interact with culture. During the 1990s cultural fields throughout the region shed most of their socialist trappings and developed new institutions, often based on imported political values, new market principles, or the emergent prestige economy.2 Though these structures often arose without direct government involvement, the increasingly hands-on policies of, for instance, Vladimir Medinskii’s Ministry of Culture in Russia and the rise of right wing administrations in places like Poland and Hungary show how interested governments can quickly and effectively involve themselves in the cultural fields. In each of these cases, newly empowered state bodies have chosen not to disrupt the cultural landscape with sweeping reforms—as was more often the case with the rise of state socialism. Instead, they have inserted themselves within already existing structures, asserting their authority without disrupting the apparently organic development of the cultural field.

To take an example from Russian literature, one can point to the subtle workings of organizations like Read.Russia.3 Tasked with advo-cating for translated Russian literature abroad, the government-financed Read.Russia organizes the country’s participation at international book fairs, collaborates with publishers abroad, and, crucially, chooses which books and authors to promote. Read.Russia does not exercise censorship and it supports authors of a relatively broad range of political viewpoints. One promotional video, for instance, features the liberal pluralist author Liudmila Ulitskaya discussing the work of the avowed Stalinist Zakhar Prilepin. Even though she strongly disagrees with his politics, Ulitskaya says on camera, she can respect his prose. What Read.Russia’s authors have in common is a bent toward plot-driven novels in the realist tradition, or what editor Elena Shubina calls “contemporary classics.” Missing from the Read.Russia booths are more experimental works like Keti Chukhrov’s Love Machines (2013) or the poetry of Kirill Medvedev or Aleksandr Skidan. Given the relative obscurity of these authors within Russia, it is perhaps no surprise that Read.Russia does not invest in their

2 I borrow the term from James F. English’s study The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005). For an exploration of prize culture in post-Soviet Russia, see Natalia Ivanova, Nevesta Bukera: Kriticheskii uroven’ 2003/2004 (Moscow: Vremia 2005). 3 Columbia University Press is working with Read.Russia on one hundred volumes of new translations from Russian. Neither Ulbandus, the Department of Slavic Languages, nor this author has any direct involvement in that project.

Bradley Gorski vi

promotion. The organization, it seems, takes its cues from the preferences of the market itself. But by asserting control over how those market preferences are interpreted and disseminated abroad, Read.Russia helps determine how Russian literature is seen, translated, and read around the world, all the while avoiding explicit interference in the operations of the free market.

Such mechanisms work more subtly than their twentieth-century predecessors, veiling current cultural landscapes in a market-based obscurity that seems difficult to analyze from the outside but proves disconcertingly easy to manipulate from within. The essays in this volume, especially those that investigate institutions of the past, provide valuable perspective on the historically recurring roles of institutional factors in shaping our experience of culture, and therefore our understanding of the world around us. As these institutions adjust and transform across time, a historical perspective can become increasingly relevant.

For instance, potential contemporary parallels suggest themselves just beneath the surface of Kirill Zubkov’s essay on the intimate relationship between literary criticism and censorship in nineteenth-century Russia. Among the essay’s heroes (or antiheroes) is Ivan Goncharov, author of the great realist novel Oblomov and, less famously, of many censorship reports on his fellow litterateurs. Zubkov shows how censors like Goncharov imported techniques of close reading and aesthetic argumentation from professional literary criticism into the practice of censorship. Despite the censor’s explicit authority to ban works without recourse to aesthetic reasoning, Zubkov finds, the techniques of literary polemics brought much-needed cultural legitimacy to censorship as an institution. Armed with new technologies of reading and rhetoric, the censors soon went after the “thick” literary journals; that is, they attacked the very organs of literary criticism from which they had learned to sharpen their craft.

Sophie Pikham’s intimate retrospective of the 1979 Metropol affair reveals a slightly different relationship between censorship, authors, and critics. Based on extensive interviews conducted in 2013, Pinkham reconstructs the genesis and aftermath of the scandalous literary almanac, which attempted to find a third path between dissidence and Party loyalty by demanding publication of “works that did not fit established molds” but which were not explicitly banned. Pinkham shows how the debate that erupted around the almanac sorted its participants into familiar binaries of loyalists and opposition, and how the “third way” which the editors had sought all but disappeared. In Pinkham’s reading—as in Zubkov’s essay—the rhetoric of literary criticism worked alongside

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censorship, legitimating, on aesthetic grounds, the restriction of politically undesirable publications.

In these essays, we see how the categories and rhetoric of aesthetic debate can serve to reinforce and strengthen state authority. What emerges is something of an inversion of Jürgen Habermas’s optimistic account of the “public sphere” in Western Europe.4 In Habermas’s telling, bourgeois literary culture beginning in the late seventeenth century cultivated self-reflection and rational critical debate, which led “to the more properly civic tasks of a society engaged in critical public debates.”5 Through literary polemics, the new bourgeois public sphere learned to demand rights, “regulate civil society,” and even “challenge the established authority of the monarch.” 6 In contrast, Zubkov and Pinkham’s accounts both show how the techniques of reasoned literary debate brought more legitimacy to state authority and weakened the possibilities for opposition. Literary culture, in other words, reinforced state power rather than forming an articulate counterweight to power in a public sphere.

Creating such a public sphere once again became a central concern after the Soviet Union fell and Western interests clamored to build a “civil society” that would smooth the transition to democracy and capitalism. Here, once again, institutional factors aligned in unexpected ways. As Liza Mankovskaya shows, perhaps one of the more effective projects aiding the transition had nothing to do with pro-democracy Western groups, but was a series of television advertisements for the newly founded Imperial Bank. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, each of the commercials recreated an iconic moment in history apparently unrelated to banking. Though the commercials did not seem to drive much business to the bank, which filed for bankruptcy in 1999, Mankovskaya argues, they were nevertheless a resounding success. By downplaying the importance of money and emphasizing long-term historical continuity, the commercials eased the transition to capitalism and provided audiences with historical antecedents that helped in coping with the traumas of the 1990s. Furthermore, the widespread popularity of the commercials produced loose groupings based around common aesthetic experience, such that anecdotes and quotes from the commercials took on a folkloric significance in some circles and produced the kind of collectivities that had been atomized over the preceding decade.

4 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 5 Ibid., 52. 6 Ibid.

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My own contribution, in which I interview the contemporary Ural writer Aleksei Ivanov, shows an author who explicitly aspires to create just such collectivities through his work. Ivanov’s bestselling novels The Heart of the Parma (2003) and The Gold of the Rebellion (2005) combine deep geographical and historical research with elements of the supernatural in a way that encourages audience engagement beyond the reading experience. Ivanov says that he builds his novels with an eye to such “interactivity,” constructing each work “like a corporation,” which readers are encouraged to join. Within that corporation, they will find not only the novel, but also ancillary works of non-fiction, film and video-game adaptations, and immersive experiences that recreate aspects of the novels’ worlds.

As I focus on a single author in this interview, I am fully aware that I began this introduction questioning just such an approach. But Ivanov has so internalized the vocabulary and values of the capitalist market and globalized entertainment that the hours I spent in conversation with him became a veritable self-analysis along institutional lines. Contemporary authors are expected to be conversant in brand management and marketing strategies, not to mention prize competitions, film adaptations, and the construction of their public personae. This baring of the device—exemplified by Ivanov—suggests authors explicitly taking control of the institutional environment that shapes their work. At the same time, it points to the need for deeper analysis. As authors learn how to navigate the various institutions directly around them, we might be tempted to once again subscribe to a vision of an author in full control of her work, reception, and interpretation. But this is always a fantasy. No matter how well an author manipulates the mechanisms around her, there are always more layers of contingency and more institutional circumstances to disentangle.

It has been my pleasure as editor to work with all the authors included here, especially the many young scholars from the regions and cultures our journal often takes as our subject, but too rarely gives direct voice. The diversity of voices and richness of perspectives is this volume’s greatest strength. This issue of Ulbandus also revives the long-dormant tradition of reviewing recent publications in our field and our region, and I would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful readings. I would also like to thank the many co-editors and copy editors who have helped

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create this issue of Ulbandus. They include: Molly Rose Avila, Marlow Davis, Irina Denischenko, Erica Stone Drennan, Michael Gluck, Genevieve Guzman, William Hanlon, Robyn Miller Jensen, Inna Kapilevich, Dominic Leach, Holly Myers, Brendan Nieubuurt, and Emily Traverse. Thank you also to Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler for his wonderful translation of Evgeniya Vorobyeva’s article. Special thanks to John Laqua and Elsie Martinez and the whole Columbia University Slavic Department whose support in publishing Ulbandus has extended over almost four decades. Without the Department and the generous support of the Friends of Ulbandus (many of whom are affiliated with Columbia Slavic) this wonderful publication would not be possible.

Finally, we would like to acknowledge the enormous debt of gratitude both this journal and our entire department owe to two beloved faculty members who passed away as this issue was being prepared for publication. Over their many decades of service to this department and to the Slavic field at large, both Frank J. Miller and Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy worked through and between institutions to bring colleagues into closer contact, to strengthen individual relationships, and to enrich scholarship. Both were at different times presidents of AATSEEL and chairs of our department. Both fully embodied the profession as engaging teachers, leading scholars, and able administrators. A forthcoming issue of Ulbandus will be fully dedicated to Cathy Nepomnyashchy, who along with Michael Naydan, started this journal in 1976. And so it is with deep affection, respect, and sadness at his loss that this issue is dedicated to the memory of Frank J. Miller. Frank’s sense of humor, his devotion to his students, both graduate and undergraduate, his seemingly endless productivity and energy—just in the last five years, he complemented his classic intermediate textbook V puti: Russian Grammar in Context with full beginning and advanced courses—made him an ideally rounded teacher, colleague, and friend. But it is Frank’s simple presence that I will miss most of all. Frank was always there, always available, ready to answer a question about arcane grammar, tell a joke, or reminisce about any of his various experiences in Russia and across the Slavic field in America. Even with all the demands on his time, Frank prioritized being present. And for this reason, his absence is especially acute. He will be missed.

Bradley Gorski

Columbia University July 2016

PART ONE

CRITICS AND CENSORS

Literary Criticism and the Censor in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russia: Problems of Interaction

Kirill Zubkov St. Petersburg State University, Russia

In the beginning of 1864, Ivan Goncharov, a high-ranking censor and a famous writer, wrote a report on a story “The Bold Move” (“Smelyi shag”) by Lev Mechnikov, which he considered of dubious publishability. 1 Goncharov insisted that the story was not only politically dangerous, but also aesthetically weak. In his opinion, “The Bold Move” would have to be significantly altered before publication. The report ended with a statement that the suggested alterations “would be demanded not only by censorship, but by aesthetic criticism as well.”2 At first glance this phrase looks like a paradox. Why would a censor need such arguments in an official document? The possible explanation lies in the complicated interactions between literary criticism and censorship in nineteenth-century Russia. Those interactions are usually perceived and analyzed in a one-sided way. The powerful influence censorship had on mid–nineteenth century Russian criticism is evident. But can one speak of influence in the other direction? Did criticism play any sort of role in the

1 The story was published in Sovremennik (“The Contemporary,” 1863) under the pen name Leon Brandi. 2 I. A. Goncharov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 20 tomakh, t. 10: Materialy tsenzorskoi deiatel'nosti (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2014), 86. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise specified.

Kirill Zubkov 4

actions of the censor? I argue that such influence was possible, since literary criticism, even when it took on the role of opinion journalism, nevertheless remained criticism. It was not so much the critics’ ideological constructions that influenced the censors, as it was the principles critics developed for evaluating and interpreting literary texts and how those principles functioned in the public sphere.

The most significant accomplishments by scholars of mid-nineteenth-century Russian literary criticism have come in the form of preparing either annotated editions of the works of well-known critics or collections of articles dedicated to well-known writers. However, with a few exceptions, the interpretation and analysis of works of literary criticism continues to be dominated by stereotypes that go back to the critics’ own self-evaluations, such as the opposition between mostly liberal-minded critics and oppressive censors. A promising approach to this problem would be to consider criticism as one of the institutions that determines the development of literature.3 In this way, criticism and censorship could be studied in comparison, as both, despite their differences, were influential literary institutions. Literary criticism is, naturally, connected to other literary institutions, including censorship. In the overwhelming majority of existing studies, the relations between these two are seen as unidirectional: only the effect of censorship on literature is analyzed.4 However, the reverse vector of influence also existed. This influence, though, cannot be understood without taking into consideration the specific role of literary criticism in Russian culture.

Mid-nineteenth-century Russian literary criticism appeared before the public in two aspects that were interrelated in complex ways. In its first aspect, criticism de facto carried out the functions of political journalism, while in its second, it evaluated and interpreted literary works; that is, it acted as criticism, properly speaking. The reason for this duality was the 3 This approach is usually linked with the work of Jürgen Habermas, especially his conception of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit), where criticism is taken to be a fundamentally meaningful component of social communication (see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982); Peter Uwe Hohendahl (ed.), A History of German Literary Criticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988)). In the Russian context it has most often been applied to twentieth-century literature (see Evgeny Dobrenko, Galin Tixanov, eds., A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2011)). For interesting reflections on the social functions of mid-nineteenth-century literary criticism, see the following sources: M. S. Makeev, Nikolai Nekrasov: Poet i predprinimatel' (ocherki o vzaimodeistvii literatury i ekonomiki) (Moscow: Maks-Press, 2009); A. V. Vdovin, Kontsept “glava literatury” v russkoi kritike 1830–1860-kh godov (Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2011). 4 See, for example: M. K. Lemke, Ocherki po istorii russkoi tsenzury i zhurnalistiki XIX stoletiia (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia CPb, 1904); P. S. Reifman, Tsenzura v dorevoliutsionnoi, sovetskoi i postsovetskoi Rossii: V 2 t. (Moscow: Probel-2000, 2015).

Literary Criticism and the Censor 5

difficult conditions under which the Russian press existed at that time. To write openly on many social topics, to say nothing of politically sensitive ones, was impossible. Until 1864, for instance, it was officially forbidden not only to criticize, but even to praise in print any contemporary measures taken by the government. 5 Governmental decisions had to stay out of public discussion.

As for the “political” aspect, it would seem that criticism had little opportunity to have any effect on censorship, while censorship could influence critics and did so on a regular basis. In Russia, in the words of a character from Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift, “the censorship department arose before literature; its fateful seniority has always been in evidence: and what an urge to give it a tweak! Chernyshevski’s activities on The Contemporary turned into a voluptuous mockery of the censorship, which unquestionably was one of our country’s most remarkable institutions.”6 Under censorship, which for several decades effectively eliminated the very possibility to create and publish a political work, literary criticism was forced to take on the incongruous role of political journalism, which in turn drew the attention of that very institution of censorship. Thus, on March 27, 1848, the Minister of National Education, Sergey Uvarov, whose portfolio included censorship, demanded that his employees pay special attention to periodical publications where “authors pass from their judgment of literature to political innuendo.”7 At the same time, literary criticism could hardly avoid such innuendo, as those very censors quite severely limited opportunities to write about politics directly.

When they encountered the “political” side of literary criticism, censors tried to cut those fragments of critical articles that failed to correspond to the government’s idea of “correct” criticism. In mid-nineteenth-century Russia, it was the critics who felt the strongest pressure from the censors. Critics who held the most varied views were subject to interference from the censors. Perhaps the best-known example is the censor’s relationship to Vissarion Belinskii and the radical-democratic critics. One need only examine the scholarly editions of the collected works of such famous critics of Belinskii’s circle as Nikolai Dobroliubov and Nikolai Chernyshevskii to discover an enormous number of passages removed by the censors and restored from manuscripts or from the censors’ archives. The effort of restoring the censor-marred passages in the works of literary critics began as early as

5 Sbornik postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii po tsenzure c 1720 po 1862 god (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Morskogo ministerstva, 1862), 317. 6 Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell with V. Nabokov (New York: Putnam, 1963), 276. 7 Sbornik, 245.

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the middle of the nineteenth century: Nikolai Ketcher, a close friend of Belinskii’s, used the critic’s manuscripts to restore the text of his articles for a posthumous edition of his works that came out in 1859–60, during a period of relaxed censorship.8

The censor’s behavior certainly cannot always be reduced to a simple reaction to a work of criticism. Quite often the government made attempts not only to forbid people from writing on certain topics, but also to prescribe which topics they should write about. In official discourse this was called “positive influence” on the press. The Ministries of Internal Affairs and National Education attempted to finance those publications which they found suitable and to influence their politics; censors personally gave writers instructions about what to write and how to write it, and many of the censors, when they let works through or banned them, were guided by their own program for the development of Russian literature.9 The problem of self-censorship is no less essential for understanding the influence of censorship: all writers were obliged to write with a backward glance at the censors’ possible objections, and some writers were quite willing to ask the censorship department for guidance on what they should write about and how.10

But at the same time, critics themselves influenced censors in a “positive” way. For the most part researchers have not paid attention to cases of such influence. A significant exception is Alexandr Garkavi’s “N.A. Nekrasov in the Struggle against Tsarist Censorship.”11 Garkavi called attention to a volume published by a government department, A Collection of Materials on the Direction Taken by Various Branches of Russian Letters over the Past Decade, and of Our Journalism in 1863 and 1864 (Sobranie materialov o napravlenii razlichnych otraslei russkoi slovesnosti za poslednee desiatiletie i otechestvennoi zhurnalistiki za 1863 i 1864 gg.), which was intended for use by censors. The descriptions of Nikolai Nekrasov’s 8 Many of Belinskii’s manuscripts have not been preserved, and this edition remains one of the most important sources for modern scholarship and reprintings. 9 B. G. Chernukha, Pravitel'stvennaia politika v otnoshenii pechati 60–70-e gody XIX veka (Leningrad: Nauka, 1989); N. G. Patrusheva, “Teoriia ‘nravstvennogo vliianiia’ na obshchestvennoe mnenie v pravitel'stvennoi politike v otnoshchenii pechati 1860-e gg.,” Knizhnoe delo v Rossii vo vtoroi polivine XIX–nachale XX veka: sbornik nauchnikh trudov 7 (St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo RNB, 1994), 11–125; G. B. Zhirkov, “No mysl'iu obnial vse, chto na puti zametil…,” U mysli stoia na chasakh…: Tsenzory Rossii i tsenzura (St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo SPbGU, 2000), 100–58; V. A. Kotel'nikov, “I. A. Goncharov v tsenzornom vedomstve,” Tsenzura v Rossii: Istoriia i sovremennost' 6, ed. N. G. Patrusheva (St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo RNB, 2013), 247-78. 10 For numerous examples see A. I. Reitblat, ed., Vidok Figliarin: Pis'ma i agenturnye zapiski F. B. Bulgarina v III otdelenie (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998). 11 A. M. Garkavi, “N. A. Nekrasov v bor'be c tsarskoi tsenzuroi,” Uchenye zapiski Kaliningradskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta 13 (Kaliningrad: 1966).


poetry in this volume were copied almost word for word from critical articles by Evgenii Edel'son and Nikolai Pavlov, published in the magazine Library for Reading (Biblioteka dlia chteniia) and the newspaper Day (Den'), by the book’s author, Petr Kapnist.12 From this Garkavi drew the following conclusion: “conservative critics’ statements critical of Nekrasov objectively played the role of political denunciations.”13 In reality, Edel'son’s article, which praised Nekrasov’s poetry, had to be significantly changed to become usable as a denunciation. It was not enough to copy the article: it was also necessary to edit the text. According to Garkavi, a critic must either struggle against the censor or support the political actions of censorship, but in reality the critics were to some extent able to determine the very logic which could be used by the censor and other agents to establish connections between ideological and aesthetic aspects of a work of literature. The censors needed to learn to speak and think about literature so as to discuss literary works in a way that at least some literary agents could consider correct or understandable. It was necessary for them to interact with literature in order to maintain a certain influence. Thus, the censor could use methods developed by critics of different ideological opinions, but had to adapt them to his own goals.

Let us consider a few examples. The first relates to the actions of the censor for dramatic works. This institution dealt with the staging of plays in imperial theaters. In light of its especially great accountability (plays were often attended by common people, and the authorities were especially afraid of undesirable influences on them), it was part of the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery, that is, part of the same organization as the political police.14 On December 31, 1862, the censor Ivan Nordstrem wrote a report on Aleksandr Ostrovskii’s play “Sin and Sorrow Are Common to All” (“Grekh da beda na kogo ne zhivët”). The conclusion of the censor’s report runs as follows:

This, the latest effort by our talented playwright Ostrovskii, the appearance of which the public has been impatiently awaiting, is partially a depiction of the same kingdom of darkness that was depicted by him in his previous plays; and at the same time it is in

12 See A. M. Garkavi, “N. A. Nekrasov,” 112–14; see also: Lemke, Ocherki po istorii, 20. 13 Garkavi, “N. A. Nekrasov,” 114. 14 The idea that the theater was especially dangerous and must be diligently supervised was generally held by all the European censorship agencies. See Robert Justin Goldstein, “Introduction,” The Frightful Stage: Political Censure of the Theater in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Berghahn Books, 2011), 4–10.

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many ways reminiscent of Pisemskii’s drama “A Bitter Fate,” which was not approved for performance.

The censorship office leaves the question of whether to approve Ostrovskii’s present play to the judgment of its superiors.15

This review is worded in a tone favorable to the playwright by the standards of the theater censor (Nordstrem’s superiors approved the play for performance), but the most interesting aspect is the choice of words. The words “kingdom of darkness” are underlined in Nordstrem’s report, which clearly indicates that they are a quotation. It appears Nordstrem was aware that he was quoting a particular text, Dobroliubov’s article “The Kingdom of Darkness” (“Tëmnoe tsarstvo”) where Ostrovskii’s works are treated as a generalized depiction of a Russian society founded on a complete absence of rights and on uncontrolled violence. Dobroliubov was principally known as a radical critic standing shoulder to shoulder with Chernyshevskii, who had been arrested in late 1862 on political charges. Nordstrem was hardly likely to forget the source of the quotation, especially considering that Dobroliubov’s scandalous funeral (where, again, Chernyshevskii played a major part, giving a lengthy speech with an extraordinary praise for the merits of the deceased) had taken place only a year before his report was written. 16 Clearly Dobroliubov’s reputation and ideas were far from ideal in the eyes of a high-ranking employee of the censorship department; nevertheless, they did not prevent Nordstrem from quoting him.

The reference to Dobroliubov’s articles was well motivated: the censor needed to prove to his superiors that a very dark play in which the main character kills his wife could nevertheless be performed. The oppressive plot of Ostrovskii’s drama had to be presented as motivated and necessary to achieve a particular goal. Dobroliubov’s idea of a “kingdom of darkness” was entirely appropriate here, in that it put the play in the context of the playwright’s other works, which censors and readers were already used to. Strange as it may seem, a radical interpretation of Ostrovskii’s plays was an argument in favor of, rather than against, allowing them to be performed. Neither author nor censor

15 I. A. Nordstrem, “Grekh da beda na kogo ne zhivet, drama v 4 deistviiakh ‘tsenzorskii raport’,” F. 780, Op. 1, No. 39, 1862, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, 205–206 rev. 16 Dobroliubov rarely signed his published works with his full name. In 1862, before Nordstrem wrote his report, Chernyshevskii published the posthumous four-volume edition of Dobroliubov’s collected works, after which all the late critic’s articles began to be perceived as a unified whole.


could be responsible for the “darkness” of his play, since social reality itself was considered to be the source of its plot. Still more surprising is the fact that censors took this interpretation into account at all. At the same time, this is understandable: official documents could tell censors which ideas and images should cause literary works to be banned, but could not help them find these ideas and images in a work. Here the accumulated experience of literary critics came to their aid.

The use of Dobroliubov’s vocabulary implied a reliance on the interpretative tools developed by literary critics. The censor could prove that the importance of the drama for the “impatiently waiting” public was exactly what made its admittance to the stage complicated, implying that public opinion was the decisive voice. The bleak plot of the play was interpreted as a mere reflection of objectively existing social problems and not the result of the author’s politically dubious intentions. The literary critics of the 1860s, especially radically-minded ones like Dobroliubov, paid much attention to the problems of social reality reflected in modern literature. The censor seemed to understand the importance of such discussions and effectively used key concepts of criticism to suggest that the author should not be responsible for the social conditions he represented in his works. At the same time, there were several cases where the censor’s adoption of critical tools led to less favorable results for the author.

For instance, the second part of Apollon Grigor'ev’s article “On Ostrovskii’s Comedies and Their Significance in Literature and on the Stage” (“O komediiakh Ostrovskogo i ikh znachenii v literature i na stsene”) was banned by the censor and was preserved in the form of a galley proof, not discovered in the censorship department archive until the twentieth century. The Grigor'ev scholar Vasilii Spiridonov, who published the article, laid out the history of its treatment at the hands of the censor.17 The censors discussed it at length: first it was examined by one censor, then it was discussed by the Moscow Censorship Committee, then by an official in the Censorship Directorate in St. Petersburg, and finally by the full Censorship Directorate. Evidently the content of the article, which contained daring, if veiled, allusions to the necessity of political reform in Russia, bothered the members of the Committee. An annotation in an unknown hand appears on the first page of the article.18 It declares, “The author has said an untruth: this is not an analysis of Ostrovskii’s

17 V. S. Spiridonov, “A. N. Ostrovskii v otsenke A. A. Grigor'eva,” Ezhegodnik petrogradskikh gosudarstvennykh teatrov. Sezon 1918–1919 (1922), 157–74. 18 Nikolai Barsukov is of the opinion that it was Leontii Dubel't, at that time the head of the Third Section (see N. P. Barsukov, Zhizn' i trudy M. P. Pogodina, kn. 14 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1900), 239).

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comedies, but a comedy by Mr. Grigor'ev!”19 Whoever was responsible for this note, it clearly reflects the position of certain employees of the censorship department: the article was considered absurd by one of the censors who examined it as well.20 The words of this unknown censor are not simple mockery of Grigor'ev’s article, but are repeated almost word for word from a piece of literary criticism, Aleksei Galakhov’s review of Ostrovskii’s comedy “The Poor Bride” (“Bednaia nevesta,” 1852).21

In a review article called “Russian Literature in 1851” (“Russkaia literatura v 1851 godu”) Grigor'ev had as much as called Ostrovskii the successor of Nikolai Gogol and the most important modern Russian writer. Part IV of this article appeared literally under the same cover as Ostrovskii’s comedy, in a single issue of the journal The Muscovite (Moskvitianin). In a later review, Galakhov gave a detailed analysis of “The Poor Bride,” which in his opinion fell far short of justifying Grigor'ev’s hopes. Galakhov discussed the genre to which Ostrovskii’s play belonged in particular detail. At the end of his review, Galakhov writes:

In that same fourth issue of The Muscovite, there appears another comedy — not in its entirety, but merely the fourth act. Its title is rather strange: “Russian Literature in 1851: The Literary Phenomena of the Past Year.” Its author is Mr. A. Grigor'ev. There is only one character: the author himself.22

Even if the unidentified censor repeated Galakhov’s witticism entirely by chance (which is hardly likely), this would still be revealing: in his remark the censor plays on the double meaning of the word “comedy,” which refers both to the genre of a play and to a ridiculous article about that play. In other words, the censor is literally arguing like a critic trying to discredit a literary opponent by ridiculing him. In the case of censorship this method would seem superfluous: any article could be forbidden without undermining the authority of its author. Still the censor felt the need to call into question not only the political intentions, but the symbolic authority of the writer. The censor could hardly consider himself in the right to ban a work without proving its author’s incompetence, which could only be achieved through methods of literary

19 Ibid. 20 See Spiridonov, “A. N. Ostrovskii,” 170–74. 21 Galakhov’s article appeared anonymously. His authorship was established by Boris Egorov. See B. F. Egorov, “S. S. Dudyshkin — kritik,” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo universiteta 119 (Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii 5) (1962): 230. 22 A. D. Galakhov, “‘Bednaia nevesta,’ soch. g. Ostrovskogo (‘Moskvitianin’ No. 4),” Otechestvennye zapiski 4. Otd. VI (1852): 129–30.


polemics. The well-developed skill of critical mockery turned out to be very effective here.

On the basis of these examples, we may suppose that although censors did not make use of critics’ ideological positions, they did use the language and methods of the literary criticism of their time, which permitted them to find a certain concealed artistic idea in a work and describe it from various perspectives. This interrelationship between the censor and literary criticism makes it possible to draw important conclusions. But first it would not be amiss to focus on a few specific points about the interaction between these institutions.

First, the censor’s use of the “methods” of literary criticism seems to have begun rather late, no earlier than the 1830s, and more likely in the 1840s. Clearly there could be no possibility of literary criticism influencing the censor until literary criticism had developed as an institution and acquired sufficient authority. Of course, this sort of process plays out on a number of different levels, but to all appearances the rise of literary journals played a particularly important role, as they determined the very form of the critic’s work. The second aspect of the interaction between literary criticism and the censor is also connected to this point.

In the 1840s and 1850s, censors looked to critics of extremely diverse ideological positions, but in each case the critic was a rather well known author who chiefly published in literary “thick journals.” It was probably not the “thickness” of the journal or the critical article that mattered as much as having an authoritative voice that could direct the literary process and give instructions to writers and readers.23 This was the typical position of the thick-journal critics, beginning with Belinskii, who began to be active in the mid-1830s. An instructive example here is the career of Faddei Bulgarin, a journalist, newspaper publisher, and active contributor to the work of the Third Section. As a critic, Bulgarin did not have significant influence on any measures taken by the censor. Over the course of 20 years, Bulgarin continually approached the Third Section about various matters, including matters related to reorganizing the censorship department. He was often listened to, but only as an agent (Bulgarin’s wishes about the personnel of the censorship department were ultimately carried out).24 Later, when Bulgarin insistently denounced Andrei Kraevskii, the publisher of the popular journal Otechestvennye zapiski (“National annals”), in both critical articles and his confidential reports to Dubel't, his judgment was not heeded.25 One of the reasons 23 The form of the censor’s report has more in common with that of a newspaper article. 24 See the preface by Abram Reitblat in Vidok Figliarin, 30. 25 See for example Reitblat, Vidok Figliarin, 485, 491–99, 516–17, 544–47.

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for these complaints, and probably also for the lack of attention paid to them, was that Kraevskii and other thick-journal publishers were rapidly eating away at the popularity of Bulgarin’s newspaper The Northern Bee (Severnaia pchela). Evidently Bulgarin’s disputes with other men of letters—with whom Bulgarin was competing for popularity—did not seem persuasive to the censor. The closer Bulgarin’s role as a newspaper publisher was to his role as a literary critic, the less interesting he was to the censor. Bulgarin’s complaints were probably read as merely the continuation of a literary polemic. In contrast to the newspaper critics of The Northern Bee, the staff of the thick journals were much more interesting and important for the censors.

In the 1860s, on the other hand, the influence of newspaper critics on the censor grew more substantial. As noted above, it was at this time that Kapnist was reproducing articles published in Ivan Aksakov’s newspaper Day for use by the censorship office. The reason is apparently that the censor drew from the most significant and consequential form of literary criticism and by that time, newspapers played that role. However, an 1864 reform led to substantial changes in how the censorship department was organized. After this moment, censorship methods changed substantially, which makes direct comparisons of the “journal” and “newspaper” eras in the history of censorship quite problematic.

Third, the employees of the censorship offices who looked to literary criticism were in fairly senior positions. Their positions allowed them to act on their own initiative and help guide the direction of the entire institution, rather than just carrying out others’ instructions. In nineteenth-century Russia there existed several different censorship organizations.26 In ordinary notices and reports by censors, it is almost impossible to find any approaches or even any isolated expressions borrowed from the works of literary critics. This is hardly surprising: for a rank-and-file censor, the most authoritative sources were the law on censorship and various directives and decrees issued to the censorship departments, and these were to be strictly followed. All evidence suggests that censors were not even allowed to write decisions down in a manner different from that prescribed.

The above-mentioned example of Goncharov is instructive. As a mere censor, he usually only cited various kinds of decrees in his reports. After he became a member of the Council on Book Publishing of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a much more important organization, Goncharov tried to express his position not only as a censor, but also as 26 Alexandr Nikitenko, who worked for these organizations for many years, asserted that there were twelve of them. See А. V. Nikitenko, Dnevnik: v trekh tomakh, t. 1. 1826–1857 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1955), 336.


an “aesthetic critic” in his reports. His report on “The Bold Move,” mentioned at the beginning of this article, was written after his promotion and in it Goncharov indeed attempted to analyze the story. He is interested in the authorial position, which he describes in aesthetic terms popular in the nineteenth century. He opposes two possible author-hero relationships. The first one is objective and should result, as Goncharov claims, in an ironic attitude towards the main character, an emancipated woman. The irony is considered a method of establishing distance between the author and his character: the censor is not able to guess whether the author supports or rejects the ideas of emancipation. The opposite of objective irony is “the negligence and one-sidedness of attitude,” which the censor sees in the final episode of the story.27 The author seems to completely support his main character when she finally leaves her husband. In Goncharov’s opinion, such positions should not be approved for both moral and aesthetic reasons: the author fails to describe the dangerous consequences of such a decision and, at the same time, is not able to artistically reproduce the psychological condition of the heroine. The opposition of objective and subjective art dates back at least to Friedrich Schiller’s distinction of “naïve” and “sentimental” poetry and is one of the most fundamental principles of Russian nineteenth-century criticism. Goncharov effectively used his variation on Schiller’s distinction to analyze and evaluate the work of art, but his evaluation ended in important recommendations for future censors of analogous stories, who had to pay close attention to “subjective” works.

Taking these three aspects of the question into account, we can try to determine the reasons that caused the censor to look to literary criticism. The first reason is the professionalization of the entire censorship department. As recent research has shown, throughout the nineteenth century the government repeatedly took measures to improve the structure of the system of censorship, and these measures ultimately transformed the institution into a well-structured organization and increased the employees’ level of professionalism.28

The second reason, which is closely linked to the first, is the continuing development of the principles governing the process of censorship. In 1826, the “iron” law on censorship, celebrated for its

27 Goncharov, PSS, t. 10, 85. 28 See Irwin Paul Foote, The St. Petersburg Censorship Committee, 1828-1905 (Oxford: Meeuws, 1992); N. A. Grinchenko, “Tsenzurnoe vedomstvo i ego chinovniki (1804–1863 gg.),” Tsenzura v Rossii: Istoriia i sovremennost' 6, ed. N. G. Patrusheva (St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo RNB, 2013): 192–227; N. G. Patrusheva, Tsenzurnoe vedomstvo v gosudarstvennoi sisteme Rossiiskoi imperii vo vtoroi polovine XIX–nachale XX veka (St. Petersburg: Severnaia zvezda, 2013).

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harshness, was adopted. This law demanded that the censor facilitate the development of certain qualities in literature, in particular by “giving it a direction salutary to, or at least harmless for, the good of the Fatherland.”29 The results of this law were catastrophic for literature, and they were not at all congenial even to an emperor not known for liberalism; Nicholas I quickly decided to draft a new law.30 Anecdotes about the actions of censors who were trying to push literature in a “salutary” direction fill the pages of numerous memoirs and the scholarly articles based on them. It was once again Bulgarin who informed his protectors in the Third Section,

It is hard to believe what our censors consider harmful to the government. One writer, looking at the massive granite columns of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, exclaims, “It is as if these were the pillars of Russia’s might!” The censor crosses this out, noting that Russia’s pillars are her ministers. Another writer, describing General Delacroix’s coffin in Reval, said that the feet of the coffin were carved in the shape of eagles — the censor crossed it out, noting that the eagle is the emblem of Russia and therefore should not be talked of in such a manner. The censors could hardly gain respect through such actions; on the contrary, they have become the butt of jokes, satires, and epigrams, in which the government is always blamed.31

The new law on censorship introduced in 1828 turned out to be much milder. It presumed that the censor would not have any “positive” influence on literature, but would only ban works that were indisputably harmful. 32 When in 1848, amid fears of the spread of revolutions throughout Europe, the emperor began to take measures to make censorship more severe, the government came to the conclusion that the new kind of censorship was not sufficiently effective, and began to seek ways to exert a “positive” influence after all.

This is where the position of the literary critic, and in particular a critic who worked for a thick journal, could help the censor. In the 1840s and 1850s, the critics of almost all the thick journals (with the exception, perhaps, of the editor of Library for Reading, Osip Senkovskii) claimed to be laying out a definite program, not exclusively based on personal

29 Sbornik, 130. 30 Charles A. Ruud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804–1906 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 52–55. 31 Reitblat, Vidok Figliarin, 50. 32 See Sbornik, 313–14.


opinion.33 The judgments of such critics were meant to be persuasive and well motivated; such critics were meant to formulate attitudes toward literary works within an accessible system of ideas, supported by an understanding of how literature should develop. All in all, this mode of literary criticism seems to have become a model for assembling censorship reports. And many reports, especially in the less formalized system of theater censorship, really do begin to closely resemble brief literary-critical articles, where points “for” and “against” a work are laid out, questions of literary tradition and artistic value are discussed, and so on.34 With time, legislation governing the press also adopted this program more and more; it sometimes demanded, notwithstanding the 1828 law on censorship, that a censor read between the lines and understand the hidden content of literary works.35

The impact of literary criticism arguably increased the effectiveness of censor’s work. Reminiscences about the efforts of Russian censors usually contain numerous anecdotes about the absurd decisions made by some employee of a censorship office. However, in the second half of the nineteenth century, censors made fewer and fewer decisions worthy of a humorous anecdote: a censor might, for example, let a revolutionary article through for a bribe, but he would rarely let one through without realizing he was doing so.36 In the main, anecdotes about works banned for ludicrous reasons at this point have to do with the incompetence of provincial censorship committees, rather than absurd decisions by the center. 37 Instructed by critics, censors in the central censorship administration at the time began to make much more precise judgments about literature.

There was one serious problem that actual literary critics had to cope with, but censors did not: that of authority. Censors were endowed with the right to judge and evaluate a literary work not through knowledge of relevant aesthetic theories or the support of public opinion, but by the

33 See G. V. Zykova, Poetika russkogo zhurnala 1830-x–1870-x gg. (Moscow: Maks-Press, 2005). 34 See numerous reports by the theater censors: N.V. Drizen, Dramaticheskaia tsenzura dvukh epokh, 1825–1881 (Petrograd: Prometei: Izdatel'stvo N. N. Mikhailova, 1917). 35 See Reifman, Tsenzura v dorevoliutsionnoi…, 149. 36 See I. I. Iasinskii, “Moi tsenzora,” in Patrusheva, ed., Tsenzura v Rossii, 125. 37 Thus one of the employees of the Odessa censorship committee was dismissed for forbidding the publication of a news item about an archdeacon chanting the polychronion (“many years”) for the emperor and the entire ruling house, with the mention of the ruling house especially distressing to him (A. E. Egorov, “Stranitsy iz prozhitogo,” in Patrusheva, ed., Tsenzura v Rossii, 146–47). It is telling that the leader of the censorship office, E. M. Feoktistov, considered the decision absurd and immediately took measures against this censor.

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institutional position they held. Unlike critics’ opinions, a censor’s opinion were not subject to public polemics. Transferring literary-critical approaches from the public sphere to the sphere of administrative censorship decisions led to the appearance of censors who could capably interpret literary works, but their interpretations, unlike those of literary critics, were not subject to public opinion or even to legal accountability. Thus the censors, according to their internal logic, were able to correctly discern the political stance of the radical journals Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”) and Russkoe slovo (“The Russian word”) and shut both down in 1866, without subjecting their decisions to public scrutiny. The problem was not that the censors’ view was inaccurate, but that no alternative position could be put forward. Having adopted strategies of interpretation and terms of evaluation from literary criticism, censors deployed these new skills from a position of power and unquestionable authority, coopting and eventually undermining the very institution that had taught them so much. The functions of critical methods were completely changed when those methods became available to censors, who were members of a completely different institution.

Beginning at least as early as the 1830s, the institution of literary criticism had become an important part of Russian literature. The approaches and conceptual frameworks created by critics had become impossible to ignore for even the leaders of the censorship department, who held enormous power over the press. The influence of literary criticism was fundamental and complex. The censors could use the critical conceptions of the social role of literature to prove that some works could be permitted. At the same time, other censors implemented critical methods to discredit writers and to justify banning their works. Several censors were even able to incorporate short analyses of authorial positions into their reports. However, the methods of literary criticism, as applied by the censors, led to results that the critics could hardly have been happy about: the toolkit for understanding literary works that they themselves had created was used against them, to great effect.

Fidelity and Testimony: Publishing, Censorship and Commentary in József Lengyel’s Confrontat ion

Gábor Danyi Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

Compared to those of other Soviet bloc countries, socialist Hungary’s cultural policy is generally viewed as a relatively liberal system known for its lack of institutional censorship. A decade after the national trauma of the 1956 Revolution and its aftermath of retaliation—the period during which János Kádár’s new régime consolidated power—Hungary was able to break through its total isolation and leave strict cultural restrictions behind. The directives worked out in 1966 by the Party’s Cultural Theoretical Cooperative showed “some signs of ideological tolerance” and of “pursuing a more realistic literary policy” according to a background report by the Radio Free Europe Research Institute (RFE/RL).1 Certain shifts were experienced in the so-called “3-T system” of cultural policy, which categorized works as either prohibited (tiltott), tolerated (tűrt) or supported (támogatott). As a result, the number of tolerated works increased and Western literature gained a stronger foothold. 1 “Az irodalom és a művészetek hivatása társadalmunkban,” Társadalmi Szemle 21, no. 7–8. (1966), 29–58; The Literary Scene in Hungary (January–July 1966), September 9, 1966, HU OSA 300-8-3-3602; Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute: Publications Department: Background Reports; Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest.

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However, 1960s Hungarian book publishing was not nearly as liberal as it seemed from a Western perspective, according another RFE/RL report: “The works of Steinbeck, Faulkner, Grass, Enzensberger etc. are also being published. The West, however, does not inquire about the aim of the book publications, yet the prefaces and epilogues are meaningful in this regard.”2

According to this source, this period’s seemingly open cultural policy was counterbalanced by paratexts added to the given works.3 These texts were to play an important role in legitimizing publication while also guaranteeing a socialist framework for each work’s interpretation. Publishing practices common to periodicals at this time also confirm the crucial role played by these paratexts: “works that are awkward, ideologically debatable or aesthetically controversial—even if produced by a significant author and otherwise deemed valuable” were to be “propped up,” and could therefore be published only when accompanied by commentaries and studies.4 Serving as the official stamps of socialist institutions, these commentaries possess great potential in mapping the conditions defining literary production in socialist Hungary.

This study therefore focuses on the correlations between publishing, censorship and commentary. In order to do so, it has been necessary to revise the methodological approaches used to investigate censorship. First, attention has been shifted away from textual intervention towards other censorship techniques, including the production of paratexts. Second, the process leading to a work’s publication has been examined in more detail. Most investigations surrounding publishing practices in former Eastern bloc countries appear to have one crucial point in common: they focus mainly on textual variations and changes made either in the official censor’s ominous blue pencil, or even by the author himself. It cannot be denied that these textual changes were important, for their purpose was to iron out conflicts between a given work and the official political “line,” or between the work and a literary field’s current norm.5

2 Publisher’s Problems (RFE/RL Information Items No. 347/67), February 10, 1967, HU OSA 300-40-2 Box 7 [Culture: Publishing 1966–1989]; Records of RFE/RL Research Institute (Fond 300), Hungarian Unit (Subfond 40), Subject Files in English (Series 2), Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest. 3 See Gérard Genette, Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997). 4 László Farkas, “Az Új Írás kritikai hadjárata,” Tekintet 24, no. 2 (2011): 105. 5 See for example Maurice Friedberg, “New Editions of Soviet Belle-Lettres: A Study in Politics and Palimpsests,” American Slavic and East European Review 13, No. 1 (February 1954): 72–88; Petr Šámal, “Jak se stát socialistickým realistou: přepracované vydání sebe

Fidelity and Testimony 19

This, however, is only a single aspect in the triangular relationship among “the text itself, the object that conveys the text, and the act that grasps it.”6 As Roger Chartier argued, changes in meaning are produced in those cases as well when a stable text is “presented for reading in printed forms that themselves change,” or when a “text that is stable in content and fixed in form becomes the object of contrasting readings.”7 In the former case the strategies which are “explicit and rely on discourse”—for example prefaces, prologues, commentaries and notes—might play an important role in “trying to impose an orthodoxy or a prescribed meaning on the text.”8 Consequentially, censorship can be exerted not only in the form of textual intervention, but also as a framework set up by commentaries aiming to delimit the reader’s interpretation.

At the same time, East-European investigations into the conditions determining literary production in the Soviet bloc can benefit greatly from applying Bourdieu’s field theory. 9 Within the context of this approach, publishing a work can be interpreted as having to accommodate the censorship constituted by the literary field. According to Bourdieu, “Accommodation is the product of a process of euphemization” resulting in “a combination of what there was to be said, which ‘needed’ to be said, and what could be said, given the structure of a particular field.”10 The result of the form-giving process—in other words, the “compromise formation”—is “inseparable from the form in which it is manifested.”11 Following this train of thought, if the final printed work can be considered a “compromise formation,” then the “form-giving process” can be equated with the publishing process itself. In order to examine the mechanisms of publishing from a closer perspective, however, it is necessary to move a bit away from Bourdieu.

In reference to authorial intention, Jerome McGann has argued that in institutional spaces “the signifying processes of the work become sama,” Česká literatura 57, no. 2 (2009): 172–95; Marta Fik, “Cenzor jako współautor,” in Literatura i władza, ed. Bożena Wojnowska (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 1996), 131–47. 6 Roger Chartier, “Texts, Printing, Readings,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 161. 7 Ibid., 161, 165. 8 Ibid., 157. 9 Petr Šámal, an expert on Czech socialist realism applied this approach from the perspective of authorial strategies. See Petr Šámal, “Jak se stát socialistickým realistou,” 172–95. 10 Pierre Bourdieu, “Censorship,” in his Sociology in Question, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 90. 11 Ibid., 91.

Gábor Danyi 20

increasingly collaborative and socialized.” Authors do not govern every dimension of their texts, since “texts are also the locus of complex networks of communicative exchanges.” 12 From this perspective the publishing process can be interpreted as an institutionalized social sphere in which the interests of various actors—the author, the censors and consultants, the publishers, the representatives of the official cultural policy etc.—clash and compete with one another. Supposedly, each is in possession of a more or less elaborated reading. To return to Chartier, this means that the given work can—in a limited way—“become the object of contrasting readings” before it appears in printed form. These readings serve as the basis for further negotiations.

In order to define what is at stake during these negotiations, it is necessary to turn Chartier’s approach “upside down.”13 By utilizing the method of collecting those readings that preexisted publication—tracking down any background materials belonging to a publishing house or state organs, as well as the private correspondence and personal documents of the actors involved—further investigation can be made in order to compare early readings with the work’s final transmission. This study therefore attempts to cast light on a less obvious aspect of censorship while also discussing the role commentary plays in publication, a process interpreted in this paper as a social interaction.

These interrelations are mapped by following the publishing history of Confrontation, a novel by one of the most controversial Hungarian authors of the 1960s, József Lengyel. Born in 1896, Lengyel participated in the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic and left the country when the early socialist experiment ended in August 1919. After living in Vienna and Berlin, he took up residence in the Soviet Union where “fabricated accusations” led to his arrest in 1938. Following this, Lengyel spent almost two decades in labor camps and exile. Rehabilitated in 1955, Lengyel returned to Hungary where he began publishing works labeled as “camp literature.” Soon Lengyel became an embarrassing challenge for Hungarian socialist cultural policy. While he was introduced as an author fiercely loyal to Marxist ideology and communist values, in his texts, Lengyel was guilty of increasingly critical opinions concerning taboo topics of the era, such as violations during the

12 Jerome J. McGann, “What is critical editing?” in his The Textual Condition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1991), 58, 61–62. 13 Chartier argued that “it is necessary to bring together two perspectives that are often disjointed: on the one hand, the study of the way in which texts and the printed works that convey them organize the prescribed meaning; and on the other, the collection of actual readings tracked down in individual confessions or reconstructed on the level of communities of readers.” Chartier, “Texts, Printing, Readings,” 157–58.


period of Stalin’s personality cult. Although Lengyel’s position in the literary field differed significantly from those of other writers, his unique case highlights the climate and certain censorship techniques of the late 1960s.

Lengyel considered Confrontation, completed in 1966, to be the “keystone” of his oeuvre.14 The novel centers on a heated ideological debate between two communists: István Banicza and Endre Lassú. After returning from the camps in 1948, Lassú illegally escapes to Moscow in order to visit his old friend, István Banicza and arrange for his own repatriation to Hungary. After surviving the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, his friend, István Banicza, has become First Counsellor at the Embassy of the Hungarian’s People Republic in Moscow. Their meeting results in the confrontation of very different historical experiences. While the characters’ condemnation of the Nazi system comes as no surprise, Lassú’s sharp criticism of the Soviet camp system is quite unexpected. In spite of the fact that the characters’ dispute covers two decades of historical experiences, the novel’s time frame spans the events of a single day, for Lassú must quickly return to the place where he is forced to live. According to its émigré critics and later Hungarian reviewers from the glasnost period, the novel was not a masterpiece. It was criticized for its one-sided composition, for narrative inconsistencies and also for the way its language sometimes resembled political journalism.15 Those objections that evolved into enormous obstacles blocking Confrontation’s publication were not, however, aesthetic in nature, but rather ideological.

In spite of a “more realistic literary policy”—including “ideological tolerance” and the authors’ right to criticize—the official socialist publishing industry cloaked the novel in silence. After the novel was finished, Lengyel’s attempts to find publication proved unsuccessful. As a result of his tactical moves, however, a single chapter was published in the periodical Kortárs in December, 1968, and, what is more, the entire novel was printed “confidentially” with insignificant changes as a “manuscript” by the official press of Kossuth Publishing House in 1971. Although the few hundred copies of this “confidential edition”—or, as it was called in the West, “official samizdat”—were made available to the Party elite alone, a single copy reached the West. Thus the work could be published in “tamizdat” form in 1973, thanks to a British publisher in London, Peter Owen. The first edition to enjoy wide circulation in 14 Ottó Major, ed., Lengyel József noteszeiből 1955–1975 (Budapest: Magvető, 1989), 170. 15 See István Bosnyák, “Két táborrendszer epikus szembesítése,” Híd 52, no. 11 (1988): 2239–41.; George Schöpflin, “’Confrontation’ in Budapest: József Lengyel’s Affair with the Hungarian Publisher and Others,” Index on Censorship 2, no. 2 (1972): 65–70.

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Hungary appeared long after the author’s death in 1975, during glasnost in 1988.16

In the course of Confrontation’s publishing history, a wide repertoire of censorship techniques were deployed, either to prevent the novel from reaching its audience, or—in the case of commentaries framing the publications—to preempt subversive meanings. The second and third part of this analysis will discuss the novel’s two Hungarian publications as compromise formations resulting from the form-giving publication process and then map the readings they presented. This study aims to integrate into its analysis those readings as well which were only parts of Confrontation’s publishing “prehistory.” After briefly discussing the struggle for “tamizdat” publication, the fourth part will analyze the paratextual framework of the Western edition. As a by-product of this investigation, Confrontation’s fate will add greater nuance to how the “openness” and “ideological tolerance” of Hungarian literary life at this time is interpreted, while also shedding light on what topics were considered taboo by socialist literary publishing in the 1960s. Viewed through the double prism of the publishing conditions determining Hungarian and Western practices, the borders restricting an author’s capacity to act in the interest of publication become far sharper.

The “Hungarian Solzhenitsyn” and Literary Policy

The Western reception of his works drew attention to Lengyel’s non-conformist ars poetica. The background report by the RFE/RL, mentioned above, claimed that “there is an intensive drive in Hungarian literature to liquidate the gloomy heritage of the Stalinist-Rakosi-ist past and those who are carrying out this liquidation display great courage and determination in their work.”17 The report then mentioned Lengyel as an example, for “most of his stories are based on experiences of moral and physical ordeals suffered in the era of the personality cult.” A few pages later, the report touches upon the nonconformist ars poetica of Lengyel and others—including Ferenc Juhász, Ferenc Sánta or Miklós Mészöly—claiming that they “gave primacy to higher ethical values over the mere support of socialism or, at least, its Communist form.”18

16 József Lengyel, Szembesítés (Budapest: Magvető, 1988). 17 The Literary Scene in Hungary (January–July 1966), September 9, 1966, HU OSA 300-8-3-3602; Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute: Publications Department: Background Reports; Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest. 18 Ibid.


An even earlier background report introduced Lengyel as an author who, “with the publication of his works dealing with Soviet concentration camps, […] became the Solzhenitsyn of Hungarian literary life.” 19 Drawing a parallel between Solzhenitsyn and Lengyel seems natural, since the former’s novel, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in Hungary only one month after Lengyel’s own camp narrative From Beginning to End, in early 1963.20 Among other factors, the new realist prose language and the logocentric role of truth also connects the two authors. As Ann Komaromi concludes, “the neorealist literature of internationally recognized dissident authors like Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Maksimov offered a response to Soviet truth by dissident truth, expressed through the same type of supposedly transparent realist prose,” and therefore did not break with socialist realist aesthetics.21 While differences naturally exist in the prose language of Solzhenitsyn and Lengyel, the most important works in Lengyel’s oeuvre—similar to those in Solzhenitsyn’s—also did not differ significantly in style from the official literary norm.

What is more, Lengyel’s short story, “The Charmer” (also translated as “The Spell”) even became an “exemplary piece of socialist realist literature.”22 It was the most important piece of the story cycle for which Lengyel received Hungary’s distinguished Kossuth Prize in 1963. In this short story, set in a Siberian kolkhoz, András, a taciturn stranger, to whom “a great injustice had been done,” signs on as a charcoal burner and begins living with a fellow worker named Mishka in a shelter far

19 The Hungarian “Solzhenitsyn” Speaks Up, March 26, 1963, HU OSA 300-8-3-3530; Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute, Publications Department, Background Reports; Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest. 20 József Lengyel, “Elejétől végig,” Új Írás 3, no. 1 (1963): 37–71.; Alekszandr Szolzsenyicin, “Ivan Gyenyiszovics egy napja,” trans. László Wessely, Nagyvilág 8, No. 2 (1963): 163–229. The official publication of Solzhenitsyn’s work in the Soviet Union seriously influenced the chief editor, Lajos Illés’s decision to risk publishing From Beginning to End in the periodical Új Írás. See Lajos Illés, “Lengyel József a törvénysértő perekről és a kényszermunka-táborokról,” in Lajos Illés, Az Új Írás hőskora (Budapest: Hét Krajcár, 2002), 71–72.; Lajos Illés, “Lengyel József a lágerekről” in Lajos Illés, Az író magántörténelme (Budapest: Hét Krajcár, 2008), 36. 21 Ann Komaromi, “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 607. 22 Ernő Gondos, “Az Igéző ciklusról,” Kortárs 12, no. 12 (1968): 1947. The story in question is József Lengyel, Igéző (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1961). In spite of the fact that the Hungarian title Igéző was translated into English by Ilona Duczynska as “The Spell” (in From Beginning to End, 1966), I will use the translation “The Charmer” in order to retain a meaning that instead refers to a person.

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away from the village. As the two men become friends, learn how to cooperate on hard physical work, and start to share with each other, András’s solitude and sullenness dissolve. One day, however, Yevsei, the gamekeeper visits them with his hunting dog, Najda, whom he treats as his sole property and of whom he expects utter obedience. But when Najda realizes that Yevsei is planning to kill her, he loses the dog’s trust. Najda runs to András, who consequently falls under suspicion in the village as a “charmer,” or one who can communicate with animals, and therefore also cast the evil eye. As Yevsei kills the dog, now out of revenge, Najda’s drama brings to the surface the differences between Yevsei and András, cementing the latter’s humanism. Critics of Lengyel underlined the socialist character of the micro-society András created with his fellow worker, Mishka and highlighted that “the true man, the Communist—in spite of the injustice done to him—builds and creates even in the most difficult situation.”23 Thus, the whole collection—bearing the title of The Charmer—was interpreted as representing the victory of socialist humanism in spite of the inhumane circumstances of the Stalinist era. By expressing a program of “socialist humanism” The Charmer could therefore fulfill a socially educational role.24

On the other hand, Lengyel’s attempt to oppose the regime from a leftist, but humanist standpoint was combined with a “relentless search for the truth.”25 According to Ilona Margittay, the writer’s common-law wife, Lengyel considered his sole task to be that of disclosing the truth.26 “The author is allowed to write only the truth,” in a way that is “to be not only a half-truth but the entire truth,” writes Lengyel.27 Herein lie the origins of his authorial strategies, ones completely stripped of any concern for the norms determining the Hungarian literary field, a landscape that changed with the political atmosphere of the time. As Lengyel put it, he “was creating works for a still non-existent Party line.”28 Publication of “camp literature” depended on changing political situations in both Hungary and in the Soviet Union, including Khrushchev’s “thaw” and, after 1964, Brezhnev’s “stagnation.”

23 J. Kelemen, “Igéző: Lengyel József elbeszélései,” Élet és Irodalom, February 3, 1962, 7. 24 From the late 1960s The Charmer was optional reading in public education. See Géza Vasy, “Hol zsarnokság van”: Az ötvenes évek és a magyar irodalom (Budapest: Mundus, 2005), 224. 25 This term was used three times in the short preface written by Ottó Major, who published Lengyel’s diaries. (Major, Lengyel József, 5–14). 26 Margittay Ilona-interjú. Prepared by Erzsébet Havril on 1990, National Széchényi Library, 1956 Institute and Oral History Archive, Budapest, no. 245, 23. 27 Major, Lengyel József, 52. 28 Ibid., 171.


While also taking Soviet political interests into consideration, Hungarian socialist cultural policy paid attention to the production of discourses on “camp literature” by controlling, selecting, organizing and redistributing that literature. While this discursive machinery was operating, processes of exclusion were evident in every form: in prohibition, in division and rejection, and in the will to truth.29 In the reception of “camp literature” and in the general public discourse surrounding Soviet labor camps certain statements were reproduced so often as to become the official “truth.”

The “special camps,” as Pál Kardos, a literary historian, described them, came into being “in spite of the system”: “Young socialism could not overnight do away with the old, human failings which were bred on the soil of a society built for thousands of years on private property.”30 In one of his secret reports, the journalist András Sándor, who from 1965 informed on Hungarian literary life under the pseudonym “Sárdi” for state security, equated Nazi concentrations camps with the Nazi system itself, describing them as “the bites of a beast before its death.”31 At the same time, he declared that Soviet labor camps were separate from the communist system and actually “painful, but ephemeral rashes and early distortions of something new coming into being.” 32 Any other interpretation was to be excluded from public discourse. Lajos Galambos, a young prose writer, published an article entitled “I Protest” against “the tasteless hysteria developed around ‘camp literature’” in an attempt to distinguish the considered and competent from the so-called scandalous, and thus “mad” speech.33 This tendency was in harmony with the aims of official cultural policy: according to a report by Gyula Tóth, section head of the Main Publishing Directorate, the “subsequent

29 Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse”, trans. Ian McLeod, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 48–78. 30 Pál Kardos, “Egy téma – két módszer: Lengyel József és Szolzsenyicin művei,” Alföld 14, no. 4 (1963): 79. See also Pál Kardos, One Theme – Two Methods, Hungarian Press Summary, April, 1963, HU OSA 300-40-5 Box 110 [József Lengyel]; Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute (Fond 300), Hungarian Unit (Subfond 40), Biographical Files (Series 5); Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest. 31 Tamás Szőnyei, Titkos írás. Állambiztonsági szolgálat és irodalmi élet, 1956–1990, I. (Budapest: Noran, 2012), 110–11. 32 “Sárdi”: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára (ÁBTL) M-35897, 73. See other examples: A magyar irodalom története, VI., ed. István Sőtér (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1966), 811.; Gondos, “Az Igéző ciklusról”, 1952. 33 Lajos Galambos, “Protestálok”, Kortárs 7, no. 3 (1963): 370.

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‘exposure’ [of camp practices] currently in fashion is not considered to be the task of literature.”34

In accordance with this official statement, state organs endeavored to downplay the phenomenon of “camp literature.” In 1965, the Marxist philosopher György Lukács published an article in Kritika, in which he viewed Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich as “the literary awakening of socialist present time,” thereby defining the central problem of socialist realism in the criticism of the Stalinist era.35 Lukács’s article was answered by Társadalmi Szemle, the Party’s ideological periodical which condemned all those “who say that the central question and almost exclusive subject of literature is the criticism of the personality cult.”36

In spite of the control enacted upon public discourse, comparisons between Nazi and Soviet camps had already been in the air for some time. In the beginning of 1963, Lajos Galambos bitterly complained that among readers of Solzhenitsyn’s work “unmistakable hints are dropped about an equals sign between fascist and Soviet camps.”37 As György Schöpflin pointed out, “the logic of Lengyel’s oeuvre appeared to lead him steadily towards confronting the views of those who had suffered in German concentration camps and those, like the author himself, who had suffered under Stalin.”38 This logic led to Confrontation. In March 1964, when the novel’s rough outline first manifested itself, Lengyel wrote in his notebook that he was writing a “Comparison between Mauthausen and a Soviet camp. The latter is better, but the slogans under which the prisoners are kept want to seem socialist—that’s why they are more ignominious.”39

In contrast to Lengyel’s earlier works, Confrontation was seen as a more embarrassing matter for state publishing policies. Due to the fact that the novel’s debate around the Nazi and Soviet camps is dialogical in nature, its conclusion concerning the different historical experiences cannot be considered unambiguous. This was precisely the problem: Dezső Tóth, a literary historian working in the Cultural Department of the Central Committee, condemned the author, who in his previous writings “said yes or no as one person, in this new novel he divided yes

34 Gyula Tóth, “Az élő magyar szépirodalom helyzete és fejlődésének néhány vonása az utóbbi években” in Írók pórázon. A Kiadói Főigazgatóság irataiból, 1961–1970, ed. Gyula Tóth (Budapest: MTA Irodalomtudományi Intézet), 262. 35 György Lukács, “Mai szocialista realizmus,” Kritika 3, no. 3 (1965): 28–38. 36 “A Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt néhány időszerű ideológiai feladata. A Központi Bizottság irányelvei,” Társadalmi Szemle 20, no. 4 (1965): 35. 37 Galambos, “Protestálok,” 370. 38 Schöpflin, “‘Confrontation’ in Budapest,” 65. 39 Major, Lengyel József, 140.


and no in two [sic!], and set them against each other.”40 In his 1969 report entitled “Manifestations of Opposition Activity (Ideological Diversion) in Our Present Literary Life,” “Sárdi” blamed those works—including Confrontation—that expressed a thesis in which “all power means the negation of the moral,” i.e., that “power is immoral.” In “Sárdi’s” opinion Lengyel is “dangerously drawing away from his primary and proper standpoint.”41 In his notes from March 11, 1971, Lengyel ironically commented upon the so-called 3-T system of differentiating cultural policy: “I am a supported, tolerated, and prohibited author in one person. Strongly supported, even more strongly prohibited and mainly indigestibly tolerated.”42

Lengyel continued hoping for the emergence of a political Party line that would accept publication of Confrontation and therefore tried to do everything “in order to make non-publication troublesome, and finally impossible.”43 Lengyel endeavored to place official cultural policy under pressure, the most important result of which was a debate organized in the Hungarian Writers’ Union on March 28, 1969. At this debate participants discussed the question of whether or not the novel could be published. While this event most likely followed a carefully choreographed plan, a number of those present advocated for the novel’s publication. These were, among others, fellow workers at the Institute of Philosophy and Mrs. János Mathejka, a close friend of Lengyel’s who regarded the novel as positive and true.44

Meanwhile, Lengyel tried his best to attain an imprimatur for his novel in the editorials of literary journals and two publishing houses. In May, 1966, the manuscript reached Szépirodalmi Publishers as well as the periodical, Új Írás. 45 Gyula Baranyi, the chief editor of the journal forwarded the manuscript to Béla Köpeczi, head of the Cultural Department of the Central Committee, who felt that Confrontation “criticizes the personality cult in the Soviet Union in a primarily distorting way and with much less credence than in [Lengyel’s] previous works.”46 In 1967 the manuscript reached Lajos Mesterházi, editor of

40 Lengyel József kéziratos regényének vitája, “Sárdi”: ÁBTL M-35897/1, 28. See also Szőnyei, Titkos írás I., 269-271. 41 “Sárdi”: ÁBTL M-35897/1, 92. 42 Major, Lengyel József, 356. 43 Ibid., 175. 44 Lengyel József kéziratos regényének vitája, 26–29. 45 Major, Lengyel József, 175. 46 “Köpeczi Béla tájékoztatója az Írószövetség választmányi üléséről (1966, November 3),” MOL M-KS 288. f. 35/1966/3. in Zárt, bizalmas, számozott II., Irodalom-, sajtó- és

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Látóhatár, who—similarly to Baranyi—did not want to risk making an independent decision concerning the novel’s fate.47 In December Lengyel took the manuscript to György Kardos, director of Magvető Publishing House.48 Two weeks later Lengyel received a rejection letter from Endre Illés, director of Szépirodalmi Publishers, justifying his decision not to publish Lengyel’s novel in the following way:

I consider the core of the novel—to be more precise, the equals sign drawn between Soviet punitive camps and Hitler’s death-camps—unhistorical and in opposition to reality. […] This equals sign endangers the publication of the novel, stands in its way. For this concerns not only about an episode, nor a fraction of dialogues, but the axis of the novel, the electric spark igniting the debates. I have brought this danger—the sneaking, quickly spreading charge of being anti-Soviet—to your attention. It is not a danger to underestimate. 49

In the context of Illés’s words, every other argument—for example, that the novel’s characters can easily be identified with real historical figures—seems merely a pretext. From this discussion it is clear that the “equals sign” drawn by this novel—especially when combined with Lengyel’s ambiguous position—endangered the official interpretation which declared that the Nazi and the Soviet system were so different by nature that any comparison would be “in opposition to reality.” The acceptable way to publish the novel—as many official actors mentioned—would have been to rewrite its critical core. Lengyel, the old Communist, however, was essentially unbending on this question.50 The conflict was to be resolved in quite another way.

Configurations of Fidelity: Fiction and Biography

In the meantime, the last chapter of Confrontation was published in Kortárs thanks to István Simon, the periodical’s chief editor.51 Simon, however,

tájékoztatáspolitika 1962–1979 (Dokumentumok), ed. Gergő Bendegúz Cseh et al. (Budapest: Osiris, 2004), 102. 47 Major, Lengyel József, 243. 48 Ibid., 299–300. 49 Illés Endre levele Lengyel Józsefnek Szembesítés című regénye elutasításáról, Magyar Tudományos Akadémia (MTA) Kézirattár [Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Archives of the Academy, Budapest], Ms 2409/51. 50 György Gömöri, “Könyvek, kéziratok, kérdőjelek: Hazai irodalmi körkép,” Irodalmi Újság, September 15, 1969, 4. 51 Major, Lengyel József, 300.


did not risk much with this publication. First of all, the published chapter did not contain the most critical remarks of the novel; additionally, the commentaries, which were published alongside the chapter, managed to align it with Lengyel’s earlier—and already canonized—works. What is more, in Kortárs the chapter was given the subtitle “Excerpt From a Work in Progress,” rendering the status of the already finished novel ambiguous. In 1965 Simon considered the novel unpublishable “for a long time,” and history did not prove him wrong: until its 1988 edition, this chapter was the only excerpt available to the public in Hungary.

Kortárs featured a lengthy collection of works about Lengyel. The last chapter52 of the novel was accompanied by a series of commentaries. A literary portrait of the author, written by Mária Juhász, introduced the chapter, which was followed by two articles: one by Zádor Tordai and another by Ernő Gondos. 53 By analyzing the commentaries of this publication—particularly the initial commentary prefiguring the reading of Lengyel’s work—it is possible to highlight the institutional mechanisms used to cultivate the meaning of Lengyel’s oeuvre, while simultaneously revealing what strategies allowed his critical works to be integrated into socialist publishing.54

Kortárs’s choice to publish the novel’s final and least politically sensitive chapter is closely connected to the work’s composition, for the the main characters confront each other early, in the first and third chapters.55 As a result, the confrontation of the two labor camp systems, “the problematic core,” can be easily localized and isolated. In the course of the debate organized in the Hungarian Writers’ Union, this core was subjected to a barrage of questions. As “Sárdi” reported, “Dezső Tóth did not criticize the entire novel, but the dialogue part,” and “nobody called the beautiful parts of the novel’s beginning and end into question.”56

The literary historian Mária Juhász’s article, “József Lengyel, the Charmer,” published in Kortárs alongside the excerpted chapter served to bolster Lengyel’s official authorial persona. The identification between the author and his classic character, András from “The Charmer,”

52 József Lengyel, “A Várt… Részlet egy készülő regényből,” Kortárs 12, no. 12 (1968): 1928–40. 53 Mária Juhász, “Lengyel József, az igéző,” Kortárs 12, no. 12 (1968): 1922–27; Zádor Tordai, “Szóvarázs,” Kortárs 12, no. 12 (1968): 1941–46; Gondos, “Az Igéző ciklusról”, 1946–53. 54 Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, “Kanon und Zensur,” in Kanon und Zensur (München: Fink, 1987), 7–27. 55 István Bosnyák, “Két táborrendszer epikus szembesítése,” 2241. 56 Lengyel József kéziratos regényének vitája, 28.

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associated certain elements of the author’s biography with the recognized values of his officially sanctioned works. Not surprisingly, Juhász’s article defined “The Charmer” as the core of Lengyel’s oeuvre. “The Charmer” was seen as a work in which “the author’s socialist humanism was expressed most clearly.”57 That brand of socialist humanism was often characterized as “human in the face of inhumanity,” expressed as a moral thesis that allowed his heroes to preserve their humanity and their loyalty to Communist ideology even in the inhuman circumstances of Stalinist labor camps. This interpretation was confirmed by the Marxist critic Ernő Gondos, whose article connected Lengyel’s work to modern socialist realism, underlining that—in opposition to bourgeois literature—it is not based on the model of the isolated individual, but on that of social togetherness.

“People fall out of society only physically—not mentally,” one interpreter declared at the time. “No injury could force their natures to turn against socialism.”58 Juhász’s article—as its subtitle “Fidelity and Reason” (“Hűség és értelem”) pointed out—established identifying the author with his most recognized short story as the most important element in Lengyel’s reception. The short story is a “drama of betrayed fidelity” whose central characters, András and Najda are symbols of fidelity and reason. The configuration of fidelity as a constructive element transformed the author’s “active humanity” into a parable of loyalty to socialist values, and operated as a prefigurative code in the reception of Lengyel’s works.

This configuration extracted elements from the author’s biography that could be connected to fidelity as well. Juhász declared that:

Lengyel has been loyal to the Marxist worldview and to the international socialist movement for a half-century. […] The Archimedes point of his human and literary attitude henceforward remained in Communist alignment. His fifteen years of being vilified did not develop into the beginning of an ideological and political about-face; instead it was his loyalty and insistence upon the truth that invested him with the right to express the cruelest and most painful truths.59

This configuration of fidelity was echoed in a short quotation, set in

bold type and printed right after the text of the chapter. The quotation

57 Kelemen, “Igéző: Lengyel József elbeszélései,” 7. 58 László Erdős, “Még egyszer az Igézőről,” Élet és Irodalom, February 10, 1962, 7. 59 Juhász, “Lengyel József,” 1924-1925.


came from the sixth volume of the Marxist history of Hungarian literature published by the Institute of Literary History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and post-facto confirmed the lack of ambiguity in Lengyel’s oeuvre, arguing that the author’s Communist alignment cannot be separated from his humanist standpoint.

From a forgotten writer, arousing interest only from an historical literary perspective, Lengyel became a vivid, broadly influential author, thanks to the truth and passion of his humanism. Many people believe that this humanism is independent of his Communist alignment: a distinct, artistic quality that is separated from it, even opposed to it. There is not, however, any kind of ambiguity in his human and artistic behavior. He started as a revolutionary, and completed a career filled with twists, forcing him to endure many tests; he always held his ground, not turning a blind eye, and never becoming unbalanced in his worldview. In his career and oeuvre, his moral fortitude is reflected.60

This strategy worked to conceal any emerging details, fault lines, or

uncomfortable facts that may have altered this image of his Communist alignment, or at the very least, revealed his true attitude toward the existing form of socialism. As a sympathizer of Imre Nagy in 1956, Lengyel was deeply shaken when the Hungarian Armed Forces crossed the Czechoslovakian border in 1968.61 He wrote in his private diary: “I no longer feel myself to be a member of the Party.” Following the 1968 intervention, he wrote a poem titled No, expressing utter refusal, and his notebook also mentions the Czech, Jan Palach, and the Hungarian, Sándor Bauer, two young men who committed suicide by self-immolation as a form of political protest. 62 In 1971, he quit the Hungarian section of PEN to demonstrate his solidarity with Solzhenitsyn.63 A few years later, in reference to political developments after Khrushchev, he pessimistically confessed to seeing “neither an evolutionary nor a revolutionary way out.”64 The portrait of the author outlined in Lengyel’s secret diary therefore differed significantly from the official one designed for publication, for it was not compatible with the latter’s core element, that of fidelity.

60 A magyar irodalom története, VI., ed. István Sőtér (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1966), 804. 61 Margittay Ilona-interjú, 38. 62 Major, Lengyel József, 290–291, 322, 348, 309–310. 63 Ibid., 353. 64 Ibid., 584.

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In the case of Lengyel, the official authorial construction—in which the concept of fidelity was used to align the author with Communism—became the underlying condition for public speech. In reference to Émile Benveniste, Pierre Bourdieu drew attention to the connection between censorship and the Greek word skeptron, “a token passed to the orator who was about to speak, to mark the fact that his speech was authorized speech.”65 In Lengyel’s case these “prop commentaries” served as signs of power, marking—in a physical and ideological sense—the borders defining approved speech. In other words, they authorized the author’s work and declared that Lengyel’s right to speech was based on his Communist allegiance and his ideological safety—while simultaneously excluding those chapters which could endanger this interpretation. On the other hand, the “prop” can be identified with the Greek word canon in its original meaning of “measure” or “ruler.” Through this term—as analyzed by Jan Assmann—the concrete, sacred corpus and the abstract sanctified principle are both rendered visible in the form of a periodical publication. 66 The published chapter—concealing the institution of censorship—was a boundary separating Confrontation’s critical, yet canonizable aspects from its unsanctioned parts, which discussed taboo topics.

Nevertheless, the commentaries surrounding Lengyel’s work cannot be considered homogeneous materials. One of the articles published in the December issue of Kortárs was written by Zádor Tordai, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy. Some months beforehand—together with a group of Hungarian philosophers attending a symposium on “Marx and Revolution” in Korčula, Yugoslavia—Tordai had strongly protested against the invasion of Czechoslovakia.67 A few of Tordai’s colleagues, Vilmos Sós and György Márkus, later participated in the debate organized in the Hungarian Writers’ Union, arguing that Confrontation replies morally and aesthetically, if not theoretically, to the problems of the Stalinist era. Correspondingly, in his article published in Kortárs, Tordai felt Lengyel’s Confrontation had to fulfill his previous works’ underlying demand for answers, while also resolving questions left open by his cycle The Charmer.68

65 Pierre Bourdieu, “Censorship,” 91. See also Der kleine Pauly, Bd. 5, s. v. “Skeptron.” 66 See Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance and Political Imagination (New York: Cambridge UP, 2011), 97. 67 Leading Marxist Philosophers Protest against the Invasion of Czechoslovakia, 26 August 1968. HU OSA 300-8-3-10196; Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute: Publications Department: Background Reports; Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest 68 Tordai, “Szóvarázs,” 1945–46.


Tordai’s approach differed significantly from those found in the aforementioned articles. His text met the approval of Lengyel, who considered it tactically important for Tordai’s article to mention the title of the novel. 69 While the articles of Juhász or Gondos considered Lengyel’s work as an answer to the question of how humanity can be preserved in the face of inhuman conditions, Tordai demanded the continued search for answers to the great question of how Stalinism’s incomprehensible violations could have been committed in the first place. From this point of view, this commentary could prefigure an alternative reading. Under the “guidance” of this article the missing chapters of the “novel” could function as “blanks” which could serve to lead the reader’s imaginative activity closer to subversive meanings.70 Taking into consideration this set of articles it can be argued that—in spite of the dominance of those interpretations remaining loyal to the official reception of Lengyel’s works—this publication preserved the shadow of the contrastive readings surrounding the novel.

“Official Samizdat” Looking for a way to solve the prolonged issue of the novel’s publication, the head of the 3-T cultural policy, György Aczél, proposed to print the novel in a “confidential” edition. Lengyel immediately agreed to this decision.71 The necessary infrastructure for such a “confidential edition” had already been developed in Hungary. As of the early 1960s, problematic works, usually distributed only for trustworthy Party members and apparatchiks, were channeled into official and confidential circles and far away from socialist mass media. 72 For instance, the restricted series printed by Kossuth Publishing House released “in certain cases those aesthetic, belletristic or cultural political works written by Hungarian or foreign authors (Malraux, Solzhenitsyn […] etc.) which were not to be published in wide circulation.”73 Confrontation was printed by Kossuth Publishing House “as a manuscript for guidance,” but not

69 Major, Lengyel József, 299. 70 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 182–203. 71 Major, Lengyel József, 311. 72 For this see Zárt, bizalmas, számozott. Tájékoztatás és cenzúra 1956–1963, ed. Gergő Bendegúz Cseh, Melinda Kalmár and Edit Pór (Budapest: Osiris, 1999), 369–70. and Zárt, bizalmas, számozott II., ed. Cseh et al., 483–84. 73 A zárt és belső használatra szánt könyvek kiadása és forgalmazása, 1971. október 12. ülés (HU-MOL M-KS 288-41/167. ő. e.) [The National Archives of Hungary, Budapest].

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released on the book market. The majority of its approximately 160 copies went to members of the Party’s Central Committee.74

Founded in compromise, this “confidential edition,” however, did not mean Kossuth Publishing House, entrusted with the publication, cancelled plans to have the novel rewritten. By countersigning the contract, the officials responsible for publication endeavored to gain time and thereby convince Lengyel to rework certain parts of his novel. The strategy of having representatives of increasingly higher authority—such as Ferenc Rátkai, a subdepartment head of the Central Committee, or even György Aczél, the secretary of the Central Committee responsible for cultural life—place the author under pressure was evident throughout the entire preparatory process for printing the limited edition. In the end, the author executed those changes he found acceptable, first on the manuscript, then on the first and later the final proof.75

Addressed to Andor Berei, company director of Kossuth Publishing House, a note made by the negotiator, József Nyírő, shows which parts of the novel were viewed as the most problematic.76 Official suggestions made by Nyírő to modify the text can be classified into three categories. Firstly, Lengyel framed his characters’ speech with commentary such as the short phrase “[I am only joking]” after the question of “which dictator learned the most from the other—was it Adolf learning from Iosif, or the other way around?” 77 Secondly, Lengyel changed the modality of the statement “must the flaw have been there even in Lenin’s conception” from declarative sentence to a question.78 The third category of adjustments were those Lengyel refused to make. No modification was made concerning the “equals sign” mentioned by Lassú, as exhibited in sentences such as: “I hope you do not wish to equate Hitler’s fascism with what, unhappily, has taken place here?”79 The sentences, “Power is a cancer… It devours the living cells of a man’s humanity,” and, “our

74 Margittay Ilona-interjú, 122. 75 Lengyel József levele Rátkai Ferencnek, September 6, 1971, MTA Kézirattár Ms 6307/5. 76 Nyírő József feljegyzés másolata Berei Andornak Lengyel Józseffel való beszélgetéséről, Politikatörténeti és Szakszervezeti Levéltár (PIL) [The Archives of Political History and of Trade Unions, Budapest] Fond 897. (Documents of Jánosné Mathejka), Record keeper 63, 3. 77 József Lengyel, Confrontation, trans. Anna Novotny [Ilona Duczynska] (London: Peter Owen, 1973), 39. 78 József Lengyel, Szembesítés [hasábkorrektúra – ‘final proof’], Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum Kézirattár [Petőfi Literary Museum, The Manuscript Archive] V. 3499, 7; Cf. Lengyel, Confrontation, 21. 79 Lengyel, Confrontation, 35.


‘father and teacher’ has been exterminating the friends of socialism in the name of socialism,” also remained.80

Lengyel’s modifications were not enough to satisfy either the publishing house, or its superiors. Realizing that the author would not adequately censor himself, Ferenc Rátkai, in his capacity as intercessor between the publishing house and the author, made a final attempt to exact changes behind Lengyel’s back. Rátkai called upon Mrs. János Mathejka, Lengyel’s old friend, to execute changes in Confrontation’s final proof. This plan came to Lengyel’s attention and he wrote a heated letter to Rátkai:

I will not execute any kind of further changes on the novel. I do not enter into any kind of negotiations. Any objection, political or other disagreement that Kossuth Publishing House considers necessary to claim must be written in the preface or afterword; I will have no say in this matter, and I am unwilling to read it before publication.81

Lengyel made an effort to set limits while also distinguishing between

the roles of the different parties participating in the publishing process. This strategy can be interpreted as a bargaining process. Renouncing control over the “explicit” and “discursive” codes influencing a novel’s meaning is the price the author must pay for exclusive jurisdiction over his own novel’s textual body. Lengyel, however, had almost nothing to lose in this case. He could easily argue that a “confidential edition” does not warrant making the necessary textual changes, while, as he stated, a larger print run and circulation could have convinced him to be more accommodating to the publishing house’s expectations. As a result of this bargaining process, the “confidential edition” respected clear boundaries between authorial control and the publishers’ intentions, while the shift in censorship techniques—that is, the transition from textual intervention to control by commentary—became evident.

Following these developments, the novel was published in the “confidential edition” which included a preface.82 The preface made sure to mention the two important elements of Lengyel’s authorial construction, declaring that Lengyel “remained loyal to his Communist conviction to the end,” and emphasizing Lengyel’s humanism which included “the necessity of standing one’s ground and taking a positive

80 Ibid., 75 and 50. 81 Lengyel József levele Rátkai Ferencnek, September 6, 1971, MTA Kézirattár Ms 6307/5. 82 József Lengyel, Szembesítés ([Budapest]: Kossuth, [1971]), 3–4.

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attitude no matter the circumstances.” The second half of the preface directed the reader’s attention to the novel’s controversial nature and its consequences, stating that Confrontation “contains incidents that fail to disclose the great historical connections, absolutizes the occasional, generalizes based on mere detail.” The preface provided the limited edition with two arguments. On the one hand, “if the novel was published openly, readers would draw the wrong conclusion,” and on the other hand, the work “could be used, against the author’s intentions, by enemies of socialism at home and abroad in opposition to the interest of the Communist movement.” Thus, the preface indirectly admitted that the novel included ideologically sensitive sections which could not have been counterbalanced by commentaries. The only remaining censorial technique left was to limit access to the novel. The limited access enabled publication of the novel’s critical parts as well.

In 1971, Lengyel stated that “the game of chess lasting six years had ended in a draw.”83 In spite of the fact that Confrontation was printed, he added, the appearance of this edition “came closer to resembling pre-Gutenberg times and could therefore hardly be considered a book.” Why did Hungarian cultural policy enable publication of this controversial novel when it could have merely prolonged its silence? In spite of the debates that sometimes heated their relationship, Aczél was on relatively good terms with Lengyel and attempted to bring about a compromise that would resolve this long-lasting conflict, which was causing an ever-bigger stir. Aczél did so for two reasons: first of all, the novel had become known. By March, 1969, approximately one hundred people had read it, and about thirty copies were circulating in uncensored, samizdat form around the country.84 Consequently, a kind of oppositional aura arose around the novel. The status of the official edition, however, could ruin this aura and therefore halt the novel’s circulation in typewritten form.85 As Lengyel concluded, competent authorities could take the wind out of the sails of illegal distribution, and thereby counterbalance the spread of samizdat successes in other socialist countries.86

Thus it is no coincidence that the “confidential edition” was at times called both “state-licensed” and “official” samizdat.87 This term not only

83 Major, Lengyel József, 367. 84 Ibid., 406; Margittay Ilona-interjú. Készítette Havril Erzsébet 1990-ben, 1956-os Intézet Oral History Archívuma, 245. sz., 122. 85 Zárt, bizalmas, számozott, Cseh et al., 369–370. 86 Major, Lengyel József, 406. 87 Gabriel Ronay, “A Limited Licence to Protest in Hungary,” The Times, June 20, 1972; Censorship and Political Communication in Eastern Europe. A Collection of Documents, ed. George Schöplin (New York: Pinter, 1983), 146.


referred to the publication’s official source, but also to those characteristics which differentiated this work from those circulating in the mainstream socialist book industry: its limited copies and circulation as well as its lack of bibliographical data including copyright, price, the publisher’s name, place and date of publication. Until 1988, on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, only a very limited group of readers could gain access to this novel. In fact, the Western scholar, Iván Sanders, complained of having to translate back into Hungarian fragments of the novel’s English edition published in 1973 in order to write his Hungarian-language review.88

Beyond the Iron Curtain

The second battle line in the struggle to publish the novel extended between East and West. Hungarian officials tried to stop Confrontation from either legally or illegally entering the West, a goal pursued through the Bureau for the Protection of the Author’s Rights. The Bureau had monopoly rights in representing the foreign publication of authors: without the Bureau’s mediation, no Hungarian author could sell rights, and it was illegal to send any manuscript abroad without the Bureau’s permission.89 Even if Lengyel pondered withdrawing the Bureau’s right to representation, he finally concluded that the best decision in this case would be to remain “passively unbending.”90 The Bureau was in contact with Lengyel’s English publisher, Peter Owen, and clearly aimed to prevent the novel’s English publication, but it changed the tenor of its arguments as information leaked out to the West. In 1972, Owen claimed to have approached the Bureau several times during the previous three years. Each time he was invariably informed that they knew of no completed book.91 This argument was easily supported by the subtitle found in the Kortárs publication, “Excerpt from a Work in Progress.” Once news about the limited edition reached the West, however, the Bureau changed this argument, saying that Lengyel himself did not wish to publish his novel, an argument that directly contradicted the author’s original intentions.92

88 Iván Sanders, “Egy tiltott könyv,” Új Látóhatár 25, no. 3/4 (August 1974): 316. 89 Cf. József Lengyel, Noteszek, November 6, 1971, MTA Kézirattár Ms 5535/30. 90 Major, Lengyel József, 403; Lengyel József, Noteszek, December 25, 1972, MTA Kézirattár Ms 5535/31. 91 The Times Literary Supplement, May 5, 1972, 521. 92 Major, Lengyel József, 403; Lengyel József, Noteszek, September 20, 1972, MTA Kézirattár Ms 5535/31.

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When the “confidential edition” reached the West and was reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement, a whole new chapter in the history of Confrontation opened.93 On the one hand, no longer would it be possible to keep mum over the existence of the novel. On the other hand, Owen could argue that—since the “confidential edition” did not contain any copyright clause—the novel was technically publishable and translatable by anyone. 94 To save the novel from falling into the clutches of unauthorized publishers or being circulated as a pirate edition, Owen promised to publish the novel and to sell its copyright at the Frankfurt Book Fair.95 Owen’s declaration caused an immediate reaction: György Kardos, director of Magvető Publishing House in socialist Hungary, accused Owen of piracy for neither possessing a contract with the writer nor the right to offer the work to other publishers. In response to these accusations, Owen argued that “Lengyel is not a free agent and is presumably obliged to accede to the demands made on him by the authorities.”96 Kardos’s efforts succeeded only in postponing the novel’s English publication.97

On October 18, 1973, Confrontation was finally published in London by Owen, “at risk of legal proceedings by the Hungarians.”98 In the case of the English publication, the role of commentary naturally placed the novel in a slightly different context from the socialist one. First of all, it underscored the fact that the novel had been “long-suppressed” and “officially banned in Hungary,” while also being “bitterly critical of the repressive and bureaucratic aspects of communism.” (This was supported by Keith Cunningham’s very simple, yet effective jacket design: the title in red was printed above a large black “X” covering a white field, which could be interpreted alternately as representing the crossroads traversed by the novel’s main figures, or as a sign of restriction.) Secondly, the paratextual codes for this edition did not emphasize the author’s communist allegiance as justification for his critical opinion and his right to public speech, as it did within Hungary. But the author’s communist conviction did make “his testimony the more valuable,” according to the book jacket. The Western edition continued to use the basic element of Lengyel’s socialist authorial construction, yet did so while placing it into the context of Cold War logic.

93 “Truth in Limited Editions,” The Times Literary Supplement, April 28, 1972, 465. 94 Major, Lengyel József, 401-402, 406. 95 “Hungarian Novel,” The Bookseller, September 30, 1972, 1893–96. 96 “Confrontation,” The Bookseller, November 18, 1972, 2442–44. 97 Major, Lengyel József, 401–402, 412–13. 98 “Novel Banned by Hungarians,” Nottingham Evening Post, December 27, 1973.


József Lengyel’s lengthy struggle for publication sheds light on the narrow borders drawn between Hungary’s system of socialist publication and Western opportunities. It is true that by the end of his life, Lengyel had nothing to lose and could therefore actively push to have his novel published in Hungary. At the same time, he played a fairly passive role in furthering his novel’s English—tamizdat—publication. Loath to place his work directly in the “other side’s hands” during an era of Cold War politics, Lengyel was averse to breaking the legal framework provided by his country’s socialist system even as he was unsatisfied with Confrontation’s circulation within Hungary. The publication delay caused by Aczél’s cultural policy had broad consequences for Lengyel’s career. Stalling his novel’s publication kept Lengyel from beginning a new novel, while also meaning that it could not play a part in the intellectual discussion surrounding the period of reform begun in 1968.99 At the same time, The Gulag Archipelago’s 1973 publication in Paris served to diminish any sensation Confrontation could have caused when it was published later that same year.

Conclusions A work that in many ways contradicted the official discourse surrounding “camp literature,” Confrontation was published only after a lengthy process of negotiation. In spite of the fact that numerous actors urged the novel’s immediate publication, the opinion of cultural policymakers and representatives demanded that the conflict be resolved only by rewriting the novel’s critical parts. After attempts aiming to bring about textual intervention failed, other censorship techniques came to the forefront. Two Hungarian publications attempted to resolve the conflict through two different combinations of censorship techniques, each cementing its status as compromise formations.

When published as an excerpt in Kortárs, the conflicts were resolved by separating the novel’s publishable and unsanctioned sections, then using commentaries to “prop up” the text and influence interpretation. The virtual space of these commentaries reflected the broader social sphere of the publishing process, which included various, often conflicting interests: the author’s goal of publishing his novel, the editor’s, the literary historian’s, the critic’s aim to fix its meaning—or even the aim of the author’s ally Zádor Tordai, a philosopher attempting to smuggle an alternative reading past official interpretations. The Kortárs publication subtly reveals the contrastive readings that surrounded this

99 Major, Lengyel József, 466; Sándor Révész, Aczél és korunk (Budapest: Sík, 1997), 345.

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novel far before its actual publication. Because Confrontation’s well-documented history attracted the attention of many actors from the literary scene, these contrastive readings can be compared to the paratextual framework of its printed form. Although the negotiation process included the novel’s numerous “positive” readings—particularly apparent in the debate organized by the Hungarian Writers’ Union—the majority of paratexts accompanying the printed form only repeated the main elements in Lengyel’s official reception excluding the alternative readings from the work’s public. Tordai’s article was naturally an exception to this rule.

In general, through the prism of Chartier’s “inverse” approach, the practice of the “prop commentaries” may be regarded as playing a double role. On the one hand, as a technique it separates adequate readings from inadequate; on the other hand, it also affirms these adequate readings by transforming them into prefigurative codes. In this sense commentary is not only a censorship technique applied to cultivate meaning, but also a “vehicle” bearing traces of the form-giving process by preserving certain readings. These applications demand the inclusion of commentary in any investigation of publishing processes in Eastern bloc countries.

In reference to Confrontation’s second printed form (that of “official samizdat”), the conflict was conversely resolved by printing the novel in full, but limiting access. Although this publication was also “propped up” by a preface, the “confidential edition” exposed the limits of commentary’s ability to influence, since it admitted that the novel could lead the readers to the wrong conclusion despite its preface. Other than these censorship techniques, the negotiation process leading up to the “confidential edition” also included pressure exerted on the author to censor himself. In this regard the embodiment of censorship can be interpreted as a combination of various censorship techniques (limiting access, adding paratexts, textual intervention), which constantly evolves during the publishing process. From another perspective, the same could also be observed in the case of the “tamizdat” edition: the Bureau for the Protection of the Author’s Rights attempted to prevent the novel’s widespread publication by means of varying practices (keeping the novel secret, threats, pressure on the author etc.).

According to this interpretation, censorship also falls within the jurisdiction of the form-giving process; its crystallized form is the effect of a negotiation process that can be traced through personal and official records. Censorship, therefore, often seems to be a publishing strategy shaped in accordance with social exchange, a process frequently requiring a combination of censorship techniques. Whatever the case may be, the history of Confrontation—the “confrontation” not only of different


historical experiences in fictional space, but also of different interests, readings and censorship techniques in the operative space of publishing—calls for the research of censorship mechanisms to include the complex interplay of these factors—thereby allowing for a more dynamic and complex understanding of socialist publishing practices.

(Re)Defining a Literary Genre: How Italo Calvino’s Postmodern (Hyper)Novels became “Philosophical Allegories” in the USSR

Ilaria Sicari Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

In the Soviet era the institution of literary criticism occupied a prominent place within the complex state management of cultural production. Criticism recognized or denied the artistic value of all literary production, subjecting it to censure or ideological homologation. Thus, criticism itself was an active agent in the creation of the meaning of literary works, legitimizing through an exercise of power their aesthetic value and playing a determinant role in shaping their reception by the Soviet reader.1 The strategies used to intervene in defense of Soviet art were essentially of two kinds: first, disparaging or promoting authors; and, second, molding the content of the works according to the dictates of Socialist Realism. Both functions were exercised through reviews in the official press and critical introductions in the books edited by state publishers.2

1 Cf. Maria Zalambani, Censura, istituzioni e politica letteraria in URSS. 1964–1985 (Firenze: Firenze UP, 2009), 107‒108. 2 For a more detailed discussion on the topic, see: E. Dobrenko, I. Kalinin “Literaturnaia kritika i ideologicheskoe razmezhevanie epokhi ottepeli: 1953‒1970,” in E. Dobrenko, G. Tikhanova, eds., Istoriia russkoi literaturnoi kritiki (Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011), 417‒76.

(Re)Defining a Literary Genre 43

The Soviet Reception of Italo Calvino’s Postmodern Narratives as a Case Study To demonstrate how these domesticating strategies were implemented, we will examine the critical reception in the USSR of Italo Calvino’s postmodern works Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics, 1965); Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1969–73); Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities, 1972); and Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 1979) because together they represent an interesting case of ideological manipulation for many reasons. First, Calvino enjoyed some popularity in the land of the Soviets, largely due to his leftist political reputation. A partisan, anti-fascist and member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Calvino was the prototype of the foreign writer published in the Soviet Union. His loyalty to the ideals of communism and his solid Marxist training were consolidated over his years of collaboration with major press organs of the PCI (Rinascita, l’Unità), on whose pages he published his first short stories (1948–52). It is no coincidence that the short stories that appeared in these newspapers were the first to be translated and published in Russian. His good political reputation was consolidated by his participation in a conference organized by the Union of Soviet Writers and held in Moscow in 1951.3 The speech that Calvino gave on that occasion was published on the front page of Literaturnaia gazeta (15 November 1951) with the title “The Destinies of History are in the Hands of the Peoples” (Sud'by istorii v rukakh narodov) and consecrated him a “progressive writer” (progressivnyi pisatel'). In 1954, he was invited to the Second Congress of Soviet Writers as a member of the Italian delegation. Unfortunately, Calvino was unable to attend the meeting as the Italian delegation had been denied visas to enter the USSR.4 Notwithstanding this diplomatic incident, the invitation clearly demonstrates that Calvino had been widely credited in the USSR since the 1950s. As a consequence, his works were published with some continuity from 1948 to 1986. This allows us to reconstruct the microhistory of the reception of Calvino’s hyper-novels in the USSR with

3 From his stay in the USSR (October–November, 1951) Calvino drew inspiration for a series of articles published on the pages of the newspaper l’Unità (February–March, 1952) in the form of travel correspondence, earning him the Saint Vincent Prize (1952). The entire report was published under the title Taccuino di viaggio in Unione Sovietica (Travel diary of a journey in the Soviet Union), in Italo Calvino. Saggi 1945–1985 (Milano: Mondadori. I Meridiani, 1995). Despite the fact that the volume represented the Soviet Union in an extremely positive and idyllic light (which was often harshly criticized), it was not published in the USSR and is still unpublished in Russian. 4 “Pis'mo redaktora progressivnogo ital'ianskogo zhurnala Kontemporaneo Karlo Salinari,” in Vtoroi vsesoyuznyi s"ezd sovetskikh pisatelei. 15–26 dekabria 1954 goda. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel', 1956), 563.

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an ultimate aim of understanding the broader phenomenon of the recep-tion of Western postmodern literature in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.5

Calvino’s case represents an anomaly, because his Cosmicomics was among the first Western postmodern narratives to be published in the USSR (together with Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, which were widespread in Soviet times). It came out long before glasnost and perestroika opened the way for the publication of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Vladimir Nabokov, and Umberto Eco (1986–89). Nevertheless, as with the works of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon and Georges Perec (to name but a few), Calvino’s hyper-novels were published in Russia only with significant delay.6 Thus, his case allows us to systematize the study of the reception of Western postmodern works in (post)Soviet Russia. Furthermore, as noted by Barth, Calvino is a “true postmodernist.”7 As his hyper-novels summarize several of the trends of the Western postmodern canon (self-reflexivity, metanarrative, second-person narrative, hypertextuality, multiperspectivity, unreliability and so on), we can consider them as representative of the postmodern literary trend more broadly.

The Soviet Reception: Calvino-the-Realist and Calvino-the-Fabulist Thinking about Calvino’s literary production translated and published in Russia, it is possible to roughly distinguish two distinct periods:

1) The Soviet period (1948–85) ‒ characterized by the publication of Calvino’s neorealist works Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947 (Tropa

5 The concept of microhistory was proposed by Carlo Ginzburg, as the historical reconstruction of a small portion of events and phenomena, which allows detailed and historically circumstantial analysis of the past. Cf. Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory. Two or Three Things That I Know About It,” in Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive, (University of California Press, 2012), 193‒214. See also Carlo Ginzburg, “Witches and Shamans,” in Threads and Traces, 215‒27. 6 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) was published for first time in Russia in 1994, while Invisible Cities (1972) and The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969-73) were published for first time in Russian in 1997. To demonstrate that this chronological gap is a constant in Russian reception of the most significant works of Western postmodernism, suffice it to mention the publication of the Barth’s story colletion Lost in the Funhouse (1968) with 33 years of delay (Zabludivshis' v komnate smekha, 2001); that of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) with 40 years of delay (Raduga tiagoteniia, 2012), or of Perec’s hyper-novel Life, a User’s Manual (1978) with a delay of 31 years (Zhizn' sposob upotrebleniia, 2009). 7 John Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment,” in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction (London: The John Hopkins UP, 1984), 204.


pauch'ikh gnezd, 1977),8 and Ultimo viene il corvo, 1949 (Poslednim priletaet voron, 1959);9 his short novel with social content La nuvola di smog, 1958 (Oblako smoga, 1964);10 his allegorical novels belonging to the trilogy of I nostri antenati, Il visconte dimezzato, 1952 (Razdvoennyi vikont, 1984); Il barone rampante, 1957 (Baron na dereve, 1965); Il cavaliere inesistente, 1959 (Nesushchestvuyushchii rytsar', 1984);11 and his collection of Italian folktales Fiabe italiane12, 1956 (Ital'ianskie skazki, 1959)

2) The post-Soviet period (1994–2001) ‒ characterized by the publication of Calvino’s postmodern literary production, Il castello dei destini incrociati, 1969–73 (Zamok skreshchennykh sudeb, 1997; Zamok skrestivshikhsia sudeb, 2001);13 Le città invisibili, 1972 (Nezrimye goroda, 1997; Nevidimye goroda, 2001);14 Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, 1979 (Esli odnazhdy zimnei noch'yu putnik, 1994);15 Palomar, 1983 (Palomar, 1994).16

The only exception to this division is Cosmicomics, which, as mentioned above, was Calvino’s only postmodernist work published during the Soviet era (1968).17

Before analyzing the dynamics that influenced and made possible the Soviet edition of Cosmicomics, let us outline the historical framework of the reception of Calvino’s works in order to understand how his previous literary and political reputation affected (but also promoted) this publication.

8 Eng. trans. A. Colquhoun: The Path to the Net of Spiders, 1957; and M. McLaughlin: The Path to the Spider’s Nest, 1998. 9 The short stories of this volume were published in various Russian journals beginning in 1959. It has not been translated into English, but a selection of its short stories was included in the book Adam, One Afternoon and Other Stories, 1957 (trans. A. Colquhoun and P. Wright). 10 Eng: Smog, 1971 (trans. W. Weaver). 11 The trilogy Our Ancestors was translated into English by A. Colquhoun: The Cloven Viscount, 1962; The Baron in the Trees, 1959; The Nonexistent Knight, 1962. 12 Like A. N. Afanasyev, the Brothers Grimm and H. C. Andersen, Calvino also collected Italian folktales, often translating them into Italian from different dialects. However, although we cannot consider Italian Folktales as a work of his own invention, this philological and creative work earned him a kind of paternity over them. In English there are different editions of the work: Italian Fables, 1961 (trans. L. Brigante); Italian Folk Tales, 1975 (trans. S. Mulcahy); Italian Folktales, 1980 (trans. G. Martin). 13 Eng: The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1977 (trans. W. Weaver). 14 Eng: Invisible Cities, 1974 (trans. W. Weaver). 15 Eng: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 1981 (trans. W. Weaver). 16 Eng: Mr. Palomar, 1985 (trans. W. Weaver). 17 Eng: Cosmicomics, 1968 (trans. W. Weaver).

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Calvino’s work first appeared in the Soviet Union in 1948, when the magazine Ogonëk published his first novel, Son sud'i (The Judge’s Dream). Between 1957 and 1971, seventeen short stories belonging to the so-called “neorealist period” were published. The short stories of the collection The Crow Comes Last and Marcovaldo found space on the pages of some of the most prestigious and popular Soviet publications such as Zvezda, Inostrannaia literatura and Znamia in part because their subject matter—the partisan struggle, the crisis of contemporary man in capitalist societies, and political activism as an antidote to alienation—perfectly suited Soviet ideology. The poetics of Calvino’s neorealist works largely conformed to the literary canon of Socialist Realism and, therefore, it is not surprising that Calvino’s short stories were repeatedly reprinted in the Soviet Union, consolidating his image as a “partisan fighter” (voin-garibal'diets), “anti-fascist writer and a democrat” (pisatel'-antifashist i demokrat).18 Many anthologies devoted to the literature of the Resistance printed his short stories.19 From the end of 1950s to the late 1980s, his literary fortune remained tied to the Resistance and neorealist literature, which was so widespread in the USSR that it had become synonymous with contemporary Italian literature even after neorealism in Italy had already faded and the positions of some of its exponents had changed.20 In 1957, following the events in Hungary in 1956 and the crisis of the Italian left, Calvino left the PCI along with many other Italian intellectuals. He announced his departure in an open letter published in the communist newspaper l’Unità, in which he claimed that, despite his opposition to the path followed by the PCI and his difficult decision to resign from the party, he would continue to be a comrade of “the better part of the Italian people.”21 Although the news was well known to Soviet authorities, it was barely disclosed to the Soviet public and did not affect Calvino’s political reputation or his literary fortunes in the country. Indeed, his political commitment and loyalty to communist ideals were

18 Valentina Torpakova, “Italo Kal'vino v poiskakh garmonii,” introduction to Italo Kal'vino. Sbornik rasskazov, ed. Valentina Torpakova (Moskva: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1979), 14; Ruf Khlodovsky, Ob Italo Kal'vino, ego predkakh, istorii i o nashikh sovremennikakh, introduction to Italo Kal'vino, ed. Ruf Khlodovsky (Moskva: Raduga, 1984), 11. 19 See, for instance, Deti Italii (Moscow: Detgiz, 1962), Dolgii put' vozvrashcheniia (Moscow: Progress, 1965), and Soprotivlenie zhivet (Moscow: Progress, 1977). 20 In this regard, see Zlata Potapova, Neorealizm v ital'ianskoi literature (Moskva: Iz. Akademii nauk SSSR, 1961); Tsetsiliia Kin, Mif, real'nost', literatura (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel', 1968). 21 Italo Calvino, “Letter to the Editorial Board of L’Unità (1 August 1957)”, in Italo Calvino. Letters: 1941‒1985, ed. Michael Wood, trans. Martin McLaughlin (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013), 181.


frequently emphasized to underline the distinction between him and other Italian intellectuals who abandoned leftist politics in the 1950s.22

When Calvino’s Italian folktales where published in the USSR in 1959, Soviet criticism began to give much importance to another aspect of Calvino’s poetics, namely skazochnost' (the fantastic). By the mid-1960s, skazochnost' became the defining feature of Calvino’s poetics for Soviet critics even when referring to his most experimental works. The critic Ruf Khlodovsky, for example, emphasized the continuity between Calvino’s neorealistic and fantastical production, claiming that the two were not antithetical, but complementary. Calvino’s newfound skazochnost', Khlodovsky wrote, recalls “Calvino’s neorealistic stories, and at the same time it is completely different.”23 Khlodovsky also emphasized that the author’s change in style should not be understood as an abandonment of social commitment or of his role as engagé writer:

It mustn’t be supposed that Italo Calvino fled into the world of fairytales from his contemporary reality or from those difficult problems which set new forms of life in front of progressive Italian literature. […] The logic of folk tales is, according to Calvino, the logic of the very people ‒ the logic of the simplest people and at the same time of the most natural relationship between man and man, between man and nature, between man and society.24

In this way, the Soviet reception of Calvino’s works took place under the aegis of neorealism and fantasy, bringing the two together under an image of the anti-fascist and progressive writer who fought for democracy and in defense of communist ideals.

In his 1967 preface to a science fiction anthology, The Moon of Twenty Arms (Luna dvadtsati ruk), the critic Sergei Osherov codified this dual reception of Calvino’s work by drawing a distinction between “Calvino-the-realist” (Kal'vino-realist) and “Calvino-the-fabulist” (Kal'vino-skazochnik): the first expression is used to refer to the author of neorealist works, while the second is used in reference to Calvino’s fantastic production,

22 For more details, see: Ts. Kin, “Ot kakoi politiki ustali ital'ianskie pisateli?”, Voprosy literatury 9 (1973), 101‒40; Ruf Khlodovsky, Ob Italo Kal'vino, 5‒17. 23 Ruf Khlodovsky, “O “Barone na dereve” i drugikh romanakh Italo Kal'vino,” introduction to Italo Kal'vino, Baron na dereve (Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965), 9–10. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 24 Ibid., 14.

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which includes the trilogy of Our Ancestors and the Italian Folktales.25 Calvino’s first experimental work to be published in the USSR, Cosmicomics, occupies an intermediary position in this framework. Inspired by an interest in the ars combinatoria, structuralism and semiotics, Cosmicomics created a fabulous cosmogony, but one in which the social content inspired by the “truth of humankind’s problems” (“pravda problem obshchechelovecheskikh”) reflects Calvino’s neorealist poetics.26 Below we will analyze how even a postmodern work such as Cosmicomics was confined within the boundaries of Soviet poetic ideals, illustrating the strategies employed by critics in order to adapt it to the Soviet literary and cultural system.

The “Cosmicomic” Adventures of Qfwfq in the USSR In 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, the space race began, intensifying after Yuri Gagarin’s space flight in 1961 and leading to an increased interest in science fiction set in outer space. In the wake of this enthusiasm Calvino wrote Cosmicomics, a collection of short stories in which the protean protagonist with the unpronounceable palindromic name “Qfwfq” traces the history of the universe through geological eras and the space-time continuum, from the birth of the planets to the extinction of dinosaurs. Starting from several scientific assumptions, Calvino explores new narrative worlds by experimenting with forms of composition inspired by both structuralist criticism and semiotics. When Kosmikomicheskie istorii was published in the USSR in 1968, the volume was given a place of honor in the science fiction genre.27 As Osherov explained in the introduction to The Moon of Twenty Arms, the stories represented an exception to the science fiction to which Soviet readers were accustomed.28 The peculiar stylistic trait which made Cosmicomics “a fantastic and rational cosmogony” resided in that mixture of fantasy and

25 Sergei Osherov, preface to Luna dvadtsati ruk, ed. Lev Vershinin (Moskva: Mir, 1967), 18. 26 Sergei Osherov, “Pis'mo geroia chitateliu,” introduction to Italo Kal'vino, Kosmikomicheskie istorii (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1968), 5. 27 When considering the typological redefinition of the genre to which Cosmicomics was subjected in the USSR it is important to take into account that the same situation occurred in the USA. For the sake of the market—and, therefore, also in accordance with political ideals, those of capitalism—between the years 1970 and 1980, the work was labeled as science fiction rather than general fiction and sold very well. For a more detailed discussion, see: Peter Bondanella, “Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco: Postmodern Masters,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 176. 28 Osherov, preface to Luna, 16.


science that Calvino himself carefully avoided calling science fiction.29 “I’ll go ahead with this series of short stories,” Calvino wrote to a friend, “which have nothing to do with science fiction but are an entirely new genre.”30 Osherov described Calvino’s new genre as follows:

Science and science fiction are merged inextricably in Calvino’s new works, but in a wholly new way. Cosmicomics does not at all fit the traditional definition of science fiction, and yet any alternative to science fiction is equally impossible. In any case, these are not stories, but fairytales. And not just because in them the imagination of the writer goes beyond the limits of the possible, or even of the scientifically acceptable, but because the human character does not appear in the form of specific themes, as is common among other Italian and non-Italian science fiction writers, but in the form of the broadest categories: good and evil, loyalty and betrayal, love and hatred. […] It is precisely this generalization that allows Calvino to formulate and solve common issues of human existence, such as the problem of individuality. In this way, the science fiction tale turns into a philosophical tale.31

Thus, the Cosmicomics short stories were included in the production of Calvino-the-fabulist (Kal'vino-skazochnik). However, their philosophical nature prompted Soviet critics to attribute to them a moral and didactic intent, which aligned with the needs of Soviet literature, but which was quite far from the intentions of the author. In a letter to his friend Giancarlo Ferretti in 1965, Calvino wrote: “In a couple of months my book of short stories will come out, in which finding any ideology will be a problem.”32 Apparently, however, it was a problem easily solved. In Italy the collection was received rather poorly by leftist critics, who deplored Calvino’s shift to the non-aligned front since The Baron in the Trees, and his move away from neorealism and engagé literature. The philosophical generalization realized by Soviet critics also attempted to justify the complexity of the stories, while at the same time avoiding taboo subjects such as semiotics and structuralism, which represented the generative core of the “philosophical” speculations of many of the

29 Alberto Asor Rosa, Stile Calvino (Torino: Einaudi, 2001), 118. 30 Italo Calvino, Lettere 1940–1985, ed. Luca Baranelli (Milano: I Meridiani, Mondadori, 2000), 837. 31 Osherov, preface to Luna, 18. 32 Calvino, Lettere, 885. “Tra un paio di mesi uscirà un mio libro di racconti, dove pescare l’ideologia sarà un problema.”

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stories. In fact, the story that is the most loaded with references to semiotics and structuralism is undoubtedly “A Sign in Space” (“Un segno nello spazio”), in which Qfwfq describes the birth of the first sign, “the only name available for everything that required a name.”33 In the story, Calvino reflects not only on relations between the signifier and the signified, but also on the relationships that connect the first sign to those created after it, anticipating the rhizomatic network of relations between signs which would form the core of the combinatorial experimentation of his hyper-novels (from The Castle of Crossed Destinies to If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler). And it is no coincidence that precisely this short story was excluded from the Soviet edition of Cosmicomics.34

Indeed, the publication of Kosmikomicheskie istorii in the USSR was possible only thanks to a clever critical (and structural) “reassessment” that placed the work within the ideological limits of the Soviet literary system. In his preface, Osherov described the work as a mixture of genres where “fantasy” (skazochnost'), “science fiction” (nauchnaia fantastika) and realism inspired by the “truth of the problems of humanity” (“pravda problem obshechelovecheskikh”) coexisted in harmony.35 However, even if the classification of this work followed the logic employed in the foreword of 1965, the interesting and innovative aspect of this introduction resided in the form Osherov used to present the work. In line with the “postmodern” spirit, he titled his introduction “A Letter from the Hero to the Reader” (Pis'mo geroia chitateliu) signing it with the name of the protagonist of the stories, Qfwfq. The introduction was thereby turned into a meta-narrative, which offered the Soviet reader a Marxist interpretive key as if in the voice of Calvino’s hero: “The history of the universe gives him [Calvino] enough opportunities to try again to solve the task that, according to him, stands before literature: ‘to find the right connection between the individual consciousness and the course of history’.”36 In this regard, it is useful to note that in a later anthology called Lunarium (1975) Osherov’s introduction was included alongside Calvino’s short story “The Distance from the Moon” without mentioning Osherov by name. Only a footnote informed the reader that the excerpts were reproduced from the 1968 edition of Cosmicomics.37 The failure to report Osherov’s name as the author of the meta-introduction 33 Italo Calvino, “A Sign in Space,” trans. W. Weaver, in The Complete Cosmicomics (London: Penguin, 2010), 60. 34 The 1968 edition excluded two short stories (“A Sign in Space” and “The Form of Space”), and added a story from the book t zero (1967), “The Crystals.” 35 Osherov, “Pis'mo geroia,” 5–6. 36 Ibid., 6. 37 E. Parnov and L. Samsonenko, eds., Lunarium (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1975), 186.


misled the reader, perhaps intentionally, suggesting that the introduction was also by Calvino. Thus, the interpretation of the work in a Marxist key seemed to be the intention of the author himself, while in fact it was a trick of the editor. Moreover, Calvino’s quotation in the introduction (“to find the right connection between the individual consciousness and the course of history”) was given without citation, suggesting incorrectly that it referred to Cosmicomics. In fact, the quote in question was taken from Calvino’s 1960 afterword to the trilogy Our Ancestors, a work that is poetically quite distinct from Cosmicomics. Such contingencies significantly altered the reception of Cosmicomics, which, far from being an example of socially engagé literature, constituted the author’s first attempt to experiment with new narrative forms before his transition to the hyper-novel.

The case of Cosmicomics clearly shows the critic’s effort to circumscribe the work within the limits of the politically committed literature that characterized the first phase of Calvino’s literary production and that was more acceptable in the Soviet Union. There were several reasons for this cultural domestication. On the one hand, there was the need to assimilate the work to the Soviet literary system and make it accessible to Soviet readers; on the other, this adaptation increased the chances that the text would pass through the sieve of the various censoring authorities (the Central Committee’s Ideological Commission, Ideologicheskaia Komissiia TsK KPSS, and the General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press, Glavlit) and be printed. Therefore, with the dual purpose of incorporating Cosmicomics into the Soviet literary system and neutralizing its experimental character, Osherov emphasized the continuity between Calvino’s text and more familiar science fiction (“in our age […] science fiction writers have taught you many things”) and underlined the range of possibilities (“From science fiction writers you can expect everything…”) including a work as complicated as Calvino’s.38 In the voice of Calvino’s hero, Osherov continues:

Take for instance the tall tales of my friend Ijon Tichy! I’ll tell you a secret: he is a direct descendant of Baron Munchausen; but I trace my literary genealogy to other ancestors (soon I’ll tell you who) and all the episodes of my long life, described in my own words by Italo Calvino, are the pure truth.39

38 Ibid., 5. 39 Ibid.

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Bringing to the reader’s mind familiar characters, such as Stanisław Lem’s fictional character Ijon Tichy and Rudolf Raspe’s mythologized Baron Munchausen, Osherov redefined a new network of references, in other words, a new kind of intertextuality, based on the repertoire and interpretative competences of the target reader.40

Repositioning the novel within a literary framework different from that created by the novel itself affects the typology of literary genre to which the text belongs. The appeal to predecessors such as Munchausen and Tichy, fully placed the work in the genre of fantastic folk tales, creating a counterpoint to the science fiction aspect suggested by the references to science. A science fiction that was both serious and humorous, sacred and profane, cosmic but also comic was science fiction à la Calvino. However, the stronger adaptation operated by Osherov affected the meaning of the work. Staging an almost Pirandellian dispute between the hero and the author, the critic—appropriating the voice of Qfwfq—called into question Calvino’s skepticism and fatalistic depiction of a chaotic and fragmented worldview which was senseless and unacceptable to the Soviet mass reader:

I just wanted to tell him [Calvino] that it is much easier to comprehend the laws that govern the development of organic and inorganic nature […] than the laws governing human society and operating through all contingencies. But his account seems to show that there is no pattern to humanity’s development […]. In reality, such skepticism is not justified today, when the laws of society’s development are not only acknowledged, but also experienced, and aside from that, my author here is in conflict with himself: each of his stories talks about forward movement of the world and of man, but how can the sum of the consequent contingencies result in progressive development?41

40 Lem introduces The Star Diaries (Dzienniki gwiazdowe, 1957), where Ijon Tichy first appears, with a meta-foreword written in the voice of the fictional Professor Tarantoga, in which Tichy is presented as the heir of such fictional and half-fictional forebears as Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Münchhausen (the real-life model for Raspe’s Baron), Pavel Masloboinikov (a character in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The History of a Town), Lemuel Gulliver and Alcofribas Nasier (the anagrammic pseudonym under which François Rabelais published the stories of Gargantua and Pantagruel). In Rudolf Raspe’s meta-preface to Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, the authenticity of the character’s incredible adventures is claimed and undersigned by fictional characters such as Gulliver, Sinbad, and Aladdin. 41 Osherov, “Pis'mo geroia,” 11.


Calvino’s answer to this rhetorical question can be found, perhaps by coincidence, in a short story criticized by Osherov, “Crystals”: “Rationalize, that’s the big task, rationalize if you don’t want everything to come apart.”42 As we have seen, then, through the redefinition of literary genre and through the cultural domestication to which the text and co-text were subjected, the original work’s ironic rewriting of scientific theories was no longer presented as postmodern narrative practice, but as a “philosophical fairytale” (filosofskaia skazka), that is, as a reflection in a fantasy key on the condition of contemporary man perfectly in line with the Soviet era’s evergreen theme of social criticism.43 This critical interpretation of the work would soon become canonical.

In the preface to an anthology of The Italian Novella of Twentieth Century (Ital'ianskaia novella XX veka, 1969), the Italianist Tsetsiliia Kin used Cosmicomics to illustrate how contemporary Italian short stories had broadened their boundaries by mingling with other genres. Taking into account also the short stories contained in the volume T con zero (t zero)44 Kin defined them as “fantastic novella-parables” (“fantasticheskie novelly-pritchi”).45 She thereby tried to simplify and make accessible Calvino’s experimental narrative world, suggesting that the author’s allegorical use of science-fiction was an attempt to address the problems of contemporary humanity: “The writer uses scientific hypotheses and even the style of scientific prose to metaphorically answer the basic questions of human existence in the modern world: issues of freedom and ‘alienation,’ individual responsibility, adaptation, and so on.”46 Similarly, in 1977 Zlata Potapova used the formula “philosophical-fantastic parable” (“filosofsko-fantasticheskaia pritcha”) to define Cosmicomics as a work in which the writer considered the place of humans in the world: “The writer reflects on man’s place in the universe and its history, in time and space. [...] In the form of a philosophical-fantastic parable Calvino with

42 Italo Calvino, “Crystals,” trans. W. Weaver, in The Complete Cosmicomics (London: Penguin, 2010), 184. 43 Osherov, “Pis'mo geroia,” 11. 44 1967 saw the publication of the second collection of the Cosmicomics short stories (T con zero, Einaudi). Alongside other stories of Qfwfq’s cycle, the volume included several stories in which Calvino moved away from a purely logical-deductive process to explore possible narrative worlds (T con zero, L’inseguimento, Il guidatore notturno, Il conte di Montecristo). These last short stories show the turn of Calvino’s poetics to postmodern narrative techniques. 45 Tsetsiliia Kin, introduction to Ital'ianskaia novella XX veka, ed. Georgi Bogemskii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1969), 28. 46 Ibid.

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gentle humor embodies his idea of indissoluble connection of all existing things.”47

The fantastic aspect of Cosmicomics was underlined in 1979 by Valentina Torpakova who introduced the work of the “writer-philosopher” (“pisatel'-filosof”):

In the sixties Calvino once again returns to the fairytale, but this time he enters “outer space” with a philosophical tale about the history of the universe (Cosmicomics). There he presents data from various sciences, scientific theories and hypotheses, often invented, but the focus of attention is always the human and here the writer-philosopher tries “to find the right connection between the individual consciousness and the course of history.”48

The quotation recites the words used in Osherov’s meta-introduction, in which, as mentioned above, Calvino’s own words are quoted improperly to convey the idea that the work was characterized by a deeply Marxist philosophical outlook. This trend continued in 1990, on the precipice of the collapse of the USSR, when critics still underlined the Marxist spirit of the work, recognizing a relation of continuity between the poetics of previous novels and that of Cosmicomics:

In “The Nonexistent Knight” Calvino ridicules the separation of “pure” ideas from life: only in unity with actual practice does the ideal becomes tangible and can the person, connecting “both halves,” escape from alienation. Cosmicomics were written in the same vein […]. In the form of philosophical prose fiction Calvino embodies his faith in the future fate of the universe and of humanity.49

If on a Winter’s Night a (Soviet) Reader

The redefinition of the genre and the cultural and ideological domestication of Calvino’s work also affected the critical reception of other postmodern narratives by the author. Before examining this reception, it would be useful to provide a more exhaustive definition of the Soviet reader since, in the case of hyper-novels the reader becomes

47 Zlata Potapova, “Pritcha o cheloveke,” in Ital'ianskii roman segodnia (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 61. 48 Torpakova, “Italo Kal'vino v poiskakh garmonii,” 13. 49 Nina Volodina et al., Istoriia ital'ianskoi literaturoi XIX–XX vekov (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1990), 254–55.


the co-author of the text. As Evgeny Dobrenko has noted (following Hans Günther), the Soviet era was characterized by the “State appropriation of the reader” (“ogosudarstvlenie chitatelia”) and the interaction between the text and the reader was mediated by a “Third Member” ‒ the authority.50 Hence, “under Soviet conditions this process of interaction flowed in a strictly defined channel that was fully determined by the authority’s strategies in relation to literature and reading.”51 From this perspective, the Soviet reader was not always considered an individual actor who was able to exercise his own individual interpretative agency (as Umberto Eco suggested was the case in the West), but a “mass reader.”52 To use the definition which Dobrenko borrowed from Vsevolov Kochetov, the reader acquired the status of “reader-people” (chitatel'-narod).53 And because the shaping of Soviet readers was a part of a larger ideological process, namely “the shaping of the Soviet man,” they were not considered as simple recipients, but as addressees of the ideological discourse which—through literature (and literary criticism)—was aimed at “reshaping society.”54 It is precisely in this frame that we must relocate the critical reception of Italo Calvino’s hyper-novels in Soviet Union.55

Calvino’s hyper-novel Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies) was published in 1973 in Italy. The work was written under the influence of Structuralism, cybernetics and mathematical principles of composition (game theory) inspired by Oulipo’s literary experiments.56 The Castle is an example of constrained writing in which tarot cards are 50 Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, trans. M. Jesse Savage (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), vii. 51 Ibid. 52 Umberto Eco, Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milano: Bompiani, 1962); and Umberto Eco, Lector in fabula: la cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi (Milano: Bompiani, 1979). 53 Dobrenko, Making of the State Reader, 1. 54 Ibid., 2. 55 Calvino’s hyper-novels were not published in Russian until after the fall of the USSR, and therefore I limit this analysis to their “critical reception,” including reviews, critical articles and explanatory texts contained in works of literary history and encyclopedias. These were the only publicly available sources that discussed the existence of Calvino’s hyper-novels within the USSR. In this analysis, I also consider unpublished texts (stored at the Russian state archive RGALI), such as notes and reports written by literary consultants for the internal use of institutions such as the Union of Soviet Writers and the editorial boards of state publishing houses. 56 Oulipo, or the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (The Workshop of Potential Literature), was a loose grouping of primarily French writers who used mathematical formulas to produce structurally complex forms of “constrained writing.” Calvino became a foreign member (membre étranger) of Oulipo in 1973. See Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, et al. Oulipo Laboratory (London: Atlas, 1995).

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used to create “a narrative combinatorial machine” with the aim of “extracting stories from the mysterious figures of the tarot and interpreting the same figure in a different way each time.”57 The idea, which constitutes the generative core of the novel’s structure, was also inspired by semiotics, which suggested to Calvino “that the meaning of each card depends on the place it has in the sequence of cards that precede and follow it.”58 The Soviet critical reception of this work, however, ignored the semiotic and structuralist basis for the work.59 Instead, it was presented as a philosophical allegory, i.e. as a parable about the condition of contemporary humanity: “In this ‘fairy-tale structure’ Calvino presents a person, a ‘moral personality’ as hostile to nature, as one who gives in to a ‘ruthless society,’ which turns him into its toy.”60 At most, critics might refer obliquely to some of Calvino’s structural sources, as Potapova did in reference to the Castle in 1977:

Calvino wrote that the idea of using “tarots” as a narrative mechanism came to him after becoming acquainted with presentations at the International Seminar on the Structure of the Story, held in 1968, as well as with a number of papers analyzing the narrative function of playing cards.61

However, the combinatorial aspect was reduced to a mere “rational allegory” (rassudochnaia allegoriia) about the meaning of life in a chaotic modern world: 57 Italo Calvino, Il castello dei destini incrociati (Milano, Mondadori, 2011), vi; Italo Calvino, Six memos for the next millennium, trans. by William Weaver (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988), 94. 58 Calvino, Il castello, vii; Calvino specifies his indebtedness to semiotic theory in a note published in the 1973 edition, where he refers to Paolo Fabbri’s lecture “Il racconto della cartomanzia ed il linguaggio degli emblemi” (“Fortune-telling’s Tale and the Language of Emblems,” 1968); to M. I. Lekomtseva and B. A. Uspenskii’s article “Gadanie na igral'nych kartakh kak semioticheskaia sistema” (“Fortune-telling with Playing Cards as a Semiotic System,” 1962) and to B. F. Egorov’s article “Prosteishie semioticheskie sistemy i tipologiia siuzhetov” (“The Simplest Semiotic Systems and the Typology of Plots,” 1965). Calvino read these articles in the Italian translation published in 1969 (I sistemi di segni e lo strutturalismo sovietico, eds. Remo Faccani and Umberto Eco, Milano: Bompiani). For more detailed information about Calvino’s reception of Soviet structuralism, see also his essay “Cibernetica e fantasmi,” in Saggi 1945-1985 (Milano: I Meridiani, Mondadori, 2003), 199–219. 59 There are few exceptions to this trend, see for example: N. Kotrelev, “Italo Kal'vino. Esli odnazhdy zimnei noch'yu priezzhii,” Sovremennaia khudozhestvennaia literatura za rubezhem 3 (1980): 60–63; and E. Kostioukovitch, “Italo Kal'vino. kamen' sverkhu”, Sovremennaia khudozhestvennaia literatura za rubezhem 1 (1982): 105–10. 60 Potapova, “Pritcha o cheloveke,” 67. 61 Ibid., 65.


The main allegorical meaning of Calvino’s work is that all the stories are told with the help of playing cards […], the same cards change their meaning, in other words, people experience the same events, which, however, can be interpreted in different ways and lead to completely different results. Human life is a combination of veiled factors and, in this sense, all destinies are interrelated and predetermined.62

Another critic offers a similar interpretation:

The allegorical meaning of the story is that the cards, laid out in a different order, acquire other meanings […]. And here one notices in Calvino analogues with the present time ‒ both in its problems, and in human nature, the development of which depends on the understanding of the truth or of the falsity of moral values.63

Invisible Cities inspired similar interpretations. Soviet critics framed the cities visited by Marco Polo and described to Kublai Khan in the novel as allegories for human desires, the human soul, and even for a social order:

The cities allegorically represent the state of mind and the spiritual development of man, symbolize his desires and motivations. Some cities have courage and hope. Others talk about the diversity of living forms and about the variety of the soul. And then there are those which do not embody the human soul, but the “soul” of the social order.64

What is important to notice here is that, even if this allegorical reading is one of the possible interpretations of the book, confining the sense of the novel within these limits would be tantamount to misinterpreting it: as the novel’s own Kublai Khan understands, the emblematic reduction of the world does not resolve its meaning.65 This philosophical consideration is doubly true in the case of Calvino’s hyper-novels, where the combinatory device is used in order to multiply not only the possibilities of reading, but also the meanings of each possible

62 Ibid., 62–64. 63 Volodina et al., Istoriia, 272. 64 Ibid. 65 Cf. Pietro Citati, “Le città invisibili di Italo Calvino. Parabola morale e allegoria metafisica,” Il Giorno, 6 December 1972, 10.

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combination. Nevertheless, in this specific case, the above-mentioned simplification aimed to position the hyper-novels in the Soviet literary system where readers could not be trusted to derive their own meanings from the work’s possible combinations. For exactly this reason, in a report to the editorial board of Inostrannaia literatura in 1973, Kin advises against the publication of Invisible Cities: “The book is beautiful but, unfortunately, it is difficult to recommend it for translation as the lack of plot would likely trouble our readers who are not accustomed to this genre and make it difficult for them to evaluate the literary merits of the work.”66 The same Kin, in a 1979 report on If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler—which she defined as “real literature”—underlined that, should the novel be published, it would be essential introduce it properly to elucidate its meaning to the reader: “It is clear, however, that such a thing can be printed only accompanied by articles of a major sociologist, a philosopher or an essayist because the novel needs an introduction in which the author’s intention is explained to the readers.”67 Similarly, in her 1981 review of If on a Winter’s Night in Literaturnaia gazeta, Kin rejected meta-narration, emphasizing that the work was not “a novel on the novel” (“roman o romane”) but a “novel of novels” (“roman romanov”), and suggested that the complex narrative structure of the plot was presented as nothing more than an engagé writer’s attempt to represent the chaos of contemporary reality: “The writer lives in the frame of his own historical time. […] The rapid rhythms of the century require that the literature keep pace with times.”68 Once again, therefore, we note that the role of criticism was crucial not only in promoting the diffusion of literary works in the USSR, but also in shaping the reader’s reception through the official formulation of the work’s meaning.

Instead of a Conclusion: The (Double-edged) Arms of Criticism

When considering the role played by the institution of criticism within the Soviet system of cultural production, we should not underestimate the importance of what we have called its “redefinition of the genre”: indeed, by means of cultural and ideological domestication criticism had the power to incorporate in (or exclude from) the system works that were alien to it both ideologically and culturally. As we have seen, in the case of the reception of Calvino’s hyper-novels an even more incisive adaptation was realized in order to domesticate their cultural content and

66 RGALI, f. 1573, op. 4, ed. khr. 291, 7. 67 RGALI, f. 1573, op. 4, ed. khr. 310, 67. Ibid., 68. 68 Tsetsiliia Kin, “Volshebnaia palochka Italo Kal'vino,” Literaturnaia gazeta, January 14, 1981, 15.


their complex narrative structure. Such methods of ideological adaptation are important for understanding how experimental texts worked within the Soviet literary system; however, we must not forget that in the hierarchical system of Soviet cultural production literary criticism had specific privileges as much as duties.

In the USSR the creation of the ideal reader was not entrusted only to the work of politicized writers, but was also realized through censors, critics and, not least, librarians. Already in the 1930s the act of reading was recognized as a powerful tool in shaping citizens’ consciousness and, with this aim, reading plans “directed towards the communist re-education of the masses” were created.69 Even during Khrushchev’s “thaw,” this utilitarian view of reading and of the role of literature in socialist society remained largely unchanged. In 1958, a resolution of the Ideological Commission of the CPSU pointed out the danger of an “uncritical approach to printing foreign literature,” which could have negative effects for the “ideological education” and “cultural growth” of Soviet citizens if publishers did not “help readers navigate complex literary phenomena.”70 The main concern of the Commission was the proper interpretation of foreign literary works, achieved through the skillful mediation of critics.71 In this way the goal of directing the reading experience and suggesting “correct,” i.e. ideologically irreproachable, interpretations was entrusted to the institution of criticism.72 However, as we have already noted, often the very same critics had the power to help a work pass through censorship that otherwise might not have been published. The fortune of a novel and its reception in the USSR was often entrusted to their judgment and rhetorical abilities: if they could build a plausible case to justify the “anomalies” of a literary work in a credible way and in conformity with the demands of the system, then that work had a chance to reach the Soviet reader. The potentially arbitrary nature of the critics’ power did not escape the attention of the Central Committee of the Party: “In practice, publishers and literary magazines are often influenced by the pressure of translators and reviewers which derive from subjective views, aesthetic tastes, and sometimes personal interest.”73 69 Dobrenko, Making of the State Reader, 281. 70 Postanovlenie Komissii TsK KPSS “O meropriiatiiakh po ustraneniiu nedostatkov v izdanii i kritike inostrannoi khudozhestvennoi literatury,” in Kul'tura i vlast' ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. Ideologicheskie komissii TsK KPCC 1958–1964: Dokumenty (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), 36. 71 Postanovlenie Komissii TsK KPSS “Ob ustranenii nedostatkov v izdanii i retsenzirovanii inostrannoi chudozhestvennoi literatury, in Kul'tura i vlast', 46. 72 Dobrenko, Making of the State Reader, 15–17. 73 Postanovlenie Komissii TsK KPSS “O meropriiatiiakh,” 36.

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The domestication of Calvino’s works to fit the needs of the Soviet literary system has been the primary topic of my discussion here, but in conclusion I will consider an aspect of this process that can be read as a subtle form of resistance. In considering Osherov’s introduction to Cosmicomics, written in the voice of the protagonist Qfwfq, one notes a particularly playful relationship to the reader. Typical of postmodern practice, this playful attitude can be read as adding a subversive and parodic character to the didactic and indoctrinating function for which the text was ostensibly intended. But could the Soviet reader have decoded this irony? Perhaps so. By 1968, when Kosmikomicheskie istorii was published, two parallel literary circuits had already begun to function in the USSR: one official, consecrated by state institutions, represented by the Writers Union, and devoted to propagating socialist realist works; and the other unofficial, persecuted by state institutions, consisting mainly of writers who had been expelled from, rejected by, or never admitted to the Writers Union and devoted to exploring alternatives to official literary practice.74 In the 1960s, the rise of the dissident movement along with the proliferation of samizdat and tamizdat helped give birth to a new type of reader who developed new approaches to reading that differed from those of the ideal reader envisioned, desired, and molded by authoritative Soviet criticism.75 This new “unofficial reader” was a careful reader with a sharp critical sense developed through his awareness of being the object of attention and ideological manipulation from the authorities.76 He was able to read between the lines of the official discourse and often could discern an alternative narrative behind the one offered by state literary institutions.

The parodic irony in Osherov’s meta-introduction was directed precisely to this reader, who could grasp the allusive and subversive qualities underneath the necessary panegyric to Marxism-Leninism. In “A Letter from the Hero to the Reader,” the narrative device contrived by Osherov to disguise his authorial identity behind Qfwfq’s name produces

74 For an in-depth analysis of the unofficial literary circuit and of its dynamics of culture’s production and reception see: Olga Zaslavskaya, “Samizdat as social practice and alternative ‘communication circuit’,” in V. Parisi (ed.), Samizdat. Between Practices and Representations. Lecture series at Open Society Archives, Budapest, February–June 2013. IAS Publications No. 1 (Budapest: Central European University, Institute of Advanced Study, 2015), 87–100. 75 For an exhaustive discussion on reading practices during the Thaw, see: D. Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013). 76 The “unofficial reader” can be assimilated to the “exceeding reader” described by Valentina Parisi, see: Il lettore eccedente: edizioni periodiche del samizdat sovietico 1956–1990 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013).


an effect of estrangement (ostranenie) and contributes to the unmasking of the real intentions of the critic. The criticism of Calvino’s pessimism and the inevitable hosannas to socialism acquire a different meaning if we take into account Osherov-Qfwfq’s insistence that his adventures, like those of Baron Munchausen and Ijon Tichy, are “the pure truth” (chisteishaia pravda). Pure truth, defined by the examples of such prevaricators par excellence, is anything but. Seen through this lens, the statements on the progress and stability of the Soviet system are entrusted to the voice of an unreliable narrator, thus the distortion of reality decreed by the Soviet authorities is turned against the same system through an ontological subversion. The unmasking of the narrator’s unreliability presupposes and strengthens the relationship of complicity between the reader and the implied author or, to use Wayne Booth’s formulation, the “secret communion of the author and reader behind the narrator’s back.”77 Thus, behind the back of the positive hero into which Qfwfq was necessarily transformed, the reader and the critic exchange a look of understanding that restores the natural order of things, revealing the plot of another possible story, less rhetorical and certainly closer to Calvino’s authorial intentions.

77 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 300.

PART TWO

MARKETS AND CULTURAL CONSUMPTION

When Theory Entered the Market: The Russian Formalists’ Encounter with Mass Culture

Basil Lvoff The City University of New York, Graduate Center

and Lomonosov Moscow State University

When the Muses Left

“The machine changes man more than anything else.”

—Viktor Shklovsky When it showed its full might in the twentieth century, mass culture posed a serious threat to traditional aesthetics. Omnipresent and omnipotent, mass culture affected all spheres of life, and in literature as everywhere, “a sudden revulsion of quantity into quality” took place according to the Hegelian dialectic.1 The rapid growth of the cultural market altered modes of producing, receiving, and judging art. Appeals to beauty and good taste now felt hopelessly archaic, agreeable but useless—like decrepit craftsmen’s workshops in front of newly-built factories. The Russian poet Maximilian Voloshin, famous for his poetic insight, eloquently expressed the idea in 1922:

Machine taught man […] That genius is obsolete, that culture

1 Georg W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel: Translated from the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences with Prolegomena (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1874), 175.

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Equals necessities increased in number, That the ideal Is surfeit and success, That there exists a single global stomach, And that, apart from it, there are no gods.2

The assembly line society privileged its new institutions over the old

ones, and the patron of the arts changed: no longer a single connoisseur expecting art to edify and treat him to its subtleties but the faceless masses of workers with their urging necessity for respite from hard, dehumanizing work. In this brave new world, the muses of old art were driven away by the culture industry—as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno christened the new cultural order in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).

Horkheimer and Adorno are justly ranked among the first scholars of mass culture, having deduced its theorem: “The budgeted differences of value in the culture industry have nothing to do with actual differences, with the meaning of the product itself.”3 Today, the Frankfurt School’s Marxian approach to mass culture is considered classic. Much less known are the writings of the Russian Formalists devoted to the same problem. Not only do these works challenge a stereotyped view of Russian Formalism as a Russian precursor of New Criticism, which is a gross oversimplification, for the Formalists were more interested in analyzing the dialectical development of literary modes of representation than in close readings of the texts alone. More importantly, these Formalist works offer an original, non-Marxian approach to the extremely topical problem of mass culture.

This article traces the Russian Formalists’ theoretical journey to the problem of mass culture: from their initial rejection of literature’s socioeconomic aspect to their later recognition of these issues. The first section explains why the Formalists originally opposed a sociological study of literature and why, when they later addressed it, their contemporaries distrusted their intentions. The second argues that even early Formalism—manifestly apolitical—had a hidden ethical stance, which overlapped with the Frankfurt School’s Marxian critique of modernity. The last section shows that, despite the Formalists’ seeming elitism and their critique of modernity, they encountered the rise of mass

2 Maksimilian Voloshin, Putiami Kaina. Tragediia material'noi kul'tury (Saint Petersburg: Serdtse, 1992), 21. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 3 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002), 98.

When Theory Entered the Market

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literature with unusual tolerance, and that instead of repudiating it, they tried to embrace it as a new theoretical opportunity.

A Monument to a Scientific Era

“We are not Marxists, but if we need this utensil in our household, we will not eat with our bare hands out of spite.”

—Viktor Shklovsky

The Russian Formalists studied the laws whereby literature and social life correlate, but their victories and defeats in this area are scarcely known outside of departments of Slavic languages and cultures. The first reason for this is the anti-sociological bent of early Formalism; the second is Viktor Shklovsky’s public denial of Formalist doctrine in favor of Marxism in 1930.

Even though Russian Formalism appeared a hundred years ago and underwent an eventful evolution, it is still frequently judged based on its early declarations. In the mid-1910s, newborn Formalism insisted on separating art from social life.4 It argued that in everyday life with its everyday language and everyday thinking, the word and the world are reduced to operable, uniform concepts, so that the consumption and communication of information dominate. But in art, on the other hand, experience matters most. Concentrating on expression, art rehabilitates the word and the world, and hence our perception thereof, by restoring their original complexity and inexhaustibility.

4 This applies to Formalism’s three most famous and radical representatives, Viktor Shklovsky, Iurii Tynianov, and Boris Eikhenbaum—the central figures of this article. All three were members of OPOIAZ, the Society for the Study of the Theory of Poetic Language. The Formalism of OPOIAZ was closely tied with contemporary literary life and, in its early days, with Russian Futurism and the avant-garde in general. It is the OPOIAZ variation of Formalism that is best known worldwide. However, Russian Formalism also comprised such equally important institutions as the Moscow Linguistic Circle, cofounded by Roman Jakobson, and the GAKhN (the State Academy for Cultural Studies), led among others by Gustav Shpet (who developed a phenomenological variation of Formalism). It is also important to mention Boris Iarkho, who applied mathematics and statistics to literature almost a century before digital humanities, and Vladimir Propp, whose morphological approach to fairy tales is known worldwide. Often, these scholars disagreed more than they concurred. For more about this movement in its diversity, see Tomáš Glanc, “The Russian Formalists as a Community,” in Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-Century Humanities: Literary Theory, History, Philosophy, ed. Marina Grishakova and Silvi Salupere (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 1–22. Whenever Formalism is mentioned in this article, the OPOIAZ trio is implied.

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At the core of these views was the Formalists’ rejection of the form-content binary. Instead, they spoke of art as form and of life as material.5 From their perspective, the form of the work of art, or how each work finds expression, was its real, unique message. The ideas and events that the work expresses, or its material, were secondary and auxiliary to form.6 Roughly speaking, early Formalism saw the relationship of the work’s material to its form like that of the alphabet to a word or a tile to a mosaic: that is, material can be artistically present only when it is expressed in form. Yet already in the mid-1920s, the Formalists modified their stance. Though their understanding of form remained the same—as a hierarchy of principles whereby the work structurally exists—they reappraised the role of material, conceding that it could play an active part in the work’s formation.

An example of this change is Shklovsky’s 1928 book Material and Style in Leo Tolstoy’s Novel War and Peace. Shklovsky shows how Tolstoy, while writing his novel about Russia’s war with Napoleon, delved deeply into historical documents—only to distort them. In doing this, Shklovsky says, Tolstoy wanted to idealize his social group, the Russian nobility, which, when Tolstoy began writing the novel, was under attack due to both Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War and the rising opposition from the plebian intelligentsia (raznochintsy). However, the inclusion of documentary materials affected Tolstoy’s style, leading to such sociologically dense “psychological characteristics” and historico-philosophical digressions that often took focus away from the twists and turns of Tolstoy’s plotlines, thus violating the canonical form of the novel of that time.7 This, in turn, made Tolstoy’s work aesthetically and, in the eyes of his contemporaries, ideologically radical, akin to the work of raznochinets writers, such as Nikolay Chernyshevsky. In Victor Erlich’s succinct account of Shklovsky’s work, “Tolstoj’s [aristocratic] class bias compelled him to distort or color historical truth,” but “this deformation

5 This does not exhaust the concept of material in Formalism. The term also means the medium in which a certain art is realized; for literature, it is language. See Mikhail Bakhtin/Pavel Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1991), 104–28. 6 This view was both novel and traditional, if one remembers Aristotle, for whom matter existed by being realized through form. For a more recent application of Aristotelian theory of causality to art, see Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Media and Formal Cause (Houston: NeoPoiesis Press, 2011). 7 Viktor Shklovskii, Mater'ial i stil' v romane L'va Tolstogo “Voina i mir” (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1928), 239.


69

was in turn deformed and modified by the exigencies of the medium Tolstoj chose to employ.”8

Erlich believes that this book shows Shklovsky “caught between militant Formalism and a somewhat ill-digested Marxism.”9 Ill-digested or not, Shklovsky’s approach was anything but a combination of the two.10 His work was still fundamentally non-Marxian because, in the struggle between the base (Tolstoy’s class) and the superstructure (Tolstoy’s art), it was the latter that proved essential in Shklovsky’s opinion. What changed, however, is that Shklovsky kept the promise he made two years earlier in his book, Third Factory (Tret'ia fabrika 1926), about using Marxism (in this case the theory of class struggle) when it comes in handy: “We are not Marxists, but if we need this utensil in our household, we will not eat with our bare hands out of spite.” 11 Nevertheless, Shklovsky’s contemporaries did not take it seriously, and the Marxist critic Isaak Nusinov, for instance, wrote a review of Material and Style unambiguously titled “Belated Discoveries; or, How V. Shklovsky Got Tired of Eating with Bare Formalist Hands and Provided Himself with a Homemade Marxist Spoon.”12

It was hard, and probably still is, to believe in the sincerity of Shklovsky’s statements—because of the deliberately provocative declarations he made in the early days of Formalism, such as writing that all that matters is “art as device” whereas “that which is made in art is unimportant.” 13 It looked as though the early Shklovsky had denied 8 Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History–Doctrine (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981), 122–23. 9 Ibid., 125. 10 The Formalists, who also referred to themselves as “specifiers,” considered eclecticism a mortal sin. The most articulate expression of this idea can be found in Eikhenbaum’s “Around the Issue of the ‘Formalists’” (“Vokrug voprosa o formalistakh”), written as part of his paper war with Marxist critics, including Leon Trotsky, who at some point suggested that the Formal method could be an auxiliary to Marxist literary scholarship. Eikhenbaum wrote that a synthesis would be detrimental to the Formalists and the Marxists alike as both schools should be consistent in explaining the world based on their unique doctrines. Any compromise between the two (the Formalists conceding that sometimes art is determined by social life and the Marxists conceding that sometimes the base does not determine the superstructure) would only weaken them. That is why the Formalists did not accept the rather insightful attempt of Pavel Sakulin to find a methodologically justified way of combining Formalism with literary sociology (with which Marxism was mainly associated) in his 1925 book The Sociological Method in Literary Scholarship (Sotsiologicheskii metod v literaturovedenii) (Moscow: Mir, 1925). 11 Viktor Shklovskii, Tret'ia fabrika (Moscow: Krug, 1926), 88. 12 Isaak Nusinov, “Zapozdalye otkrytiia, ili kak V. Shklovskomu nadoelo est' golymi formalistskimi rukami i on obzavelsia samodel'noi marksistskoi lozhkoi,” Literatura i marksizm 5 (1929): 3–52. 13 Viktor Shklovskii, O teorii prozy (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), 13, emphasis in the original.

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meaning to art, but it was not so. About the same time when he published his article “On Poetry and Trans-Sense Language” (this article celebrated the freedom of the Russian Futurists’ verse from fixed meaning), he also wrote in a lesser-known text of his: “Who told you that we have forgotten meaning? We just do not discuss that which we do not (yet) understand, and what we have forgotten are only your theories of filling with meaning [osmyshlenie], which tend to be so primitive in their highfalutin abstractness.”14 To understand Shklovsky’s position, which made him overstate initially the freedom of art from any socioeconomic meaning, it is necessary to go back to the 1910s when Formalism was just coming into being.

Erlich justly remarks that “Formalist a-sociologism was a matter of methodological expedience.”15 Back then, literary scholarship was largely in the hands of the positivists. Preoccupied with political, ethnographic, and other similar concerns, the positivists studied art without paying due attention to its unique nature so that it seemed that art interested them merely as a source of illustrations. It was already in the nineteenth century that the prominent Russian literary scholar Aleksandr Veselovskii described this state of affairs in a passage the Formalists knew very well:16

Literary history resembles the territory that international law defines as a res nullius, where the art historian and the aesthetician go hunting, along with the erudite and the scholar of social relations. Each of them carries away what he can, according to his abilities and beliefs.17

According to the Formalists, Russian scholars and critics had not

discussed literature professionally, on its own terms, since the end of the Golden Age of Russian literature—when Alexander Pushkin and his contemporaries, eager to establish a great national literature, were riveted to formal matters. With time, however, the achievements of that era had been largely forgotten, and ideological criticism flourished.

Russia’s tradition of severe censorship was conducive to ideological criticism since literature often served as the only grounds for political debate. The Formalists undertook to change this situation by studying literature in terms of its specificity, its literariness (another Formalist term) instead of focusing exclusively on its social or ideological “content.”

14 Viktor Shklovskii, “Iz filologicheskikh ochevidnostei sovremennoi nauki o stikhe,” Germes 1 (1919): 68. 15 Erlich, Russian Formalism, 118. 16 Boris Eikhenbaum, O literature (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1987), 379. 17 Aleksandr Veselovskii, Izbrannoe. Istoricheskaia poetika (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006), 57.


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Their achievements in this field are well known—if only because they anticipated Structuralism in numerous ways.18 The question is why they did not content themselves with these discoveries but instead attempted to solve the problem of literature vis-à-vis social life, thereby jeopardizing their arguments for literature’s autonomy.

The answer is twofold. What made the Formalists move forward in their theory was the new reality they confronted at the turn of the 1920s—and the last section of this article discusses this encounter. At the same time, the Formalists were eager for such encounters, and the idea of constantly adapting their doctrine to an ever-changing reality was central to Formalism from the very start. The reason lay in the Formalists themselves: Shklovsky, Iurii Tynianov, and Boris Eikhenbaum were not mere theoreticians, but sophisticated observers of literary life. All three were fully immersed in it as journalists, as well as creative writers, especially Shklovsky and Tynianov. This compelled them to check their hypotheses against the literary lifeblood of the epoch pulsing through their veins.

For all the stubbornness with which they stood for the immutable laws of literature, they saw literature as highly mercurial in its development. “[Literature] is not a train that has to arrive at a certain destination,” Tynianov wrote. “[…] Many commissions have been given to Russian literature. But to give it commissions is useless: it will be commissioned India and will discover America.”19 Neither Tynianov nor his Formalist friends wanted theory to lag behind literature, and when (as the last section of the article argues) socioeconomic matters began to play a prominent role in literary evolution, the Formalists accepted this as a theoretical challenge.

This explains why they did not rest in the ivory tower of pure aesthetics, but instead endured a series of theoretical crises, especially in the mid-1920s. However, this was not a marker of their demise but a turning point of Formalism’s evolution, and from the mid-1920s onwards some of its most compelling hypotheses were advanced. Yet instead of appreciating the Formalists’ turn to sociological problems, as in Shklovsky’s monograph on Tolstoy, the majority of contemporary critics saw it as cunning motivated by weakness.

Those who saw it this way felt that their suspicions were confirmed when Shklovsky publicly recanted Formalism and acknowledged the superiority of Marxism in his 1930 article, “A Monument to a Scientific Error.” “My error,” Shklovsky wrote, “consisted in […] trying to study 18 See Jurij Striedter, Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value: Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989). 19 Iurii Tynianov, Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 166.

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works of art as a closed system, regardless of its [this closed system’s] correlation with the whole system of literature and with the basic culture-forming economic order [kul'turoobrazuiushchii ekonomicheskii riad].”20 The contrast between these words and Shklovsky’s earlier works (especially in Knight’s Move) could hardly have been starker.21

People distant from Formalism are tempted to see this as Formalism’s failure. But people close to it justly observe that Formalism had no choice but to surrender, since the storm of Stalinism was already gathering. This leads some to the conclusion that Shklovsky, who was an unexcelled master of irony, did not fully mean whatever he wrote about the sociology of literature.22

And yet, as Richard Sheldon has demonstrated, so great was Shklovsky’s irony that his recantation was both a fake, “ostensible surrender” (the title of Sheldon’s article) and a point-blank statement of Shklovsky’s beliefs, which remained Formalist. The name of Shklovsky’s article, Sheldon observes, was itself ironic because it alluded to Jules Romains’s novel Donogoo Tonka, whose plot might provide insights into Shklovsky’s thinking. The protagonist of Romains’s novel is a renowned geographer whose career is in danger because his book contains a map with a nonexistent South American city called Donogoo Tonka. To save the situation, he decides to travel to the geographic location where the city should be and actually build a city named Donogoo Tonka. But, to his surprise, when he arrives, the task has already been accomplished by his followers who were eager to found the city they had seen on the map. A monument to the geographer’s scientific error is erected in the city. Applied to Shklovsky, this could be read as follows: he erred but, when rectifying the error, confirmed the reality of it. In the article, Shklovsky only said that he would not like “to stand as a monument to his own error,” but he preferred not to say anything about the irony of this image.23

Moreover, Shklovsky repeated in the 1930 article the theses of his Tolstoy book and other sociology-oriented works of the manifestly Formalist period. And while he stated now that “in order to study literary evolution [...] it is necessary to become familiar with the Marxist method in its entirety,” in the subsequent two sentences he said, ostensibly 20 Viktor Shklovskii, “Pamiatnik nauchnoi oshibke,” Literaturnaia gazeta, Jan. 27, 1930. 21 In Knight’s Move (1923), Shklovsky argued that literary plots recur worldwide among peoples historically and geographically separated from each other; therefore, literature develops according to its internal patterns only, regardless of social reality. 22 See Peter Steiner, “The Praxis of Irony: Viktor Shklovsky’s Zoo,” Russian Formalism: A Retrospective Glance: A Festschrift in Honor of Victor Erlich (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1985), 27–43. 23 Shklovskii, “Pamiatnik nauchnoi oshibke.”


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humbled and covertly irreverent: “I am not declaring myself a Marxist of course, because one does not join scholarly methods. / One masters and creates them.”24 Finally, when repenting his attempts “to study works of art as a closed system,” he did not say anything entirely new.25 One year before, in a letter to Tynianov, he had already criticized early Formalism’s anti-sociological “position,” calling it “antediluvian”; but instead of abandoning Formalism in that letter, Shklovsky discussed its future development.26

Shklovsky wrote this letter when Tynianov was in Prague with Roman Jakobson. Tynianov’s sojourn resulted in the nine theses he and Jakobson wrote under the title “Problems in the Study of Literature and Language.” These constituted a plan to bring together the most prominent Russian Formalists under the leadership of Shklovsky in order to move their research in a new direction: to study the systems of literature, of language, and of social and economic life no longer separately but by finding the laws governing their correlation. However novel, this systematic approach had been anticipated as early as in Tynianov’s Formalist classic—his 1924 article “On Literary Fact.” Tynianov and Jakobson’s project could have been the next step in Formalism’s evolution. Due to political circumstances, it did not happen, but the endeavor itself clearly shows one thing.27 Despite the Formalists’ natural interest in Marxist scholarship, they did not depend on it as much as Shklovsky claimed. They were working on an alternative, all-embracing theory, whose main difference was that, unlike Marxism, it proceeded from the assumption that all spheres of life are mainly governed by their own, internal laws.

Ex Machina

“The world, which has lost art and with it the sensation of life, is presently absorbed in monstrous self-murder.”

—Viktor Shklovsky One of the indicators of change in Formalist theory is the concept of byt. Though a cognate of the English to be, it does not mean existence— 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Olga Panchenko, ed., “Iz perepiski Iu. Tynianova i B. Eikhenbauma s V. Shklovskim,” Voprosy Literatury 12 (1984): 194. 27 For Shklovsky’s and other Formalists’ reactions to the theses, see Aleksandr Galushkin, “‘I tak, stavshi na kostiakh, budem trubit' sbor…’: k istorii nesostoiavshegosia vozrozhdeniia OPOIAZa v 1928–1930 gg.,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 44 (2000): 136–53.

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unlike its lofty paronym bytie. The most accurate translation of byt might be “everyday life.” As mentioned above, Formalism set out by opposing art to everyday existence. Later, the Formalist understanding of byt changed together with Formalist theory, which reassessed the literary everyday as a sometimes-active factor in literary evolution.

It would seem superfluous to ask which version of Formalism was closer to Marxism—the one that opposed the everyday or the one that recognized it as adjacent to literature. Yet the matter is not so simple. In part, the answer depends on what branch of Marxism is at issue. In this article, I am most concerned with the Marxian criticism of the Frankfurt School as represented by Horkheimer and Adorno.28 This comparison may come as a surprise considering that in the 1920s the Formalists and the Frankfurt critics scarcely knew about each other’s work,29 not to mention the fact that the first Soviet decade witnessed a boom of various sorts of “homegrown” Marxist literary scholarship. 30 However, the Russian Marxists of the time did not try to study mass literature theoretically although they paid attention to it.31 Furthermore, because the Frankfurt School’s approach to the problem of mass culture has gained prominence in contemporary academic discourse, I would suggest that it is by juxtaposition with the Frankfurt School that the ideas of the 28 For clarity’s sake, these two critics are compared with Shklovsky alone as the inclusion of Eikhenbaum and Tynianov would require an excursus on the institutional history of Formalism and certain divergences between the three Formalists—a problem too complicated to be treated in passing. 29 An exception is Walter Benjamin, hardly definable but associated with the Frankfurt School nonetheless, who, as Galin Tihanov writes, “[i]n 1928 […] praised enthusiastically the 1926 French translation of Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey, insisting that the book be translated into German” (“The Politics of Estrangement: The Case of the Early Shklovsky,” Poetics Today 4 (2005): 668). Tihanov also mentions Herbert Marcuse’s interest in Shklovsky’s defamiliarization theory, but this came later, only in the 1960s. 30 For other literary schools of the first Soviet decade, see Galina Belaia, Don Kikhoty revoliutsii – opyt pobed i porazhenii (Moscow: RGGU, 2004) and Evgenii Dobrenko and Galin Tihanov, eds., Istoriia russkoi literaturnoi kritiki: sovetskaia i postsovetskaia epokhi (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011). 31 The government’s reaction to mass literature was twofold. In some cases, officials tried to guard the proletarian readers against it, for example, by withdrawing pulp fiction from libraries (see Evgenii Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia. Sotsial'nye i esteticheskie predposylki retseptsii sovetskoi literatury (Saint Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1997), 50). At the same time, Nikolai Bukharin, the Bolshevik party leader, encouraged the writing of ideologically loyal pulp fiction as an alternative to the bourgeois output of the same kind. As Katerina Clark writes, Bukharin “proposed in a Pravda article of 1923 that Soviet literature produce a ‘red Pinkerton,’ or in other words, that it apply the kind of plot structures one sees in detective and adventure literature [the most popular genres at the time] to produce fiction celebrating the triumph of Soviet Communism” (Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996), 173).


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Russian Formalists in this field can be measured most productively. Surprisingly, a careful study of Formalism reveals that it was not its later version, which embraced the social, but an earlier one, that had more in common with the Marxian approach of the Frankfurt School.

When contrasted, the writings of Shklovsky and those of the Frankfurt critics reveal that, for all their differences, they have a common enemy: the mechanization of life. Horkheimer and Adorno write about the dictate of the culture industry under which everything is identical and ready for consumption so that “[a]utomobiles, bombs, and films hold the totality together.”32 This resonates with Shklovsky’s aphorism from “Art as Device”: “Automatization eats away at things, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.”33 These two lists both present the culture industry’s blindness to the important differences between things.

In this excerpt from Shklovsky (just as in Horkheimer and Adorno), the theme of war appears, which recalls the fact that the famous “Art as Device,” from which it is taken, was written in 1916, during World War I. Unlike the majority of Russian litterateurs, Shklovsky fought in the war; he enlisted in 1914, and in 1917 he even spearheaded an attack, was shot through the stomach, and was decorated thereafter. The theme of war was neither random nor abstract for Shklovsky, and its presence in “Art as Device” gives a glimpse into the ethical undertones of his celebrated essay.

For Shklovsky and the two Frankfurt critics, the greatest peril mechanization poses is in lulling people’s senses and imposing sameness on perception. Moreover, all three realize that classical works of art are themselves subject to automatization. Shklovsky develops this idea with regard to his defamiliarization theory, explaining the constant need for new artistic forms.34 Horkhiemer and Adorno approach it from a more political perspective, writing about the way in which the radio, this “progressive latecomer to mass culture,”35 has the same, stultifying effect on its audience, no matter whether it is playing “the scientifically

32 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 95. 33 Shklovskii, O teorii prozy, 13. 34 Radoslav Borislavov (with a reference to Galin Tihanov’s “The Politics of Estrangement”) draws parallels between defamiliarization theory and the idea of disturbing society’s perceptual inertia, present in the works of the Frankfurt School, including “Georg Simmel’s discussion of modernity and automatization in […] ‘The Crisis of Culture’ and Walter Benjamin’s conception of enervation and shock aesthetics” (“Viktor Shklovskii—between Art and Life” (PhD dissertation, the University of Chicago, 2011), 34). 35 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 128.

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endorsed praise of the laxative […] the overtures of La Traviata and Rienzi” or “the Führer’s overt command.”36

It is for the same reason—attacking the mechanization of life—that Shklovsky and the Frankfurt critics assail positivism. In “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Horkheimer writes of traditional theory’s Cartesian “tendency [...] towards a purely mathematical system of symbols.” 37 According to Horkheimer, such an approach disregards “experiential objects” and “experiential judgments.”38 Exactly the same opposition is present in “Art as Device,” in which Shklovsky writes that because of the “algebraic method of thinking” “we do not see things but recognize them by their primary characteristics.”39 Furthermore, Horkheimer criticizes positivism as it developed “especially in the Anglo-Saxon universities since Spencer’s time,” and Shklovsky, too, chooses Spencer as the object of his critique of positivism.40 He argues against Spencer’s interpretation of rhythm in poetry as an “economy of effort [ekonomiia sil].”41 After an excursus into art history, Shklovsky concludes that rhythm in art originally presents a “violation that cannot be anticipated,” and when this rhythm is automatized, a new and unforeseen one should replace it.42 In Shklovsky’s opinion, the same is true for art in general. The mode of Shklovsky’s thinking can be read as a kind of negative dialectics, to use Adorno’s term.

One could object, of course, that, despite an apparent resemblance between automatization (Shklovsky) and mechanization (Horkheimer and Adorno), the relationship between the two lines of thought might be better understood as “dissimilarity of the similar,” to use Shklovsky’s expression.43 This is true insofar as Critical Theory and Formalism should not be conflated; for they were indeed different, one proceeding from a holistic Marxian understanding of how society functions, and the other

36 Ibid., 129. 37 Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory. Selected Essays (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 2002), 190. 38 Ibid., 190 and 189. 39 Shklovskii, O teorii, 12. At the same time, this did not prevent Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum from illustrating their points with algebraic symbols in a few texts of theirs. However, it was not the OPOIAZ brand of Formalism that employed mathematical methods, but that of Boris Iarkho. See Boris Iarkho, Metodologiia tochnogo literaturovedeniia: Izbrannye trudy po teorii literatury (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul'tur, 2006). 40 Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 191. 41 Shklovskii, O teorii prozy, 22. 42 Ibid., 23. It should be noted that Shklovsky, according to Galin Tihanov, read Spencer in Veselovskii’s rendition (“The Politics of Estrangement,” 682). 43 See Viktor Shklovsky, Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar, trans. Shushan Avagyan (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011).


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deriving its theory from the examination of specific, immanent laws of a given system, in this case literature. However, acknowledging these differences does not undermine the comparison, but makes it more reliable: it shows how two different schools of thought, unwittingly, became temporary allies—not even because they shared some values but primarily because they opposed certain pervasive modernizing developments of their day. Moreover, it can be argued that, for the same reason, each of the schools made a step towards the other. Thus, the aversion to the mechanization of society, responsible for mass culture, made Horkheimer and Adorno resort to modernist culture as an alternative. This, in turn, allowed many to reproach them for “the valorization of traditional modernist high art as the locus of some genuinely critical and subversive, ‘autonomous’ aesthetic production.”44 Meanwhile, Shklovsky’s attack on automatization in “Art as Device” sounded almost passé, if not conservative, at times despite his famed hymn to the future with its automobiles, airplanes, and other machines.45

It is of course noteworthy that, just as Horkheimer and Adorno, the Shklovsky of “Art as Device” seemed to have a penchant for the kind of art not intended for the masses, especially Futurism (no matter how deliberately vulgar its behavior often was). This may be interpreted in different ways, but the irrefutable fact is that the shape which Formalism took in the 1920s dispels its reputation for being decidedly elitist.

On the World Cotton Market

“At this moment, I need time and a reader. I want to write about unfreedom, Smirdin’s salary books, magazines’ influence on literature, and […] life.”

—Viktor Shklovsky The 1920s in Russia witnessed the return of automatization, the return of byt. At some point, it had seemed to be gone. For, even though it was the mechanization of life and human perception that made possible the Great War and the Russian revolution, the war machine undid the very everyday life from which it had emerged by sowing destruction. In the Formalists’ own words, “the main difference between revolutionary life and habitual existence [was] that now everything [was] felt [oshchushchat'sia]. Life became art.” 46 However, when matters quieted down, byt returned, catalyzed by the New Economic Policy, which was 44 Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979): 133. 45 Such is the argument Galin Tihanov makes in “The Politics of Estrangement.” 46 Shklovskii, Gamburgskii schët, 182.

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implemented at the time. The Bolsheviks saw NEP as a necessary evil, as Lenin explained: “The New Economic Policy means that the grain levy [prodrazverstka] is replaced with a tax and that, to a considerable extent, capitalism is being restored. To what extent, we do not know”; “the private market overpowered us.” 47

The return of the market affected art. A demand for mass literature appeared. Before the revolution, when Russian literature of the Silver Age flourished, the market was easier to ignore. But now the intelligentsia (let alone the aristocracy) had shrunk so much that it no longer determined the literary situation. A great many serious writers lost their readers, and this had an impact on the whole industry.

For some time, a degree of inertia remained in the Formalists’ statements, as in Shklovsky’s preface to his Theory of Prose: “My task in the theory of literature is to study its inner laws. To draw a parallel with a factory, I am interested not in the state of affairs on the world cotton market, and not in the policy of its trusts, but only in the count of yarn and the ways of weaving it.”48 However, the articles Shklovsky and his fellow Formalists wrote about the crisis of literature suggested otherwise: the market became a great obstacle to Formalism, and counting yarn could suffice no longer.

In 1924, Tynianov described the crisis of literature as follows: Writers write joylessly, as if they were moving rocks. With even less joy, the publisher rolls these stones to the publishing house, and it is with total aloofness that the reader looks at them both. Everybody can see the writer, who writes; some see the publisher, who publishes, but it seems as though nobody sees the reader who would read. What distinguishes today’s reader is precisely the fact that he does not read.49

And yet the reader did read, of which Tynianov was perfectly aware.

Only Russian writers and publishers felt uninvolved. The face of Russian literature was no longer Russian, or, as Shklovsky said, it was hard to recognize because now “Jack London, O. Henry, and Pierre Benoit [were] the most widely read Russian writers.”50 That is to say, foreign 47 Vladimir Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, izdanie 5-e (Moscow: Izadatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1970), 159–60 and 208. 48 Shklovskii, O teorii prozy, 5-6. 49 Tynianov, Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino, 150. 50 Shklovskii, Gamburgskii schet, 192. To the Soviet reader, all three were authors of adventure stories, including O. Henry. O. Henry’s reception in Soviet Russia is an interesting case, which Eikhenbaum addressed in the 1925 article “O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story” [O. Genri i teoriia novelly], writing that it is the sentimental


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writers ousted their Russian peers from the market. The market was inundated with adventure novels, so numerous and, paradoxically, so similar in their plots’ diversity (which was the way readers reacted to them, regardless of “the meaning of the product itself”) that Shklovsky saw them as automatization incarnate.51 Typical of this trend was the author of Tarzan novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Shklovsky must have felt the bitter irony of the situation, for in 1921 (before the boom of mass literature) he had pinned his hopes on the Serapion Brothers—the literary movement he promoted as its senior member.52 The Serapions did not have a doctrine, but their goal was to create dynamic literature that would overcome the inertia of automatization. One of the strategies for doing this was writing plot-driven literature, which they thought Russia had always lacked, having to learn from Western writers. Despite the fact that the Serapions such as Lev Lunts or Veniamin Kaverin penned some plot-driven stories of high literary quality, this technique was soon compromised—“guessed” by the market and put on the production line.

Other theorists, as sophisticated as the Formalists, could have stigmatized this new literature as unworthy of attention. Yet the Formalists disagreed. Shklovsky wrote: “Tarzan may be ignored, and this will be traditional but silly. It is necessary to study mass literature and the causes of its success.”53 However, before the Formalists wrote their works devoted to the problem of the market, an extraordinary event in the history of literary scholarship took place. It can be argued that Shklovsky began to solve this problem not in theory but in practice. To understand the market, he—by that time an established author but not popular among the masses—undertook to write an adventure novel exactly like those about Tarzan. The 1925 novel, titled Yperite, was coauthored by the Serapion Brother Vsevolod Ivanov, but, for brevity’s sake, it is discussed here in relation to Shklovsky alone. However, before more is said, it is important to stress: because Yperite was written at the zenith and as part of mass literature of the time of NEP, it should be viewed as distinct from Shklovsky and the Serapions’ earlier plan of plot-driven literature as a force opposed to automatization. side of the American author’s stories that appealed to his fellow countrymen whereas the Soviet reader was primarily interested in the twists of O. Henry’s stories filled with situational irony. 51 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 98. 52 See Viktor Shklovskii, “Serapionovy brat'ia,” Knizhnyi ugol 7 (1921): 18–21. Many famous writers started as members of this group, including Mikhail Zoshchenko and Veniamin Kaverin. Evgeny Zamyatin was one of its leaders together with Shklovsky. 53 Viktor Shklovskii, “Tarzan,” Russkii sovremennik 3 (1924): 253–54. Novels and films about Tarzan were exceptionally popular with the mass audiences at that time.

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The plot of Yperite—so cinematographically eventful and defiantly inconsistent—would require several pages to summarize. It flaunts the clichés of the day. The novel describes a chemical world war between the Western capitalists and the Soviets. These and other elements of science fiction (à la H. G. Wells) abound in Yperite, reflecting the sensationalism of the Soviet newspapers of the time. New York, for example, mechanically heats its own atmosphere while the famed London fogs are drained into a smog sewer system, and the provincial-sounding Russian city Ipatievsk (which does not exist in reality) has skyscrapers. The events described are perfectly preposterous, including endless fights and chase scenes. The protagonist, named Slovokhotov (which could be translated as Bigmouth), is a Russian fugitive sailor accompanied by a trained bear. At some point, escaping a legion of enemies, the sailor and the bear get on an ocean liner with bourgeois passengers and sink it, after which these two reach dry land, whereupon they encounter a beautiful young girl whom Slovokhotov saves from a walrus. The girl takes him for Tarzan and covers the naked Slovokhotov (who previously lost his clothes) with a tiger pelt that she happened to have with her (apparently, a mocking reference to Tarzan’s loincloth). Some time later, a painfully banal and also ironic “movie shot” follows: “A handsome young man in a tiger pelt is at the wheel, driving with one hand and embracing the waist of his female companion with the other.”54 Later in the novel, the young girl takes Slovokhotov and his bear to England, where the bear starts drinking because of homesickness.

The list could go on and on, but the point is that even to a reader not so well acquainted with Shklovsky’s work it is obvious that the book is a parody, and Shklovsky reminds the reader of it constantly. He does this by baring the device, undermining the already evanescent verisimilitude of the plot, as when he mentions the contemporary writer Boris Pilniak, whose disconnected narrative style Shklovsky attacked in critical articles: “The secretary spoke like Pilniak: the blizzard. The snow. Wolves. Mother Russia.”55

Yperite was not a success, but the failure was important because it allowed Shklovsky to experience the resistance of the newly established literary “economy.” The market played an ironic trick on him again. First, it appropriated Shklovsky and the Serapions’ project of plot-driven literature, having immediately automatized it, while in this case it not only absorbed Shklovsky’s move but anticipated it, for Yperite was far from being the only attempt to outwit the market in such a way. Mariia Malikova writes that the twenties witnessed the rise of adventure novels 54 Vsevolod Ivanov and Viktor Shklovskii, Iprit. 100 let russkogo formalizma, chap. 11. 55 Ibid., chap. 56.


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authored by professional and sometimes refined Russian writers who had lost their old readers and had to survive by emulating their Western colleagues and even by passing off their own work as translations of Western originals.56 Like Shklovsky and Ivanov, many of these writers, if not most of them, hinted at the real state of affairs, resorting to irony, hoping to be heard and excused, but this could not make them successful on the market. Such undertones of meaning were either indistinct to the masses—just as were the undertones of classical operas absorbed by the never-abating radio broadcasts, to use Horkheimer and Adorno’s example. Or it is quite likely that these undertones even prevented the audience from recognizing the home product as identical to the foreign, desired one.

A theoretical leap was needed to reckon with this new reality, and Eikhenbaum made it in his theory of literature and the literary everyday, put forth in the eponymous article of 1927.57 Though simple at first blush, this theory bespoke a complex philosophy of literature that had always been latent in Formalism. Eikhenbaum wrote that while Pushkin’s iambic tetrameter, for instance, had nothing to do with the “socioeconomic conditions of the […] epoch,” Pushkin’s engagement in journalism that helped to establish new literary genres was the result of a socioeconomic shift—the commercialization and professionalization of the literary métier, made possible by the growth of capitalism in Russia.58

Eikhenbaum’s theory, claiming that sometimes the everyday affects literature, may have seemed inconsistent with the Formalists’ earlier works, which is why his students did not accept it at first.59 And yet it was in keeping with Formalist understanding of literature as a self-evolving system.60 It is important to stress that the theory of the literary everyday did not argue for any direct influence of socioeconomic life on literature. The ones affected were the author and the reader; their social behavior changed the environment around literary evolution but not the evolution itself.61 To use another evolutionary metaphor, the role of socioeconomic

56 Mariia Malikova, “Khalturovedenie: sovetskii psevdoperevodnoi roman perioda NEPa,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 103 (2010): 109–39. 57 Boris Eikhenbaum, “Literaturnyi byt,” O literature (Moscow: Sovremennyi pisatel', 1987), 428–36. 58 Ibid., 434. 59 For an account of the Formalists’ interrelationship with their students, see Denis Ustinov, “Formalizm i mladoformalisty,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 50 (2001): 296–321. 60 Cf.: “Art develops by the intellect [razum] of its technique [tekhnika]” (Shklovskii, Gamburgskii schët, 170). 61 Some scholars argue that evolutionary metaphors recurrent in Formalism bespeak an almost literal extrapolation of the theory of evolution (be it Darwinian or Lamarckian)

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life in literature—in such epochs as the 1920s—could be compared to that which a meteor supposedly played in the evolution of life on this planet, by putting an end to the dinosaurs’ existence. The meteor’s impact on evolution was immense; however, life adapted to the new environment according to its internal, evolutionary laws, not according to the laws of physics that had determined the meteor’s trajectory from outer space.

Shklovsky’s book on Tolstoy was an application of Eikhenbaum’s theory. In his next book, Matvei Komarov: Resident of Moscow, he used the theory of the literary everyday to tackle the problem of the market. The eighteenth-century author after whom the book was named was little known even to scholars of Shklovsky’s time. And yet, when introducing Komarov, Shklovsky quoted Tolstoy, who called Komarov Russia’s most popular author, for it was the commoners, including petty bourgeoisie and merchants, who read Komarov and writers like him more than anyone else. Komarov’s books were part of the so-called lubochnaia literatura, or pulp fiction, which featured adventure stories, often about rogues and criminals, accompanied by lubki, simple and colorful illustrations, similar to today’s cartoons, which the semiliterate could enjoy.

What motivated Shklovsky’s unusual choice of subject was the fact that the literary situation of the late eighteenth century rhymed with that of the mid-1920s.62 Literature of the establishment in the eighteenth century did not have a market of its own (though it did not need one as it subsisted on the aristocrats’ patronage). The only market that existed was that of pulp fiction, mainly consisting of translated Western novels. That Komarov’s name made its way to the surface of the largely anonymous lubochnaia literatura, as well as the fact that his work was based on Russian realities (meeting the challenge of applying Western technique to local material), was highly significant. To Shklovsky, Komarov’s achievement to literature. For more, see Radoslav Borislavov, “Viktor Shklovskii—between Art and Life,” 66–101. 62 Of course, the fact that the Formalists drew parallels between the situation of the eighteenth century and the one in which they found themselves can be criticized as rather untenable from the standpoint of Marxism, since in the twentieth century the new quantity of mass culture arguably led to its new quality. This is the argument Georg Lukács makes when citing Marx’s words about the status of commodity exchange in capitalist societies being different from the societies in which serfdom prevails (as in Russia of the period described by Shklovsky): “Where the commodity is universal it manifests itself differently from the commodity as a particular, isolated, non-dominant phenomenon” (History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 85). For a comparison of Shklovsky and Lukács, see Galin Tihanov, “Viktor Shklovskii and Georg Lukács in the 1930s,” Slavonic and East European Review 1 (2002): 44–65.


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was a formal one, and a large portion of Shklovsky’s book was devoted to it, analyzing the style, genres, and themes of Komarov’s writings.

What made Komarov’s case particularly interesting was the indubitable and lasting nature of his success that rendered his work a fact of literature. It was in this regard that Shklovsky contrasted Komarov with the eighteenth-century aristocrat Antiokh Kantemir, whose satires, published already after Kantemir’s death, were not a fact of the literary evolution of his epoch, according to Shklovsky, though they were later inscribed in the canon of Russian literature. Analyzing Komarov and the eighteenth-century literary market was an endeavor to redress the injustice of “replacing the history of [Russian] literature” with “the study of the influence of the court and the government on literature,” as Shklovsky’s students wrote, echoing their mentor.63

But Shklovsky had an even greater stake in writing about Komarov. Studying the market, especially in its origins, meant dealing with a pure case of literary evolution, which, like its biological analogue, selects certain species and casts others aside. One of the reasons why Komarov succeeded, according to Shklovsky, was his having been one of Russia’s first professional writers, before professional authorship became the literary norm, which it did only in the 1830s. Unlike aristocratic writers, Komarov, as a craftsman, depended on public taste, and its biggest indicators were the royalties he received and the circulation of his books. In other words, exploring Komarov’s professionalism and the market of his time was a pure case for Shklovsky because nothing random, such as the arbitrariness of individual taste, could be mistaken here for the workings of the system of literature.

Studying such details—the authors’ royalties, the books’ circulation, even the publishing houses’ price lists and the rent they had to pay—became the Formalists’ scholarly innovation in conjunction with their overall theory. Their Marxist rivals ridiculed this as a desperate undertaking, not far from vulgar sociologism, but, as Aage A. Hansen-Löve justly writes, the Formalists were indeed “the first to analyze the ‘literary market’ as an economic and communicative phenomenon,” discussing “the communicative aspect of the economic order and the economic aspect of the communicative order.”64

Soon, the Formalists’ students joined the project. Thus, Teodor Grits, Vladimir Trenin, and Mikhail Nikitin developed Formalist theory of the literary everyday as applied to the problem of the market in their

63 Teodor Grits, Vladimir Trenin, and Mikhail Nikitin, Slovesnost' i kommertsiia. Knizhnaia lavka A. F. Smirdina (Moscow: Agraf, 2001), 11. 64 Aage A. Hansen-Löve, Russkii formalizm: metodologicheskaia rekonstruktsiia razvitiia na osnove printsipa ostraneniia (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul'tury, 2001), 391.

Basil Lvoff 84

1929 book Literature and Commerce. The Bookshop of A. F. Smirdin, edited by Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum. The book researched how the professionalization of literary work in the 1830s affected the authors and the readers of the higher classes, making them participate in the market of literature.

It is noteworthy that Grits and his coauthors did not write negatively about the bookseller Aleksandr Smirdin, who published Russia’s first mass magazine The Library for Reading (somewhat ill-reputed in the history of Russian literature), or about such infamous littérateurs of that time as Faddei Bulgarin or Nikolai Grech.65 According to the Formalists, the role that Smirdin, Bulgarin, and Grech played in the commercialization of Russian literature was a progressive one, helping Russian literature to evolve. Thus, thanks to commercialization, journalism flourished, and Pushkin, for one, took advantage of it in his literary journal The Contemporary, having started to move towards original documentary prose.66 This example alone shows that Formalist theory was getting more ambivalent in its criteria, having encountered new problems through the theory of the literary everyday. It was also becoming more promising as it attempted to solve these problems. One can only regret that Formalism was stunted in its development by the stifling Soviet censorship and did not get more time to produce the answers we can now only infer from the Formalists’ writings.

Needless to say that for a Marxist such understanding of literature as in these Formalist works is unsatisfactory. Formalism could easily be accused of reification, when, instead of studying literature in its relation to the overall logic of a given socioeconomic epoch, one abstracts literature and regards it as a self-determined system. But Marxism, too, could be faulted for being reductive in its attempt to bring everything down to matters of the economic order alone, reducing the complexity of literature to a political doctrine.67 Yet these limitations of Formalism and Marxism are also their strengths. The Marxian approach offers a teleological and overarching understanding of the role literature plays in society while Formalism provides the kind of knowledge about the mechanics of literature that a microbiologist or a quantum physicist are after in their fields. As two self-sufficient worldviews, Formalism and Marxism could attack each other ad infinitum. What these two otherwise incompatible doctrines share, nevertheless, is a fascination with “the

65 The Library for Reading was published between 1834 and 1865; until 1848, Smirdin remained its publisher. 66 See Viktor Shklovskii, “Sovremennik,” Novyi LEF 5 (1927): 5–6. 67 See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, “The Phenomenon of Reification”; and also Boris Eikhenbaum, “5 = 100,”Knizhnyi ugol 8 (1922): 38–41.


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objective laws governing human activity,” separating from the individual that which he or she creates.68 For both, the market and mass culture are perfect illustrations of this process.

Today the literary market is greater and the status of the canon weaker than ever while our world continues to be inundated with data like never before. Hundreds of thousands of books are published every year in the U.S. alone; entire continents, such as Africa and Asia, make their presence felt on our literary map more and more, and alongside established forms of high and mass literature, we have new ones emerging on the Internet—from self-publishing to social networks. The current state of affairs challenges our understanding of canon-formation and of literary evolution, and this calls for the elaboration of existing theories and the invention of new ones. Though indispensable on the whole, the scholarship of the sublime (as Harold Bloom would put it) is losing its ability to elucidate the literary status quo. Of course, Digital Humanities scholars are the ones tackling this problem, but, as Franco Moretti’s work shows, no matter how much computational criticism can give us, we need a philosophy of literature in the first place, because data have to be interpreted. I would argue, there is not enough evidence to believe that Digital Humanities scholars are theoretically more advanced than their twentieth-century predecessors. In looking for such a philosophy, we can doubtless resort to a variety of Marxist schools. They have proven useful, even ingenious, but have also discredited themselves more than once by replacing scholarship with ideology and by showing insensitivity to the autonomy of literature. This is why it is time that the Formalist theory of mass literature were revisited to help us navigate the labyrinth of big data.

68 Galin Tihanov, “Marxism and Formalism Revisited: Notes on the 1927 Leningrad Dispute,” Literary Research/Recherche Littéraire 37–38 (2002): 72.

Mythologizing the Past to Survive the Present: Trauma and Cultural Memory in Timur Bekmambetov’s

Imperial Bank Commercials (1992–1997)1

Elizaveta Mankovskaya Princeton University

This paper examines the cultural function of advertising in the first decade of post-Soviet Russia based on an analysis of a series of commercials for Imperial Bank created by Timur Bekmambetov between 1992 and 1997 and broadcast on Russian TV throughout the decade. I analyze how post-Soviet advertising addresses the trauma of the transition to a capitalist state. By adopting the new means of capitalist consumption in a way that relies on an anti-capitalist message, this advertising campaign invokes the Soviet rhetorical subtext of “everything is for the people” and thus makes the transitional period, commonly perceived in terms of the merciless rule of money, less painful. I also argue that the series responds to the trauma of the collapse of the USSR by selecting pre-Soviet historical events as its content. The series lays out a narrative of continuity with the pre-revolutionary past that, on one hand, forgoes any acknowledgement of Soviet history, while, on the other, seamlessly ties together Russia’s pre-1917 existence with post-Soviet Russia. However, as I argue in the second part of the paper, the choice of Russian rulers presented in the commercials complicates these

1 I would like to thank Professor Caryl Emerson in whose seminar this project was initially conceived, my colleague Gabriella Ferrari for her support and help, and my editor Bradley Gorski for his valuable comments and suggestions.

Mythologizing the Past 87

efforts. The images of these rulers rely on familiar Soviet cinematic portrayals, creating a sense of continuity with the Soviet past rather than excluding it from the cultural narrative.

Trauma, Consumption, and Crisis of Identity

By definition, cultural trauma is a collective identity crisis, in which “collective actors” perceive “social pain as a fundamental threat to their sense of who they are.”2 An aspect of the many-sided identity crisis of the 1990s that I would like to discuss here was triggered by radical economic change. The opening of international trade, price liberalization, and privatization of state enterprises deeply affected every member of Russian society in the immediate post-Soviet era. No longer controlled by the state, imported goods flooded the country, private businesses opened, and prices skyrocketed. The result was a drastic change in the modes and practices of consumption which both reflected and contributed to a crisis in attitudes towards consumption. To accommodate capitalist-style consumption, not only the mechanisms of production and distribution needed to be changed but the attitudes and habits of consumers as well.

In the USSR, consumption was subordinated to production and ideologized as rational, oriented toward the pragmatic needs of the consumer and opposed to capitalist consumption driven by artificially created demand.3 Even by the end of the Soviet Union, rational consumption was still subconsciously marked as good, while veshchizm (literally, thing-ism), or a “predilection for material values to the detriment of spiritual values,” was a term used to condemn an “irrational” desire for material goods which were often not available through centralized distribution.4 In Russia’s first post-Soviet decade, capitalist consumption culture largely displaced this socialist ideal of rational consumption and the human values it implied.

Piotr Sztompka, applying trauma theory to deep social changes, considers the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe to be the type of phenomenon that has the potential to be perceived as traumatic despite the positive change that it may bring to the majority of the 2 Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (New York: Oxford UP, 2003), 93. 3 On particularities of Soviet consumption see: Serguei Alex. Oushakine, “‘Against the Cult of Things’: On Soviet Productivism, Storage Economy, and Commodities with No Destination.” Russian Review 73, no. 2 (2014): 198–236. All translations from Russian are mine. 4 Sergei I. Ozhegov and Nataliia Iu. Shvedova, eds. Tolkovyi slovar' russkogo iazyka: 72,500 slov i 7,500 frazeologicheskikh vyrazhenii, (Moscow: Az, 1995), s.v. “veshchism.”

Elizaveta Mankovskaya 88

population.5 Likewise, the pain of the economic transition, while perhaps necessary, reinforced a subconscious perception of capitalist consumption as evil, as the new economy brought along with it unemployment, poverty, and instability for some, and corruption, wealth, and garish consumption for others. A telling symptom of this split is the emergence of a new social type, the “new Russian,” whose essential characteristic, ostentatious consumption, is ridiculed in jokes and humorous anecdotes of the time.6

It was this suspicion of capitalism, bordering on contempt, which the early Russian advertising industry had to overcome. The difficulty of the task was compounded by the fact that advertising itself was seen as an equivocal embodiment of the controversial changes.

On the one hand, advertising was a new and exciting phenomenon that had not been seen on such a scale in the Soviet Union since NEP in the 1920s. It had an enormous resonance due to its novelty.7 It also fulfilled a very important cultural function by portraying a way of life associated with well-off capitalist societies, an aspirational reference point for the new Russia in its transition to capitalist-style consumption. On the other hand, advertising had negative connotations. The products advertised were beyond the reach of many and at the same time of low quality; advertisements themselves looked cheap and trashy, and often, in the case of Western companies, were culturally insensitive or based on mistranslated copies designed for a different target audience.8 While late Soviet advertising held a less intrusive place in the informational field, the new impossible-to-ignore advertising was everywhere. Its demanding, eye-catching nature disadvantageously contrasted with the rational and informative style of the Soviet ads and created nostalgia for the old “people-oriented” mode of consumption, however flawed it was.9 In the new reality dominated by the impersonality of money, advertising replaced reliance on word of mouth and networks of personal

5 Piotr Sztompka, “Sotsial'noe izmenenie kak travma,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 1 (2001): 10. 6 On the image of the “new Russians” and post-Soviet consumption see: Serguei A. Oushakine, “The Quantity of Style. Imaginary Consumption in the New Russia,” Theory, Culture & Society 17, 5 (2000): 97–120. 7 Elena Rykova, “Reklama nachala 90-kh: samye nostal'gicheskie roliki,” RB.ru, April 11, 2008, accessed August 31, 2015, http://www.rb.ru/article/reklama-nachala-90-h-samye-nostalgicheskie-roliki/5190107.html. 8 Jeremy Morris, “Drinking to the nation: Russian television advertising and cultural differentiation.” Europe-Asia Studies 59, 8 (2007): 1387–1403. 9 Oushakine, “Against the Cult of Things,” 205.


relationships in acquiring information on how to access defitsit goods.10 Moreover, in the midst of political and economic crises and instability of the post-Soviet period, colorful pictures of the “dolce vita” looked like a blasphemy, a “feast in the time of plague.”11 As one author remembers, writing in 2010: “After the collapse of the USSR we all started to resemble dancing natives who were willing to sell our motherland for some pretty beads.” Feelings of blame and self-inflicted trauma inform this retrospective vision: not only was the motherland lost, but we were the ones selling it. The new culture represented by omnipresent consumption emerged as a world of foam-rubber values.12 Buying consumer goods was symbolically equated to selling the motherland, and the values it once stood for.

People in the advertising industry felt this stigma as well. They were well aware that advertising was viewed as something unworthy of attention and not respected. Marina Sobe-Panek, a copy-writer at the time, remembers: “I became an object of derision for my friends. Now ad people are blue blood, but then it was considered a different level.”13 Many chose advertising not because it promised an appealing career but because it was a way to make ends meet in the midst of sudden and traumatic social and economic changes. Vladimir Perepelkin, who worked as a copywriter in the early 1990s, recalls: “I hardly knew myself what I was doing […] In fact, it was very difficult to adapt [...] when this destruction happened, I suffered psychologically for quite some time. It was very unusual, it wasn’t right—it was as if an arrow was shot and it landed in another dimension.”14 Finding a response to this mistrust and discontent was a defining task for the early stage of post-Soviet advertising in Russia.

The unprecedented state of advertising in these first post-Soviet years also contributed to the search for a solution to the emotional crisis in the attitude toward capitalist consumption. In its early years, post-Soviet advertising fulfilled few of the functions associated with it in developed

10 Aleksei Levinson, “Zametki po sotsiologii antropologii reklamy i… literatura,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 22 (1997), accessed August 31, 2015, http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo /1997/22/levinson.html. On the mechanism of networking and personal relationships in late Soviet consumption see: Yegor Gaydar, and Karl O. Pöhl. Russian Reform/ International Money (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 27. 11 Levinson, “Zametki po sotsiologii antropologii reklamy.” 12 Tat'iana Prudinnik, “Detstvo-90: nachalo epokhi veshchizma,” Interfax.by, March 30, 2010, accessed August 31, 2015, http://www.interfax.by/article/61758 13 Marina Sobe-Panek, “Istoriia rossiiskoi reklamy ot “MMM” do chiken-sheika,” Interview with Aleksandr Gorbachev. Afisha-Gorod, 24 Dec 2012, accessed 31 August 2015, http://gorod.afisha.ru/archive/ad/. 14 Vladimir Perepelkin, ibid.


capitalist economies. For instance, commercials were not yet aimed at particular demographics. Advertisers often did not even know what goods they were promoting because clients asked for commercials that did not explicitly mention products or services.15 The industry was booming, but not always because advertising led to more sales. For clients, advertising was often a way to either show off their wealth or to signal trustworthiness to the authorities: “...advertisements weren’t intended for customers, as a rule; people made them for themselves, to put in an appearance on television. Or, maybe, to please somebody in particular.”16

In response to the negative attitude toward advertising, the industry began to advertise itself. Public service announcements appeared in an effort to show that advertising can not only sell valuables but also promote values. The first non-commercial Russian advertising campaign was created by a group of enthusiasts in 1992 and aired for several years.17 It became immensely popular and is referenced to this day as the first public service campaign in Russian advertising. It consisted of several thirty-second commercials with reassuring slogans like, “Don’t be afraid of change” and “Call your parents.” The copywriter Igor Burenkov recalls, “The philosophy was simple—advertisers are socially responsible people. We are not extortionists who dupe suckers. We are citizens of Russia, just as good as any others.”18 The industry also began to teach consumption: to construct a reality in which new goods and services appeared necessary. “We advertised not even brands, but ideas. One needs to use a bank. To buy CDs,” remembers director Timur Bekmambetov. The first and most important step in this process was to associate capitalist advertising and, by extension, capitalism itself with positive values. One of the boldest campaigns of this kind was a series of commercials for Imperial Bank directed by Bekmambetov, which ran for almost the entire decade of the 1990s.

The series stood out in the sea of advertising ephemera to such an extent that it won multiple awards throughout the decade, and is still remembered more than a decade later.19 It was recently voted the best 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 “Igor' Burenkov. Chelovek, kotoryi zastavil Rossiiu pozvonit' roditeliam,” Sostav.ru, August 3, 2011, accessed May 29, 2016, http://www.sostav.ru/columns/efir/2011/ burenkov/ 18 Igor Burenkov, “Istoriia rossiiskoi reklamy.” 19 The series won several international awards, including the Golden Apple at the Moscow International Advertising Festival in 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996; the Golden Drum at the International Advertising Festival “Golden Drum,” 1995; and a gold medal at the International Cinema Festival in Houston in 1995.


Russian ad campaign of the twentieth century at the Moscow International Advertising Festival.20 It was also emblematic of the epoch in that it had many goals, but not the one usually expected of advertising: it did not aim at increasing sales. It appears that the client, Imperial Bank’s president, Sergei Rodionov, was not interested in expanding his client base, since Imperial Bank was a corporate bank involved in state business, and therefore did not rely on clients from the general public.21 According to Bekmambetov, for Rodionov the ad campaign was therapy of a sort: “The world was dark, money was scary, man’s soul hurt, he was probably trying to balance his life.”22 Bekmambetov’s creative approach also stemmed from his own circumstances. Like many trained film directors, Bekmambetov took up advertising in the 1990s to earn a living. But he also wanted to use advertising as a substitute for cinema and take the opportunity to create something meaningful. He perceived advertising as a conversation with viewers: “communication through advertising was the only possible type of communication. There was nothing else that united people, that told them about themselves. There were no movie theaters, on TV there were Mexican soaps, on video, American movies.”23

In order to engage in this conversation, Bekmambetov and Rodionov set a surprising goal: to do something for kids, in the words of Bekmambetov, “to teach them something good.” Here, the director continues the mission of the public service advertisements mentioned above. In essence, because it lacked a concrete product to promote, the Imperial Bank series was very similar to public service announcements: it advertised values instead of goods. It responded to the nation’s identity crisis by promoting not Imperial Bank, but capitalism itself.

Towards its goal of conveying abstract values, the campaign featured recognizable episodes and figures out of Russian and world history from Genghis Khan to Ivan the Terrible and Napoleon, all seemingly unrelated to the task of advertising a bank. In fact, the viewer never even knows exactly what is being sold: the only reference to the bank is a terse mention of its name at the end of each commercial. Over the course of six years (1992–97), Bekmambetov produced a total of eighteen 20 “Opredelena luchshaia reklama dvadtsatogo stoletiia,” Sostav.ru, September 17, 2010, accessed August 31, 2015, http://www.sostav.ru/columns/mmfr20/parts/6/5/ 21 “25 let Vsemirnoi Istorii s Bankom Imperial,” InterRight Information Agency, August 17, 2015, accessed November 15, 2015, http://www.inright.ru/news/economy/20150817/ id_10557/; Vladislav Pisanov, “‘Imperial’ ne dotianul do ‘pervoi zvezdy’,” Gazeta Trud, March 30, 2004, accessed May 31, 2016, www.trud.ru/article/30-03-2004/69799_imperial_ne_ dotjanul_do_pervoj_zvezdy.html 22 Timur Bekmambetov, “Istoriia rossiiskoi reklamy ot “MMM” do chiken-sheika.” 23 Ibid.


commercials for the bank. The first four of them at least touched upon a theme related to banking: “tochnost',” meaning both “precision” and “punctuality.” This double meaning was used in the tagline “Tochnost' – vezhlivost' korolei” (“Punctuality/precision is the politeness of kings”), which played out in different contexts in the four commercials, but the message that one can entrust money to the Imperial Bank was made somewhat explicit only in one. In the following fourteen commercials, the slogan became even more obscure; it simply read: “World history. Imperial Bank.”24

Beyond connecting Imperial Bank to the prestige of world history, the commercials also help to overcome the emotional crisis in attitudes toward consumption. While not advertising any specific commodities, the series suggests that viewers engage in the new economy by accepting banking as its inherent part. To that end, perhaps one of the most powerful strategies used to appeal to the values of the implied viewer is an explicitly anti-monetary orientation. The commercials boldly state that money is not important, a perhaps counterintuitive message in the new economy, especially coming from a bank.

When money or material wealth comes up in several commercials, instead of highlighting the attractiveness of money, the ads question its true value. Two commercials address this idea most explicitly. In one, Alexander the Great orders his army to burn their plunder in order to lighten their loads as they march to victory. The other portrays an idyllic Incan society, in which gold was used not as money, but to craft beautiful objects. When the Spanish invade, they steal the golden objects and melt them down into bullion. In the commercial’s last line, the narrator tells us that the Incas pitied the Spaniards, because “they were born in a place where there is nothing more beautiful than a gold brick.”

In the Imperial Bank commercials, money is stripped of value and is eloquently contrasted to the important things that money cannot buy. This message is touchingly represented in a different commercial about Napoleon. Defeated in Russia, the emperor flees for his life. At a border post he is met by an old woman who wants “to see her emperor.” Flattered, Napoleon gives her a coin with his portrait saying, “Here you are, madam. Here I look much better.” The commercial ends with the old woman running after the emperor, hoping to catch one more glimpse of him. By juxtaposing the emperor’s portrait on the coin with an image of the old woman longing for personal communication with the real emperor, the commercial implies that money can be a barrier in human

24 The entire series of Imperial Bank commercials is available on YouTube. All quotations are in my translation.


interactions. The metaphor is reinforced in the final shot as a road block physically stops the old woman’s further pursuit of the emperor.

The Imperial Bank commercials not only advertise a bank without explicitly stating what the bank wants the viewer to do, they also advertise it by saying that money is not important and there is no need to strive for it. This seemingly counter-intuitive strategy disconnects the idea of banking, one of the cornerstones of capitalism, from the negative connotations around money that ruled the new economic order. Paradoxically, precisely by denying the value of money, the essential element of both banking and capitalism, the Imperial Bank commercials attempt to generate trust in the new economy: they present a capitalism with a human face. To further dissociate capitalism and even capitalist consumption from the chaotic and atomized state of society of the 1990s, the commercials rely on another strategy. They represent history as a series of episodes in which a common man or woman is as important as any of history’s greatest actors.

In one way or another, the relationship between greatness and commonness is present in almost every commercial of the series. One of the most powerful images is in the commercial about Prince Dmitry Donskoi, the fourteenth-century liberator of Russia from the Mongols. The commercial opens on the image of a common young man sleeping on the grass; he smiles and opens his eyes, then suddenly crosses himself and looks frightened. The camera then pans out to show the endless ranks of the Russian army, the battle with the Mongols, and finally Dmitry Donskoi in a masked helmet. The young man approaches the prince, trembling and shouting something inaudible. The prince takes off his helmet, puts it on the young man, and embraces him in order to calm him down. Donskoi then turns to his army and issues a battle cry, which becomes audible only when the warriors respond in kind, and the prince leads them without his helmet, dressed as a simple soldier. The commercial ends with the words, “Dmitry Donskoi. World history. Imperial Bank.” The gesture of putting the helmet on the simple man symbolically and visually equates them. Because the helmet has a mask, the head of the peasant literally becomes the head of the prince. The prince’s battle cry is mute until the soldiers add their voices to his and the army charges into battle only when the prince has changed places with the common soldier, suggesting that the people and the state are one.

This message acquires another dimension in the commercial about Genghis Khan. The commercial starts with an image of an old Mongol man and his three sons. The narrator says: “Once a father asked his sons: ‘What is the greatest pleasure for a man?’ ‘To hunt with a golden eagle,’ answered the eldest son. ‘To be rich,’ answered the middle one. And only


the youngest, Ögedei, said what his father wanted to hear: ‘To care about one’s fatherland is the greatest pleasure for a man.’ And he didn’t lie, Ögedei, the future ruler of Mongolia, for just so had lived his great father, Genghis Khan.”

The visual illustration of the story, which begins as a parable that has no names and thus applies to everybody, is also significant. At the words “to care about the fatherland” we are shown the youngest son handing his father a bowl of soup, and for a moment the shot focuses on the bowl and their hands touching. If in the Dmitry Donskoi commercial the message seemed to be, The state is the people and the people are the state, then here it is, To care about one’s fatherland means to care about one’s father. Great historical figures become human, and abstract good for the state acquires a personal dimension. In this way, portraying the common man next to the powerful ruler helps make peace with another symptom of the trauma of the capitalist transition. It challenges distrust of the state, which was especially sharp in the 1990s, as the government introduced multiple monetary reforms and an unpopular policy of economic “shock therapy” that was seen by many as more damaging than productive.

National Pride and Trauma of the Soviet

The next logical step in an attempt to make capitalist consumption a positive value was to disconnect it altogether from the traumatic dissolution of the Soviet state. Although consumerism was emblematic of the transition from socialist to capitalist Russia, the Imperial Bank commercials present capitalism in such a way that it does not stand for selling the motherland in exchange for commodities. They do so by mirroring the strategies employed by the dominant political discourse, that is, by describing the collapse of the Soviet state as a return to a pre-revolutionary Russia after the years of exile.

The Belavezha Accords that marked the end of the USSR were seen by many as a symbolical repeal of a 70-year experiment, or a return to normalcy. For society, it was also the first chance to openly mourn “the Russia we lost” to the 1917 Revolution.25 A movement to canonize the last Romanovs gained momentum during the decade. What might have looked like voluntary amnesia was also the work of mourning another trauma: the Revolution itself. The urge to go back to the idealized pre-revolutionary past had its pragmatic aspects. Symbolically, Russia before 1917 appeared as both a lost utopia and a safe place where there was no

25 A documentary film by Stanislav Govorukhin, The Russia We Lost, about pre-revolutionary Russia, aired on state television in 1992.


trace of the trauma of the civil war, Stalin’s repressions, or the present economic devastation.

In his December 1991 address to the country, president Yeltsin took part in this same discourse.26 His words on the country’s new economic and political direction abrogated everything Soviet, replacing recent trauma with the more distant and less painful loss of pre-revolutionary Russia. The turn to capitalism, then, was symbolically presented not as a loss, but as a gain, a return of what was previously lost.

It wasn’t Russia that suffered a defeat, but the communist idea, an experiment that was carried out on Russia and that was thrust on our people. […] This year Russia took over its economy, its property, that was taken away in 1917. The legacy that we received deeply aggrieves us. It feels as if our land was plundered by an enemy.27

Following the spirit of the times the Imperial Bank commercials also presented a longer-term legacy. By connecting Russia directly to its pre-revolutionary past, the commercials showed Russian and world history without any trace of the Soviet period. Intentionally or not, the series avoids the 20th century by several decades; the latest historical event depicted is the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Furthermore, a direct reference to pre-revolutionary Russia can be seen in the very name of the bank, Imperial, which appears at the end of each commercial. While the copywriters derived inspiration from the name of the bank (“We started simply from the word ‘Imperial.’ You know, ‘imperial’—empire, tsars and so on.”28), it is worth remembering another meaning of the word which might also have been a reason for the bank’s name: the imperial, a type of Russian golden coin. Appearing in the Russian empire from time to time, the coin was minted for the longest period at the end of the nineteenth century and existed up until 1917 and thus, this piece of material capitalism signaled the nostalgic turn to almost century-old values.

The main slogan of the campaign is also pregnant with meaning: “Vsemirnaia istoriia. Bank Imperial” (“World history. Imperial Bank”) 26 On the style and ideology of the epoch, see for example: Kirill Kobrin and Nikolai Koposov, “Intelligentsiia i istoriia: klinch,” interview with Irina Chechel' and Aleksandr Markov, Gefter, July 16, 2014, accessed August 31, 2015, http://gefter.ru/archive/ 12703. 27 “Vystuplenie Borisa Yel'tsina po televideniiu 30 dekabria 1991 goda,” in Evgenii Zhirnov, “Zagovor biurokratov,” Kommersant Vlast', December 24, 2001, accessed August 31, 2015, http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/303973 28 Bekmambetov, “Istoriia rossiiskoi reklamy.”


marks not only nostalgia for the old Russia but conveys an idea extremely important for the new Russia. Done with the communist experiment, and freed from the iron curtain dividing the world, Russian history was now seen as fully part of world history. The choice of characters and stories told in the commercials as well as the ratio of world history episodes to those from Russian history speaks for itself. Out of the fourteen commercials with the slogan “World history” eight represent historical episodes that take place outside of Russia, and six are dedicated to Russian history.

What is especially interesting about these episodes is that they render Russia’s relationship to the world smooth and painless. There are virtually no enemies.29 There are opponents, of course, such as libertine France in a commercial about Nicholas I, and there are those who doubt Russia’s fortitude, such as other European powers in the Peter the Great commercial. However, this juxtaposition is almost never an open confrontation: even in the two commercials where the events presented specifically deal with wars with Russia—the Dmitry Donskoi and the war of 1812 commercials—the focus is not on enmity. In the Dmitry Donskoi commercial the Russian army is the center of attention; only very briefly does a lonely Mongol warrior appear. The commercial about 1812, conversely, shows the French side and describes the bravery of Napoleon. Of course, Russian national pride in no way suffers from this generosity of presentation. Every Russian schoolchild knows the outcome of both episodes: Russia is victorious.30

The Russian history commercials present another very curious symptom of the epoch. Relying on heroes from the pre-revolutionary past to tell post-Soviet viewers about the post-Soviet world, the commercials represent another way of dealing with trauma: narrative fetishism. Eric Santner, introducing the concept, defines it as “the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that

29 This trend coincides with broader sentiments at the time. According to the Levada Center, the level of international aggressive sentiment in the Russian public was low in the beginning of the decade. In answer to the question “Does Russia have enemies?” 47% (the largest group) chose “Why look for enemies if all our troubles are internal?” See: Lev Gudkov, “Ideologema ‘vraga’: “Vragi” kak massovyi sindrom i mekhanizm sotsiokul'turnoi integratsii,” in Obraz vraga, ed. Lev Gudkov (Moscow: OGI, 2005), 9. 30 Openness to the world is carefully balanced by the presentation of national pride in the Russian history commercials. The number of portrayed monarchs whose rule was characterized by westernizing or liberal values (Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander II) equals the number of rulers famous for promoting nationalism or more authoritative styles of governing (Dmitry Donskoi, Ivan the Terrible, Nicholas I).


narrative into being in the first place.”31 By connecting the Romanovs directly to the contemporary viewer, the commercials seem to be saying that there might as well have never been a revolution. At the same time they also provide a way of dealing with the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet state that is closely related to the ideology voiced by the official discourse. “In the past, we have overcome even more difficult times. I am sure that we will make it through this difficult period as well,” said president Yeltsin in his year-end address in 1991.32 This idea of “overcoming” and “even more difficult times in the past” is central in several of commercials. By showing heroic and victorious moments of Russian history, the commercials equate the difficulties of the 1990s with any of the many disasters of the Russian past and thus deprive the fall of the USSR of its status as a uniquely disastrous historical event.

Besides embodying moments of achievement and surmounting difficulties, the Russian historical figures portrayed in the Imperial Bank commercials have another function. In an attempt to create a historical narrative uninterrupted by the Soviet trauma they not only pass over in silence the entire Soviet epoch, they actively nullify it. As Paul Ricoeur argued, for any society it is necessary to celebrate its own birth, and this celebration is often a negation of the previous order.33 To do that, the commercials engage in a replacement therapy of a sort. They reinvent the Russian past by relying on heroes who represent the link between the pre-1917 Russia and Russia of the 1990s. However, the series also strives to recontextualize the images of heroes who were popularized in Soviet cinema. By using key figures from Russia’s imperial past, such as Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible in an apparent attempt to skip over the Soviet past, the commercials instead create a sense of continuity with it.34 I argue that it is this, perhaps unintended, therapeutic continuity that won viewers’ hearts at a time when everything Soviet—good and bad—seemed to be condemned by the dominant discourse. In the next two sections I discuss two specific cases of how this continuity was constructed. First, I discuss the commercial about Dmitry Donskoi and

31 Eric Santner, “History Beyond the pleasure principle,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992), 149. 32 “Vystuplenie Borisa Yel'tsina.” 33 Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 261. See also Andrei Zorin, By Fables Alone: Literature and State Ideology in Late Eighteenth and Early-nineteenth-century Russia, trans. Marcus C. Levitt with Nicole Monnier and Daniel Schlaffy (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2014), 16. 34 I use the word “imperial” in a metaphorical sense here. While, strictly speaking, Russia became an empire only under Peter the Great, the expansive policies of Ivan the Terrible can be considered imperial.


show how Donskoi acts as a rival to Alexander Nevsky, the icon of the Soviet victory over the Nazis, and yet, how in this rivalry a continuity of the two figures emerges. Second, I argue that the commercial about Ivan the Terrible, which can be seen as a warning against authoritarian rule, can be read more ambivalently if one takes into account cinematic allusions and the ambiguity of Ivan the Terrible in cultural mythology.

Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoi: A Russian Victory

In 1990, the last Soviet Victory Day parade was held on Red Square. Due to political and economic instability in the first half of the decade, celebrations slightly faded. In the 1990s the war and the Soviet legacy of victory further lost prominence. This gives context to Bekmambetov’s choice of heroes for a commercial about a great battle showing the liberation of Russia from a foreign power. Bekmambetov portrayed not Alexander Nevsky, the icon of Russian victory monumentalized by Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film and used to rally the Soviet Union to victory over the Germans in World War II, but another character, not so heavily marked by the Soviet propaganda and media portrayals. This character is Dmitry Donskoi, the Moscow prince who finished the work started, according to canonic Russian history, by his ancestor Alexander Nevsky. The use of the image of Dmitry Donskoi in the Imperial Bank commercial is also clearly in sync with the efforts of the Moscow authorities who in 1992 named a street after the prince, re-introducing another name into the newly reinvented Russian pantheon of national heroes. While Dmitry Donskoi was not completely free of Soviet associations, these associations were of a different sort than those attached to Alexander Nevsky, and, furthermore, they were rather convenient for rooting a Russian state in the pre-revolutionary past. Like Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoi was evoked during the Great Patriotic War (World War II). For instance, in December 1942 patriarch Sergius, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, suggested gathering donations for “a tank column named for Dmitry Donskoi.”35 Stalin’s extraordinary permission to open a special bank account for these donations was mentioned in all the central newspapers. In early 1944, the Donskoi 35 “Obrashchenie k veruiushchim s prizyvom,” Vtoraia mirovaia voina, Nepridumannye rasskazy o voine, accessed August 31, 2015, http://www.world-war.ru/obrashhenie-k-veruyushhim-s-prizyvom/. The symbolic parallel between the present moment and the decisive battle that occurred more than half a millennium before was strengthened even more by the fact that the patriarch’s name was Sergius, the same as the famous Russian saint who blessed Dmitry Donskoi before the battle of Kulikovo. All this gave the Church a more prominent role in the victory over the Germans and perhaps also made Donskoi a more desirable alternative to Nevsky in the 1990s.


column joined the army. Significantly, this call to action was made not by the authorities, but by the church, which in the 1990s became one of the leaders of the post-Soviet renaissance of pre-revolutionary culture. In this light, Dmitry Donskoi appears to be a deserving rival to Alexander Nevsky, while the portrayal of the Battle of Kulikovo in the Imperial Bank commercial becomes a way to re-appropriate the discourse of Soviet victory and connect it to an alternative version of the Russian past.

However, it could be argued that by striving to displace the Soviet symbol of the victory, Alexander Nevsky, the commercial also does the opposite. In addition to stressing the link existing between the two characters, visual quotes in the commercial also evoke the most recognizable representation of Nevsky’s victory, Sergei Eisenstein’s film, and thus create a continuity with Soviet cultural legacies. Filmed in 1938 under the direct supervision of Stalin, Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky was hugely successful upon its release. Three years later, after the beginning of the World War II, it was re-released creating even bigger resonance. The Battle of Ice in which Nevsky defeated the Teutonic knights became an inspiration for resisting the German invasion. The film became such an icon of Russian heroism that the face of Cherkasov, who played the title role, was used in designing the Order of Alexander Nevsky medal when it was reintroduced in 1942.36

As already mentioned, the link between the two figures is embedded in the historical canon: Nevsky witnessed the beginning of the Mongol invasion while Donskoi’s victory at Kulikovo put an end to it. In its depiction of the Kulikovo battle, the Donskoi commercial relies on this historical link as well. The narration of the commercial immediately sends the viewer back to the beginning of the Mongol-Russian conflict, referring to past generations, among whom would be Donskoi’s direct ancestor, Alexander Nevsky: “They never defeated the Mongols, and their fathers never defeated the Mongols and their grandfathers never defeated the Mongols.” Furthermore, the creators of the commercial seem to have explicitly referenced Eisenstein’s famous depiction of Nevsky. Kirill Zubkov, a historical consultant for the Imperial Bank series, remembers that he was the one who insisted on using a masked helmet in the Dmitry Donskoi commercial. “It was then,” he remembers, “that, for the first time since Eisenstein, a Russian prince appeared on screen in a masked helmet.”37

36 “Orden Aleksandra Nevskogo,” Nagrady Rossii, accessed August 31, 2015, http://ordenrf.ru/su/orden-aleksandra-nevskogo.php. 37 Kirill Zubkov, “Ne streliaite v pianista – on igraet, kak umeet (iz kommentov),” Zubkoff.livejournal.com, accessed August 31, 2015, http://zubkoff.livejournal.com/ 320689.html.


The link between the two liberators is further strengthened through an intermediary portrayal of the Kulikovo battle: the 1980 animated film Swans of the Nepriadva by Roman Davydov, created in celebration of the six-hundredth anniversary of the victory over the Mongols. The most notable feature of this work is that in telling the Kulikovo story it heavily relies on Eisenstein’s cinematographic portrayal of the Battle of Ice. Though created some ten years before the Imperial Bank ad campaign, the animated film reemerged at the time when the commercials were being broadcast. Throughout the 1990s it was released several times in different animated collections. Whether or not Bekmambetov’s team had the cartoon in their “active memory” while creating their version of the battle, the viewer could easily have noticed visual parallels. Perhaps most notable is the embrace that Donskoi gives the peasant while putting his helmet on the peasant’s head in the commercial. In the cartoon a similar scene more closely conforms to a legend, according to which a confidant of the prince exchanged armor with him and died in the battle. The commercial re-accentuates the scene entirely. Instead of a nobleman dying for the prince, we are shown a peasant. Dmitry Donskoi is portrayed as the people’s prince, closer to the canonical portrayal of Alexander Nevsky, who is depicted in Eisenstein’s film among peasants and fishermen.

In the commercial, the representation of Donskoi’s victory as a united effort of the nation, a “narodnaia pobeda” (people’s victory), is achieved through the diverse composition of Donskoi’s army: professional warriors in helmets and armed with battle-axes march side by side with markedly common people, bare-headed and carrying sticks and household items as their weapons. It also coincides with the portrayals of the Russian army in the works of Bekmambetov’s predecessors. A famous line from Eisenstein’s portrayal of Nevsky comes when he assembles his troops: “The armed force (druzhina) is not enough, we’ll raise the peasants.” In Swans of Nepriadva, Sergius says to Dmitry, pointing at the groups of peasants with axes, bear-spears and hammers: “These are your forces, prince. You will win with them.”38 The commercial, while suggesting a union of the state and the people, also connects to the Soviet cinematographic canon of a heroic battle depicted as a narodnaia pobeda.

By relying on the images and associations of Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, the Imperial Bank commercial symbolically reclaims the 1945 victory by implicitly connecting it to the long history of Russian victories before the Revolution. However, the historical figure who is chosen to 38 Lebedi Nepriadvy, directed by Roman Davydov (1980; Moscow: Soiuzmul'tfil'm, 2009), DVD.


represent this link is not Nevsky, but Donskoi, suggesting a careful negotiation between Soviet and pre-Soviet associations that engages both, but fully aligns itself with neither giving the viewer the choice of interpretation.

Ivan the Terrible and the Conditions of Democracy

Like the Dmitry Donskoi commercial, the commercial about Ivan the Terrible can be read productively through its Soviet cinema prototype. The commercial portrays the moment when Ivan finally agrees to return to Moscow after an extended abdication of the throne designed to punish the boyars. A young herald amplifies the final words of the tsar’s speech: “Yielding to the great sorrow of my heart I once again take my lands and shall govern them autocratically (samoderzhavno).” The tsar turns to go when a young man from the crowd shouts: “And on what conditions?” The tsar turns back and quietly mutters: “You will find out later.” In the last shot the young man lies on the snow dead, his head covered in blood as the herald loudly repeats the tsar’s words, “You will find out later.”

Bekmambetov has said that he meant the story as an admonition to the political regime. “The episode about Ivan the Terrible, shown before the elections [of 1996], is a pronouncement that it all could end very soon, especially, if the state is governed vertically,” Bekmambetov explained in an interview.39 The director’s take on the story and its intended meaning is therefore clear: Ivan is a tyrant whose repressions were not good for Russia. But reading the commercial through the Ivan the Terrible myth and its Soviet cinematic incarnation may yield interpretations very different from the director’s stated intent.

To analyze the possible ways of viewing this commercial, it is necessary to take a step back and to remember the history of the Ivan the Terrible myth. Interest in Ivan the Terrible arose in the nineteenth century when the first consistent accounts of Russian history from ancient times to the present started to appear.40 Depending on the political and cultural agenda of the historian, Ivan was interpreted as either a paragon of medieval cruelty or with latent approval and admiration. In the 1930s and 1940s Stalin revived fascination with the Terrible tsar in an effort to find heroes from the past who would serve as a firm foundation for the Soviet state as it came to increasingly resemble

39 Bekmambetov, “Istoriia rossiiskoi reklamy.” 40 Kevin Platt, Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2011), 17. For a more detailed discussion of different representations of Ivan the Terrible prior to the twentieth century see pp. 1–176.


an empire.41 However, Stalin’s revival of the figure of Ivan was not without ambiguities. For instance, only weeks after Sergei Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible, Part I was awarded the Stalin Prize, the release of part II of the film was banned by Stalin’s own orders.42

Timur Bekmambetov’s depiction balances on the edge of a similar ambiguity. Layers of meaning allow viewers to interpret the Ivan the Terrible commercial in different manners depending on their personal beliefs and preferences about the Ivan myth. On the one hand, the violence visited on the youth’s head at the end of the commercial seems to clearly condemn Ivan’s autocratic rule. On the other hand, however, Ivan’s admonition in the commercial that “The boyars embezzled from the treasury; everyone thinks only about his wealth, having forgotten about the fatherland,” would have been particularly relevant for viewers in the midst of the 1990s economic crisis. The boyars could be seen as analogous to the new “oligarchs,” who made fortunes on the privatization of state corporations.43 Disgust with the oligarchs, along with a resurgent nostalgia for Stalinist times, might make some viewers sympathize with the dark but charismatic narrative of strong autocracy for the greater good.

Nevertheless, the commercial’s mythic narrative is disturbed by the final killing of the curious youth. The rebellious question he asks: “On what conditions?” breaks out of the context of medieval monarchy and becomes relevant for democracy in the 1990s. The young man is portrayed with sympathy, his humanity and simplicity is underlined: he jumps up and down trying to warm himself; he rubs his nose in the cold weather. We see his face close up—he smiles curiously and apologetically as people turn to him aghast, and he repeats his question. In the next frame, the young man in his simple coat is shown with his face covered in blood. The loud impropriety of his question opposes the reserved and proper majesty and cruelty of the terrible tsar. The initial words of the commercial: “Darkness is above us, darkness [T'ma nad nami, t'ma]!” can now be reinterpreted. Instead of describing the power vacuum of the interregnum, these words can be understood as a prophetic vision of the coming years under the pathologically cruel and paranoiac tsar. This poses a contradiction absent in the other commercials. The sympathies of

41 Maureen Perrie, The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 42 Platt, Terror and Greatness, 247. 43 Ironically, Imperial Bank’s major clients, Gazprom and Lukoil, were among those corporations led by oligarchs. The bank was also accused of collusion in the form of money laundering. See: “Mamut Alexander Leonidovich,” Compromat.ru, accessed August 31, 2015, http://www.compromat.ru/page_26162.htm.


the audience should be with the young man and thus the episode should be interpreted as clearly dark and traumatic. However, Ivan the Terrible, as cultivated through Soviet-era mythologies, represents the unification and expansion of Russian territory, characteristics that remained attractive to the post-Soviet viewership. The ambiguity of the commercial that makes the figure of the tsar both frightening and appealing is supported by an allusion (conscious or otherwise) to one of the most influential Soviet portrayals of Ivan the Terrible—Eisenstein’s 1944 film.

First, the historical moment chosen by Bekmambetov, Ivan’s decision to return to Moscow, also plays an important symbolic role in Eisenstein’s film. Historically, Ivan’s return marks the beginning of the second part of his reign, during which he founded the secret police, known as the oprichnina, tasked with quashing opposition among the boyars. The second part of Ivan’s reign is often seen as drastically oppressive and as having all but canceled out any positive reforms made during his earlier years in power. In Eisenstein’s film that narrative was changed: the first part of the film, which received the Stalin Prize, ended with Ivan’s return to Moscow to the cheering of the people. Ivan’s famous final remark, “For the sake of the great Russian kingdom,” accompanied by triumphant music suggests that the glorious reign of reform and victories is only about to begin. Throughout the film, Ivan is portrayed as an impulsive but not overly cruel ruler who has the best interests of Russia in mind and this understanding is reinforced in all aspects of the final scene of the film. While the moment chosen by Bekmambetov corresponds to this scene, the similarity is not complete. Eisenstein’s Ivan does not address the crowd as Bekmambetov’s Ivan does in the commercial. Instead, the sentiments of Ivan’s monologue in the Imperial Bank commercial actually find their antecedents in Ivan’s decision to leave Moscow.

In Eisenstein’s film, we see a herald reading the tsar’s decision to abdicate to a crowd gathered in the Kremlin, a setting echoed by the white and gold cupolas shown in Bekmambetov’s commercial. Ivan’s speech in the commercial very closely follows the tsar’s message to his people in the film. I will quote both of them and mark repetitions and similar constructions in italics.

Eisenstein’s film: The princes and boyars, who have accumulated much wealth, care neither for the sovereign, nor the kingdom, nor for Christianity. They refuse to defend Christianity against our enemies in Crimea, the Livonians or


the Germans. They themselves do violence to the people. Therefore the Tsar now abandons his realm and his capital Moscow.44 The Imperial Bank commercial: The boyars embezzled from the treasury, military commanders do not want to defend Christianity, they’ve given Russia over to the mercy of Lithuania, the khans, the Germans, each thinks only of his own wealth, and forgets the fatherland. Therefore, yielding to the great sorrow of my heart I once again take my realm and shall govern it autocratically.45

As we can see, the content and even the sequence of the accusations are parallel, with only slight changes in how each refers to the enemies of Russia.

Furthermore, Ivan’s proclamation at his coronation in the Eisenstein film, “Of the sovereign realm of Muscovy, henceforth shall I be the sole master,” is echoed in the commercial as, “I once again take my realm and shall govern it autocratically.” On the visual level, also, a curious similarity to the scene occurs in the opening of the commercial. In the scene of coronation after Ivan receives the scepter and the orb, for several seconds we are shown only his coronation crown (shapka Monomakha). It takes up the whole frame and demands our undivided attention. A similar device is used in the commercial: the camera focuses on the cross of the crown, it is initially the same size as the crosses on the church cupolas in the background, the hat becomes bigger and bigger until it occupies almost the entire frame and then we are shown the face of the tsar who shouts his accusations.

These visual and verbal parallels with the film, one of the most remembered representations in the project of the mythological construction of Ivan the Terrible in the twentieth century, make it difficult to decide on an unequivocal reading of the commercial.46 On the one hand, the tsar’s position seems to be morally defensible, as he “yields to a great sorrow of his heart,” and considers “the fatherland.” On the

44 “...a te kniazia i boiare, sobrav sebe bogatstva velikie, ne o gosudare, ne o gosudarstve, ne o vsem pravoslavnom khrist'ianstve radeti ne khotiat, i ot nedrugov krymskogo i livonskogo i ot nemtsa khrist'ianstvo oboronyati otkazyvaiutsia, no sami nad narodom nasilie chiniat, a posemu tsar' gosudar' velikii kniaz' gosudarstvo svoe ostavil i stol'nyi grad Moskvu pokidaet.” 45 “Boiare raskhitili kaznu zemli russkoi, voevody ne khotyat byt' zashchitnikami khristian, otdali Rus' na rasterzanie litve, khanam, nemtsam, kazhdyi dumaet o svoem bogatstve, zabyv ob otechestve, a posemu, povinuias velikoi zhalosti serdtsa, beru snova gosudarstva svoi i budu vladet' imi samoderzhavno.” 46 For a discussion of the revision of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s times, see Platt, Terror and Greatness, 176–252.


Figure 1: Left: The coronation crown (shapka Monomakha) from Sergei Eisenstein’s film, Ivan the Terrible (1944); Right: The opening shot of Bekmambetov’s Ivan the Terrible commercial for Imperial Bank (1997).

other hand, the end of the commercial bears even more significance. Ivan the Terrible stops being the “people’s tsar,” his good intentions are overridden by his autocratic power. In yet another twist, the end of the commercial, with or without allusion to the film, could be seen as appealing to advocates of strong rule: the killing of the young man is frightening but necessary in order to support rule by “a strong hand,” which in certain times, the myth suggests, is necessary.

Many figures in the commercials play on historical representations that were well known and mythologized during the Soviet times. While the formal historical chronology of the commercials obliterates the Soviet era from the history of Russia, it nevertheless creates a continuity that smoothens the rupture between the epochs. Intentionally or not, narrative fetishism is also at work here. The idea of empire and a strong national idea represented in the reference to the pre-revolutionary history of Russia while superimposed on familiar Soviet images create an uninterrupted succession that seems to say that neither the trauma of the Revolution, nor the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet state was a true rupture and thus the pleasure principle was never fully compromised in the transition from the pre-revolutionary Russia to the Soviet period and, finally, to the Russia of the 1990s.

Up to this point, my analysis has dealt with ways in which the commercials could be therapeutic for individual viewers. However, the wide circulation of the commercials and their immense popularity also fostered a sense of community in which passive viewers become active participants in the commercials’ broader cultural project. Slogans and images from the commercials became so popular that they took on a life of their own. An example can be found in a commercial featuring Napoleon, in which a bomb thrown in his direction knocks his hat to one side. He takes a moment to readjust his tricorne before blowing out the bomb’s fuse just seconds before it explodes. The image became iconic. The slogan


itself, “Tochnost' – vezhlivost' korolei,” was used in everyday life to parry any comment on punctuality.47

Among the most parodied was the commercial about Catherine the Great and Suvorov. At dinner at the royal court, Suvorov refuses to eat until the first star appears because it is Lent and he is fasting. To get him to eat, the empress awards him a medal—a star. Several parodies use a similar structure and further, not always decent, puns on the Russian word for “star,” “zvezda,” occur in numerous jokes about Suvorov, Kutuzov and even Dracula.48 Parodies, which are funny only to those who know the original, and gestures, which can be understood only if one knows their source, create a language comprehensible to those in the know. In the case of widely shown and highly popular commercials, however, this closed circle includes most of the country. Thus the sense of belonging to a closed community at the same time unifies a large nation. This sort of union creates a different type of response to trauma, which Liisa Malkki called “accidental communities of memory.” These communities, she writes, do not refer “to a local or national community, but rather to a less explicit and often more biographical, microhistorical, unevenly emerging sense of accidental sharings of memory and transitory experience.”49 The wide circulation of jokes and parodies testifies to the formation of a similar community among the viewers of the Imperial Bank commercials, which were shown on national television everywhere in Russia. Though people surely differed in how they perceived the transition to a new system and how they personally experienced it, such communities allowed them to remember, not the trauma itself, but the instances of overcoming it through watching the commercials. Due to the commercials’ constant presentation of different possible interpretations—they are distinctively pro-Western, but also infused with an acute sense of national pride—the series was able to unite people of different backgrounds, political views and social statuses around a common narrative experience.

Conclusion

The specific situation of Russia in the 1990s allowed viewers to actively perceive the commercials’ message about stability in a time of cultural

47 “Napoleon ili ‘S tochnost'iu do millimetra’” in “Vsemirnaia istoriia, bank ‘Imperial,’” Lurkmore, last modified August 6, 2015, accessed August 31, 2015, https://lurkmore.to/ _/80197#mws_+9MXisv. 48 “Ekaterina Velikaia i Suvorov” in “Vsemirnaia istoriia, bank ‘Imperial.’” 49 Liisa H. Malkki, “News and culture: Transitory phenomena and the fieldwork tradition,” in Anthropological locations: Boundaries and grounds of a field science, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (London: University of California Press, 1997), 91.


imbalance and apply it directly to themselves. Furthermore, because advertisements usually do not name their director, the commercials have a relatively weak sense of authorship. This, combined with the type of stories told—historical episodes—give the impression that the great heroes of the past speak directly to the audience. The images make the viewer almost an eyewitness of the described events and thus a participant. In turn, by producing other texts based on the content of the commercials—quotes, gestures, and jokes—the viewer takes an active part not only in watching the commercials but in a therapeutic ritual that eventually produces a sense of relative stability even in the midst of economic and political chaos.

Together with the strategies used in the commercials that I identify above—(1) dismissal of the cult of money, (2) showing simple men next to the great figures of history, (3) engaging the viewer in the memories of the past of Russia and of other countries—the commercials create a very special effect. The Imperial Bank commercials restructure people’s attitudes towards capitalism. Showing the continuity of history, affirming for the viewer that there is no need to forget about timeless values, the commercials smooth the rupture between the epochs.

Whose Ghosts Are These Anyway?

Marina Kaganova Columbia University

Prelude: Back to the Future

Karl Marx famously begins The Communist Manifesto by announcing that “A specter is haunting Europe—a specter of communism.”1 What is arresting about Marx’s sentence, oft-quoted as it is, is that at the time of its composition, communism, in any iteration, was not yet the force it would become. Marx speaks of a specter of something not yet born; this isn’t a traditional specter, which manifests only posthumously; this is a specter of the unborn and as such also undead. For Derrida in Specters of Marx the presence of such a specter, indicates an “out of jointed-ness.”2 And this disparity between the past and the present, the lack of continuity signaled by the apparition of a specter (as with the ghost of Hamlet’s father) has much to do with the concept of justice. It is only an unjust world that makes this presence possible, a world in which “the time is out of joint,” such as the world of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so vigorously referenced by Derrida. This phrase, “the time is out of joint,” triggers Derrida’s extended discussion of justice: Hamlet’s obsession is to

1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (New York: International Publications, 2014), 1. 2 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006), 20.

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dole out the justice that his father’s specter requires—the time is out of joint, the state is rotten, the play is the thing. Hamlet has to “set right” what is incorrect, unjust, and out of joint, to set right the time and overturn the anachronisms. The ghost of Hamlet’s father wants revenge—or Hamlet does, and hence, enter the ghost. But what is the specter of communism out to get? Think of the Bolshevik revolution: taking the wealth and dividing it amongst the people is but a mode of “setting right.” But the Soviet Union failed at setting things right; it failed so grandiosely that the out-of-jointedness created by it warrants a new generation of ghosts, which mix with ones still haunting the realms of injustices pre-dating the USSR, and the new ones created and re-created continuously as the past is pushed under one rug or another, hidden from view, quite often in the most literal sense, by new constructions.

I. Introduction

By exploring some aspects of the contemporary reality in the mountainous province of Svaneti in post-Soviet Georgia in this piece, I hope to bring up questions of whether it is possible to “set things right,” and whether this is a worthwhile pursuit at all. I use the concept of the ghost as an indicator of “out-of-jointedness,” an index of the fact that until a time comes when a balance is achieved and each iteration of the state ceases to overcompensate in one direction or another for what it perceives as the faults of its predecessors, more and more ghosts will manifest, re-generate. It should be impossible to inhabit several temporal spaces at once, but that is exactly what one sees happening in places like Svaneti. I seek to challenge here, or perhaps, warn against, a wholehearted acceptance of what I perceive as the main narrative that has come out of Svaneti in recent years—the region has actually been rather well-represented in the media of late—the narrative of a “land of enchantment,” “mysterious place,” “medieval mountain hideaway,” “forgotten land of song,” frozen in time.3 It isn’t that Svaneti isn’t so beautiful that it often feels almost surreal, unbelievable—the natural landscape is truly amazing. It isn’t that the music isn’t unique or interesting and intense. And it isn’t that the ancient traditions aren’t worth the concern. I am by no means denying Svaneti these attributes.

3 A recent CNN special, for instance, focused on “saving” and “preserving” ancient traditions, and prominently featured a local priest who presented himself as almost single-handedly taking on this mission (“Preserving Georgia’s Ancient Traditions,” CNN International Editions, August 17, 2015, http://edition.cnn.com/videos/world /2015/08/17/spc-on-the-road-georgia-b.cnn); Brook Larmer, “Medieval Mountain Hideaway,” National Geographic, October 2014, 78–99

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What I am denying, however, is its status as a place untouched by international travelers, which seems to be continuously reinforced in media portrayals. It is as if there is some shame, some loss that Svaneti might suffer if we admitted that there are in fact plenty of tourists and music students who regularly visit Svaneti. They too need to be incorporated into the story. Whether or not they are ephemeral, whether ornot they may be considered ghostly (as I suggest they might), we have to accept and admit that they are there. Otherwise, we run the risk of betraying what Edward Said called “the critical consciousness,” which has to be “a part of the actual social world and of the literal body that the consciousness inhabits, not by any means an escape from either one or the other.”4 In other words, it is not productive to continue pretending that only one part of Svaneti—the traditional, old, “authentic” part—exists, or in any case, is worth mentioning. There is, in a manner of speaking, an infrastructure in place that supports the current condition, which includes age-old traditions and development projects. I aim to critique this infrastructure, its history, its installation, its implications and its execution, through discussions of tourism, photography and performance. What I do not wish to do is deny that it is there, deny the conscious efforts to put it there, and the results of these efforts. I want to ask if there may be a way to admit the current reality that often caters rather bluntly to Western tourism, while also reconciling it with the histories and traditions that have been suppressed by either Church or State in the past; if there is a way to steer away from denying trauma or profiting from it, towards allowing it to heal, a way to let time take its time, instead of constantly inhabiting and “re-haunting” an already “haunted” space, wherein “time is out of joint.” I cannot aim, in what follows, to provide solutions—it would take more time, more minds, more space. I aim to simply complicate what I see as the dominant perceptions of a place, through a series of vignettes, flashes of a fractured present gathered from several years of fieldwork.

II. Of George and George and Georgia For the moment, I will take us on a brief detour away from the mountain peaks to Freedom Square in the center of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, where a giant column crowned with a golden statue of St. George slaying the dragon (a Zurab Tsereteli creation) was erected in 2006. Freedom square has had a slew of notable names: it was Yerevan Square, named

4 Edward Said, The World, The Text, The Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983), 16, emphasis mine.


for the capital of neighboring Armenia, under the Russian Empire, Freedom Square when Georgia briefly gained independence in 1918, and Lenin Square after the incorporation of Georgia in the USSR. The Lenin statue was torn down when the Union collapsed, and a shining Patron Saint has replaced him. In very recent history, then-U.S. president George W. Bush stood next to then-Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili commemorating World War II, and got a grenade thrown at him by a Georgian-Armenian man named Vladimir Arutyunian. The New York Times reported on the incident under the headline “Georgian Admits Tossing Grenade Near Bush, but Provides No Motive.”5 The grenade did not detonate, and George Bush got an expressway named after him. The expressway leads into Tbilisi from the East, and essentially must be taken on the way to and from the airport. As for Arutyunian, he did eventually provide a motive: he was upset that the Georgian government had become a puppet of the U.S. “I’m not a terrorist,” Arutyunian reportedly said. “I’m a human being.”6

This incident brings together in a single moment much of the square’s history: the consistent re-iteration, re-naming and re-building. “To write history,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “means giving dates their physiognomy.”7 And these dates—1918, 1991, 2005, 2006—are surely given such remarkable faces in this line of renaming. The Empire named the square after a capital of another country—a gesture of colonial conquest—then the brief independence marked by “Freedom” in the name, followed so quickly by the Soviet tradition of naming everything after Lenin, thus taking away the extant history, denying it as such, replacing it, putting the past and the present so decidedly “out of joint.” And yet, here it emerged again, as it did in so many other places. The pre-Soviet name was re-attached after Lenin was toppled over and carried away, no doubt with the purpose of evoking the memory of independence, however brief, and expunging the Soviet imposition by leaping backwards right over it. Lenin stands someplace, greening in his bronze suit, hidden from sight, while his ghost roams through the cities his legacy sought to homogenize. And how ironic, to have a Georgian-Armenian man, an echo of that old name the square bore, threaten the life of the world’s most frequent user of the word “freedom” right on Freedom square. Is this man, throwing the grenade, himself not a phantom of a past of that very

5 C.J. Chivers, “Georgian Admits Tossing Grenade Near Bush, but Provides No Motive,” The New York Times, July 22, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/22/ international/europe/22georgia.html. 6 “Georgian jailed for Bush attack,” BBC World News, January 11, 2006, http://news. bbc.co.uk /2/hi/europe/4603802.stm. 7 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002), 47.

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square, manifest and threatening another man, one entirely disconnected from this history? How ironic to be greeted time and again upon landing on Georgian soil by George W. Bush Expressway, with new glassy buildings lit up at night in what surely must be an expensive way, showing off the new Georgia so ready to be recognized by those who’ve overlooked it. How many ghosts can we count?

Figure 1: Village of Lenjeri, Svaneti, Georgia, December 2015. (Photo by M. Kaganova)

III. Irresistible Progress

Within Georgia, however, there are places far more “haunted” than Tbilisi. Places such as Svaneti, in the mountainous Northwest, that have a legacy of association with a sense of suspicion, fear, mystery. But what better way to do away with a fearsome place than to collapse the fear into an invention, to “clean” it up? Mystery is a two-sided coin. Turn it over, and its enchantment is released, and a whole new vocabulary of awe rises from ashes of derision.

At the time of the Soviet takeover, Svaneti was rather difficult to access—no motorway had been built and the mountain passes required horses. The Soviets, of course, undertook the challenge of bringing progress to Svaneti and built a road in 1933. A 1930 film called Salt for Svanetia directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, which in itself is a mixture of ethnography and propaganda, depicts an old-world backward society that


needs to be “set right.” It strives to present, “unaltered,” the customs of the wild and mysterious Svans, who, tucked away in the mountains, must battle the elements and overcome scarcities of the most basic things, such as salt. The film portrays an “uncivilized” people making their own clothing, giving each other peculiar haircuts, living at the mercy of nature, snowed in even in the summer, when suddenly the weather changes and freezes the crops. “The work is exhausting,” says one of the captions, “the way of life is obsolete.”8 There is no salt in Svaneti, and all the animals look for it in desperation, lick the sweat off of each other and humans, wait impatiently for their chance to lick the salty urine off a rock. “Cut off from the world, Ushkul is starving without salt,” says one of the film’s intertitles.9

Naturally, the Soviet government saves the day. The early Soviet project was self-righteously insistent on maximizing the brute force production of machines, to quote Dziga Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World, “Machines that make machines that make tractors.”10 So much emphasis is placed in the first half of Kalatozov’s film on the decisive lack of machinery and mass production in Svaneti: the elements govern and the people haven’t any means of overcoming them because they rely solely on their own hands and feet. And yet, the film is also a mode of production “of the phantom” as Derrida suggests, “itself a phantomatic mode of production.”11 By reducing the inhabitants of Svaneti to backward savages, the film turns them into phantoms of themselves, destined to haunt the Soviet Georgian mountains. They are, in a sense, not possible because they neither crave nor depend on the inventions of modernity. They are entirely “out of joint.” But things are rarely out of joint with themselves—this tango, like any other, calls for two. Modernity itself, as it is presented in Kalatozov’s film (and in other works), is in fact out of joint with the world it enters. The rupture is imposed. Specters, after all, do not belong to the past alone, they belong to the future just as much. The productive force of modernization and homogenization, the machines that appear and conquer nature cast in their grandeur so many shadows, that the effort to undermine these shadows only multiplies them, pushes them further and deeper into the collective consciousness. And the machines themselves can become haunted, as John Pemberton’s essay “The Ghost in the Machine” points out.12 It is no accident, after all,

8 Mikhail Kalatozov, dir. Salt for Svanetia, USSR: Gruiziafilm, May 24, 1930. Film. 9 Ibid. 10 Dziga Vertov, dir. A Sixth Part of the World, USSR: Sovkino, 1926. Film. 11 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 120 12 John Pemberton, “The Ghost in the Machine” in Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

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that stories of ghosts, spirits, demons, and vampires proliferate precisely at the onset of the industrial modernity.

The myths of the Svan character—stern-ness, backward-ness, bloodlust—did not end with Kalatozov’s film, or with Soviet efforts: these rumors are undead still, in mainland Georgia. “There are no obstacles for the Bolsheviks,” says the film, as we see image after image of bare-chested young men with aggressive grins thrusting their sickles into the earth as it crumbles under each blow.13 The imagery is so overtly masculine and violent that one can hardly help but think of rape.

A road is being built so that the Svans can transport all the salt they will ever need. “Our economic plan,” says an intertitle, implicitly attributing the words to the agitated man on the screen, baring his teeth, “is stronger than religion and old customs.”14 Trees fall by the dozen, and suddenly, the mountains too are subject to dynamite. The path to progress must be blown through. Nature will be conquered by knowledge, ghosts will be destroyed by disbelief. Not once does the film succumb to the scenery it berates: the mountains are obstacles, barriers, hiding places for customs, religious rituals, disobedience. “The curse of irresistible progress,” wrote Adorno and Horkheimer, “is irresistible regression.”15 In the name of progress, the Soviet state tried to impose itself upon the Svans, yet in the reality that extends beyond the film, one gathers that it failed quite miserably. Reinforcing the order it sought to maintain proved difficult and futile: in the general scarcity of the Soviet years, Svaneti was largely left to its own devices, rarely visited, growing a membrane of rumors around itself. But the phantoms of the Soviet past have come to manifest in the present. The phantom is a “metapsychological fact: what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.”16 After the collapse of the USSR, Svaneti was once again neglected for a time, and was said to harbor criminals, but once Mikheil Saakashvili came to power, he set out to change Svaneti into the “Switzerland of the Caucasus.” He started by jailing a large number of people on corruption charges, hiring an all-new police force and German architects to completely re-vamp the place. Everything was going to be different. A place hardly visited before began to attract foreign tourists with 65-liter internal-frame backpacks, tents, maps, and safari hats.

13 Kalatozov, Salt For Svanetia. 14 Ibid. 15 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Englithenment. trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1991), 36. 16 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 171.


In the summer of 2012, a massive construction effort was underway in Mestia, the region’s capital, following the building of a new road in 2011, which cut travel time to Svaneti in more than half. Walking through Mestia was itself somewhat of a hazard. Though, notably, the trekking paths were already clearly marked in the mountains, in town no designated paths or sidewalks remained in the wake of the renaissance: instead one would walk on a dirt road riddled with deep puddles careful not to step into mounds of wet cement (or cow excrement, or perhaps a mixture of both). A new police station, an amoeba-looking edifice of concrete and glass stood in the center of the town. Other buildings, similarly questionable in their architectural integrity, appeared throughout the town’s center, which resembled Aspen-in-progress. Already tourists were coming in, though in the following years their number increased ten-fold. Yet, as always, only the part of town that was shown was rebuilt. The tourists would be shown a particular kind of story: the hope of the government seems to have been that this story would be ghost-free. But what does such aggressive building point to but the emptiness that existed before? How has it come to be? What does it mean to build anew, if not, also, to take apart or demolish? Re-construction always makes us turn back.

IV. The Songs of Ghosts

Inside the new hotels, Ensemble Riho sings traditional Georgian polyphonic songs for the tourists. This is part of how the ensemble sustains itself. Vakhtang (Vakho) Pilpani, taking over from his father the role of the ensemble’s director, recounts stories of Svan ways.17 During one such concert, a chain of translation from Svan and Georgian into Russian then English and then Japanese takes place, as Vakho explains the instruments being played. He points to a chuniri, “This is the grandfather of the violin,” he says with an understanding smile. “And this,” he says, as he shows a changi, “is the grandfather of the arfa [Russian for ‘harp’].” He goes on to talk about blood-vengeance between rivaling clans, each family hiding in its own tower, lying in wait. He talks about the characteristic Svan independent spirit—Svaneti resisted incorporation into the Russian empire longer than any other Georgian province—and the lack of absolutism preserved for centuries—instead of a single leader, a council of elders held power. Suddenly the image of traditional Svan society, so despised by Soviets, has come back as

17 Ensemble Riho, directed by Vakhtang Pilpani. Performance at Hotel Svaneti in Mestia, July 6, 2014.

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marketable. They make the performance more enticing, easier to understand. “An authentic touristic experience,” Dean MacCannell writes, “involves not merely connecting a marker to a sight, but participating in a collective ritual, in connecting one’s own marker to a sight already marked by others.”18 For the tourists, Vakho and his ensemble are markers for the sight of Svaneti, but also sights themselves: they are dressed in red Svan chokhas, Svan hats, with daggers dangling and the chuniri and changi at the ready. They reenact, in a way, a scene long gone from practice except as a sight, a display, a spectacle. What they sing is also quite separate from what they present as “sights.” The songs themselves are phantomatic in the sense that they present a history that, despite affecting the audience, is completely disconnected from that audience and not understood by it: “the ‘phantom’ is a formation in the dynamic unconscious that is found there not because of the subject’s own repression but on account of a direct empathy,” it is “alien to the subject that harbors it. Moreover, the diverse manifestations of the phantom, which we call haunting, are not directly related to instinctual life and are not to be confused with the return of the repressed. On the contrary, the phantom would more likely take the form of an impediment to the subject’s instinctual life…”19As such, the effect of the music might indeed startle and impede an instinctual expectation—this is due to the structure of the songs, their lack of “words,” their intense “crunch,”20 the fact that the Svan language (related to but not mutually intelligible with Georgian) is incomprehensible to outsiders, leaves no possibility of guessing, intuiting, following an instinct when it comes to semantic meaning. The voices that sing these songs are intense enough to make the hotel lobbies actively vibrate. The historical and symbolic content of the songs is alien to the foreign visitors, to whom these songs are marketed. They might walk away stunned, surprised, as if they’d seen a ghost, except it should be as if they’d heard a ghost. Vakho and his ensemble are themselves not ghostly, but they can be understood as transmitters of ghostliness that is the sound they produce, which both belongs and does not belong to them. It is of their voices, but the songs pre-date them, pre-date everything not part of the natural landscape of Svaneti. There is a deep sense of nostalgia throughout these kinds of performances, too.

18 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 37 19 Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 181, emphasis in the original. 20 I am using a the term “crunch” here to describe particular intervals in Svan music that are slightly “dissonant” or “unusual” for a western ear. The singers themselves do not use this term, hence the quotation marks. Similarly, “words” is in quotations because many songs contain only vocables—“nonsense” syllables that have no direct semantic meaning, yet carry other kinds of meaning and cultural, contextual, and semiotic weight.


As Marilyn Ivy writes, “Nostalgia can only emerge across a temporal lag, and the nostalgic flavor of a text is more potent the farther it is from the ostensible source and potent of nostalgic desire.”21 The further removed the audience, in this case, the stronger the feeling, one might say.

Figure 2: Ensemble Riho, Hotel Svaneti, July 2014. (Photo by M. Kaganova)

V. Ghosts on Tour

Another detail is worth mentioning about the rebuilding efforts. The atmosphere of so many of the establishments in Mestia and surrounding villages is unmistakably “Soviet.” The focus on service we come to expect from something that looks a certain way is largely missing. In a sense, the construction project in Svaneti suggests a nostalgia for the Soviet order, the last time a homogenization, along with a new language (Russian) was introduced. Nowadays, the language is English, only not many speak it yet, and they revert inevitably to Russian when a tourist approaches, but the language does not take on the role it used to: most foreigners do not 21 Marilyn Ivy, “Ghostlier Demarcations” in Culture and Contexture: Readings in Anthropology and Literary Study, ed. E. Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey M. Peck (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 315.

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speak Russian. A visitor encounters it everywhere but is unable to communicate all the same; the visitor is thus made aware of the Soviet past, so much so, that it is nearly impossible to leave it unacknowledged.

As an economic endeavor, tourism is a ghostly industry: it provides no guarantees of its stability, it is ephemeral, it is populated by a continuous desire to re-claim, re-possess that which never belonged in the first place. Once again we see the terrain gain prominence: it is no longer destroyed by bulldozers. Instead, paths are marked on each mountain, cell phone service is perfect even on long forest hikes, the ski lift is in order. Time and again, Svans re-tell stories of their history of independence. Time and again, the tourists nod and ask how many hikes they can accomplish in the three days they have, and could they find a horse? The trouble is that while the premise of this mountain tourism is “outdoorsy-ness” and it is never about destroying or mechanizing, but rather seeing the views, appreciating the scenery, accomplishing something difficult, the level of disengagement from the human surroundings, from the history of living with these mountains, renders the tourists themselves into automata. MacCannell points out that “tourists have been criticized for failing somehow, to see the sights they visit, exchanging perception for mere recognition.”22 A sightseer is able to recognize a sight so immediately, having never actually encountered it before. We know the sight when we see it, but we are never certain whether we’ve seen a reality or a ghost; doubt is ever-present. The sights that tourists seek out are not themselves ghostly, but the seeking might well be. “The designation of an object as a sight, a factory process, a bit of moon dust, is most often accomplished without any aesthetic assistance from the object. Its elevation to sight status is the work of society. Markers are sometimes made out of the same stuff a sight is made out of—they might even be a chip off the sight—but once they are in the hands of an individual, they can only be souvenirs, memories of the thing itself.”23 A factory process—MacCannell’s choice of phrasing here recalls both the imagery of modernity and the “phantomatic mode of production” that Derrida speaks of. The phantom, as discussed above, carries in itself a past that does not belong to those it haunts, just as a marker of a sight, the index, points to a similar kind of past—similar in its non-belonging. “The phantom,” explain Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “will vanish only when its radically heterogeneous nature with respect to the subjects is recognized, a subject to whom it at no time has any direct reference. In no way can the subject relate to the phantom as

22 MacCannell, The Tourist, 121, emphasis in the original. 23 Ibid., 119.


his or her own repressed experience, not even as an experience by incorporation. The phantom, which returns to haunt, bears witness to the existence of the dead buried within the other.”24

The tourists both haunt and are haunted by places like Svaneti. The phantoms that appear to them are remnants of a past they do not share and may not be able to recognize. They enter into a history that is abstracted, legendized. The state does not pause to ponder the profound effects of oppression on the population’s tendencies or responses. Instead it presents its subjects as victims of the previous bad government, and goes on to proclaim a complete divorce from the old ways. Re-building starts and the landscape is changed once again, this time to “Switzerland of the Caucasus.” The trauma caused by the Soviet regime has now become incorporated in the narratives of the church, for one. Notably, in the aftermath of the tragic flood that destroyed the Tbilisi zoo in June 2015, the Patriarch (head of the Georgian Orthodox Church) claimed that the flood was retribution, or “punishment” for the Soviet crime of melting down church bells to construct parts of the zoo railings.25 Because of the Soviet repressions, the revival of traditions (the bigger question here is—which, and whose traditions) “carries the stamp of authenticity,” a notable paradigm shift pointed out by Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, which plays a big part in the narrative presented to, for, and of late, by the tourists who visit Svaneti.26

The tourists, who are a desirable commodity for the state’s existence and self-promotion, might recognize their own heterogeneity as they recognize the indexes of “sights” to see, but the contradictions or incongruities at play within Svaneti’s cultural landscape are not called out by the locals. Perhaps they have ceased to be incongruities altogether—they may well be contradictory to an outside eye only. In a sense, the tourists have replaced the communists as the foreign presence: they are in part ghosts created by the push of the Soviet legacy, coming back with a capitalist kick, trying to “set things right” in their own way. The tourists themselves might not be aware of this function, but maybe they are. Their investment, their money, surely helps overcome the financial injustices committed by Soviets and the continued instability that

24 Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 175, emphasis in the original. 25 Farangiz Najibullah, “Georgian Patriarch Blames Deadly Flooding on Communists’ Sins,” Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, June 15, 2015. http://www.rferl.org/content/ georgia-patriarch-blames-flood-on-communist-sins/27073537.html 26 “a shift from one truth to another, from a realm in which trauma was regarded with suspicion to a realm in which it carries the stamp of authenticity.” Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, trans. Rachel Gomme (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009).

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followed the USSR’s collapse. It isn’t that they are wrong exactly. It is that their presence as it manifests itself now, the tales told, amenities invented, brings up inevitably the contrast of “then” and “now,” returns the specter of communism for another go-round. The sightseers are haunted themselves, by the place, by the way so much of lived-in Svaneti looks. Mountains and famous Svan towers aside, it is full of unfinished construction and old buildings falling apart, scheduled for demolition but frozen in that state for years. With former President Saakashvili, the champion of re-inventing and re-marketing Svaneti, no longer in office, active building has ceased. What remains are too many hotels, too many new edifices not quite finished, and once again, no money. Visitors often comment on the absence of a recognizably Western concept of “service.” Instead of being a repository for fear, parts of Svaneti have become, in a way, a repository for poor financial planning. The ghostliness the region displays now isn’t of an ancient, mythical kind, but rather, it is a ghost of mismanaged capitalism. What has succeeded, it seems, in a particular kind of unraveling of Svaneti, is the righteous urge to preserve it. The region can be perceived largely as abstracted from itself, alienated—a commodity, fetishized by the outside world—it “is changed into something transcendent.”27 This is hardly novel. The process, the search for “real Georgia” is but a function of contemporary reality that seems to disbelieve itself.

VI. Ghostly Photography

Tourists do not come unarmed. They are always recognizable by their cameras. “The camera,” as Benjamin says, “gave the moment a posthumous shock.”28 This isn’t a paradox, for the moment is always already dead by the time we enter it, deader still by the time we exit. The moment is a ghost, and the photograph is its object: it is both what haunts and what is haunted. It is not the spirits that it can contain or display—the spirits, which are assumed to always be there so as to allow the technology to shed light on them—but their lack, for spirits, phantoms, fears, are manifest in the action, not the result. The photograph is inherently disturbing, as it contracts the moment into a pretense of objective reality, it raises the question of appropriation. “To whom does the photograph belong?” asks Barthes. “Is landscape itself only a kind of loan made by the owner of the terrain?”29 27 Karl Marx, Capital, v. 1 (Washington DC: Regenry Publishing, 2000), 50. 28 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, v. 2, 1927–1934, trans. Livingstone, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999), 175. 29 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 3.


Figure 3: Vittorio Sella, “August 1896. Above Mestia. Tetnuld”

Photographs are largely what has been making and continues to make

Svaneti famous. At the turn of the 20th century, the Italian mountaineer photographer Vittorio Sella visited the region three times between 1889 and 1896, trekking up and down with his camera, and ascended several peaks in the Great Caucasus ridge, staying in and near small Svan villages on his way, photographing the landscapes, the people, the architecture. Sella’s camera must have been one of the first cameras to reach Svaneti, bringing with it the inevitability of modernity: “Industry made its first real inroads,” writes Benjamin, “with the visiting-card picture.”30 Sella’s observations at times sound much like the diary of Jonathan Harker in Dracula, which takes place in the same decade as Sella’s Caucasus adventures: “Camped out near the village, which is among the lowermost in Svanetia, we are surprised not to see the people approach our tents, even though they live only 100m away […] During the night we are awakened by the screams and shouts of some of the inhabitants of the village meant to scare away bears who wreak havoc on the crops. In the morning we are left alone, no longer besieged by curious crowds, not even the tiniest inquiry into our business.”31 Yet Sella persisted in his quests. The mountains are simultaneously what draws attention to Svaneti and what obscures it from view: in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks, Svaneti’s reputation has been, for centuries, shady.

30 Benajmin, Selected Writings, 502. 31 Vittorio Sella, Vittorio Sella nel Caucaso Georgiano (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2000), 13.

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“Like ghosts,” writes John Pemberton, “photographs bring into view something that has passed away and is not usually seen, something that perhaps should no longer be seen and yet will not stay away. Photographs remain as unintended traces of a ghostliness within the machinery of the modern.”32 In his photographs Vittorio Sella, who got a street in Mestia named after him, was able to capture what at the time went generally unseen: the people and peaks of a place rather insistent on its isolation. Yet this isolation then became insisted on, too. Sella’s “machinery of the modern” produces traces we now hold, in themselves ghostly, both of its own time and our own, too. We see in the photographs what we cannot see anymore, and sometimes we see the exact same thing left standing and untouched, which is in actuality more uncanny. The photograph presupposes change, hence the impulse to take it. The photograph is, in Peircean terms, primarily an index—it points to something, a particular moment in time that existed and is no more.33 It is also an icon, but it can only be an icon so long as what it depicts looks like itself. The photograph is unchanged, a material thing that apart from its primary indexicality, is also an index of what it omits, namely the photographer, who is guaranteed to eventually be no more, regardless of what happens to the subject he or she captures. We say “take” a picture because it allows us, as Barthes has pointed out, to appropriate. “As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal,” says Susan Sontag, “they also help people take possession of space in which they are insecure.”34 As Vittorio Sella could hide behind his camera, so can the modern tourist. By producing a material record of presence and thus claiming a temporary ownership, one can do away with the insecurity that being foreign inevitably creates.

When we are haunted, following Abraham and Torok’s theory of the phantom, we also receive or appropriate something that isn’t ours. At the same time, the act of taking a photo creates a trace, whereas the moment of seeing a ghost is fleeting. The ghost’s “being does not depend on, much less derive from, its preservation, but just the opposite: a disappearance which is as sudden as its appearance,” Pemberton says. “While the photograph recalls an absence and acknowledges, even foreshadows a passing, it does so by material means.”35 A ghost is never “material,” it has no trace, it “simply flashes past, in a photographic-like instant, as if mimicking the camera, and then vanishes […] into the

32 Pemberton, “The Ghost in the Machine,” 49. 33 C.S. Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1931–58). 34 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), 9. 35 Pemberton, “The Ghost in the Machine,” 50.


memory of precisely that which cannot be photographed, no matter how ingeniously the camera may try.”36

It is on the ability to foreshadow that I’d like to pause for a moment. The photograph, as discussed above assumes a future in which its object and its taker will no longer exist. Dying or vanishing is the most predictable thing of all, a certainty all people possess. To go back to the very start of this essay, to the specter as something undead and undying, but also as something not yet born. Can we not say too, that specters have the capacity to foreshadow? They appear when “the time is out of joint.” Speaking of the haunted Machine Number One in a Javanese factory, John Pemberton writes, “it is as if this ghost, presumably from the Javanese past, were capable of anticipating its future recalling in the machinery of the modern.”37 This ghost suggests a foresight. In a strange parallel, “The Svans believed that dying people could see several years into the future, and would gather at the bedside of a dying relative to ask questions” as if the dying person were already a ghost, temporally out of place, out of joint, giving a chance to the living to make sure the future is “set right.”38

36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Kevin Tuite, “Svans,” accessed May 15, 2016, http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca /tuitekj/publications/Svans.pdf

PART THREE

PROCESS AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION

Zdesizdat and Discursive Rebellion: The Metropol Affair1

Sophie Pinkham Columbia University

By the 1970s, much of the burden of Soviet censorship had shifted from censors onto editors, and onto writers themselves. Aesopian language—communication through the substitution of politically sensitive elements with more neutral ones—had become a well-refined art, with coded meanings an expected part of published literature. 2 In post-Stalinist authoritative discourse, as Alexei Yurchak has pointed out, form and ritual took precedence over content: what you said was less important than how and where you said it.3 Similarly, in samizdat and tamizdat publications, context and source were sometimes more important than content. Many dissidents dismissed official literature simply because it was official, whereas samizdat or tamizdat acquired an instant aura of bravery and righteousness.4

1 In memory of Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Arkadii Arkanov, without whose generous help this project would not have been possible. I am grateful to Rebecca Stanton, Boris Gasparov, Vasiliy Arkanov, Ronald Meyer, Bradley Gorski, and Dmitry Kuzmin for their assistance and comments on earlier versions of this article. 2 Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship (Munchen: Sagner, 1984), 169–70, 228–29. 3 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005), 36–76. 4 Marietta Chudakova, “Pora mezh ottepel'iu i zastoem (Rannie semidesiatye),” in Rossiia/Russia (Moscow, 1998, 1(9): 101), 109, qtd. in Ann Komaromi, “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,” Slavic Review, Vol. 63, No. 3, (Autumn, 2004): 609.

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Khrushchev’s Thaw had whetted writers’ appetite for freer expression. Although Khrushchev and then Brezhnev went on to re-tighten restrictions, Soviet censorship never returned to the extremes of the Stalin era. Meanwhile, opportunities for samizdat and tamizdat expanded due to technological changes and loosened travel restrictions. These factors combined to spur some Brezhnev-era writers to push for greater liberties, to publish more illicit texts, and to look for new ways to rebel against political and aesthetic standards.

This was the environment that produced 1979’s Metropol affair, the Soviet Union’s last great literary scandal. Vasily Aksyonov, one of the most popular and famous writers in the Soviet Union, was among those who felt oppressed by censorship under Brezhnev. In his words, “The warmth of the ‘thaw’ had become no more than a distant memory […] Perhaps because the atmosphere was so bleak, many of us writers felt the need, a desperate need, to achieve some degree of autonomy.”5 In 1978, with Viktor Yerofeyev, a young writer enamored of postmodernism, Aksyonov conceived an “almanac,” or one-off journal, that would challenge the strictures of Soviet censorship and give a home to literature that could not be published, for whatever reason. Metropol’s editors would compile the work of many different writers and request official publication. The editors explained their reasoning in their introduction to the almanac, which was finished in January 1979:

Works that do not fit established molds are condemned sometimes to many years of homeless wandering. Only the blind can fail to see that such writings are becoming more and more numerous each year, that they already constitute, as it were, a forbidden, untapped vein in our native world of letters […] The dream of the homeless is a roof overhead […] The contributors to Metropol are literary professionals who are entirely independent (of one another). The one thing that binds them together under this roof is the awareness that the author bears the sole responsibility for a work. The right to have that responsibility seems to us sacred.6

Aksyonov had no trouble attracting contributors. By March 1978, Metropol was receiving so many submissions that the editors started

5 Vassily Aksyonov, “The Metropol Affair,” The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 5, (Special Issue, 1982): 154. 6 Vasily Aksyonov, et al., eds., Metropol Literary Almanac (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982).

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turning writers away, according to Aksyonov.7 (Yevgeny Popov, another Metropol editor, told me that some submissions were rejected because the editors felt they did not fit.8) Even popular writers like Fazil' Iskander, who had already found success through official channels, were frustrated by the lack of freedom in publishing, and had “homeless” manuscripts sitting in their drawers. Other famous, officially recognized writers who contributed to Metropol included Andrei Bitov, Bella Akhmadulina, and Andrei Voznesenskii. These were authors who were not ardent socialist realists, but were not dissidents or “nepodtsenzurnyi” (underground) writers, either. They inhabited a political gray area; they were publishable writers, clearly capable of producing work that could be printed through official channels, but they sometimes wrote stories and poems that were unacceptable to editors. In Metropol, these established writers joined others, such as Yuz Aleshkovskii, Genrikh Sapgir, Semën Lipkin, Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Leonid Batkin, and Boris Vakhtin, who were entirely unable to publish what they considered to be their most significant work, publishing only in other genres, such as children’s literature or criticism; Vladimir Vysotsky, whose songs and performances were hugely popular but who was unable to publish his poetry; Inna Lisianskaia, who was no longer able to publish her poetry; and a few authors, such as Yurii Kublanovskii, Viktor Trostnikov, and Yurii Karabchievskii, who had never even tried to have their work published.9

Metropol’s editors and contributors stressed that their goal was not to make a political statement, but to achieve the professional and artistic fulfillment of seeing their work in print. As Iskander put it during the subsequent discussion of Metropol in the Moscow branch of the Soviet Union of Creative Writers (henceforth, the “Writers’ Union”), “Books lie there for 10, 15, 20 years, and then writers die and—that’s it. As if nothing had ever happened…A person is not immortal, a person dies, without ever having seen his work published.”10 Evgenii Rein expressed sentiments similar to Iskander’s in a letter to the Writers’ Union after the Metropol affair had exploded. He explained that he had no political aims, but had been tortured by endless delays in the publication of a book he had been working on for years. Declaring that he had no plans to

7 Aksyonov, “The Metropol Affair,” 154. 8 Interview with Evgenii Popov by Sophie Pinkham, Moscow, June 2013. 9 Maria Zalambani, “Delo ‘Metropolia’,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, No. 82 (2006), http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2006/82/de14.html. Last accessed April 8, 2014. (The transcript of the debate in the Writers’ Union is paginated, but Zalambani’s introduction is not.) 10 Zalambani, “Delo ‘Metropolia’,” 21.

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emigrate, he begged for help publishing his manuscript.11 In keeping with its (supposed) rejection of political protest, Metropol did not include contributions from any famous dissident writers of the period, such as Vladimir Voinovich, and the editors chose not to include Yuz Aleshkovskii’s famous poem “Comrade Stalin,” on the grounds that it was too inflammatory. Popov described this choice as a pragmatic one, since the inclusion of such material would have made publication at home out of the question, rather than only extremely unlikely.12

Metropol’s editors claimed that they wanted to open literature within the Soviet Union to a wider range of aesthetic approaches, to create a space in which authors did not have to choose between being Soviet or anti-Soviet, in which they were free to say exactly what they wished without reference to official discourse, requirements, or rituals. They envisioned an unmediated literature, written neither to support nor to reject a political ideology. Popov told me that for him, much dissident literature was just “socialist realism in reverse,” and equally bad, and that he found dissidents to be “characters” just as much as dedicated Communists were. He had, he said, an “ironic relationship to the authorities [nachal'stvo],” and this applied to the dissident “party line” as much as it did to the Communist Party line. In a secret 1980 memo for the Government Security Committee, Yurii Andropov quoted Popov and Yerofeyev expressing the same sentiment:

Dissident literature is Soviet literature with a minus sign: if in Soviet literature the secretary of the regional committee is a good person, then in anti-Soviet literature he is bad. Types trade places, but the consciousness is the same, with the same dogmatism and conservative taste. Why don’t we want to go down this path? We don’t see any literary discoveries here.13

Popov told me that he never had any desire to identify as a dissident and never wanted to leave the Soviet Union. (He never did.) Even during the seven-year period after Metropol when he could not publish in the Soviet Union, he was reluctant to publish abroad, because he was afraid of becoming a typical tamizdat writer.14 Metropol constituted a bid for what Popov called zdesizdat, “publishing here,” legitimate publishing within the Soviet Union but outside the boundaries set by censors, editors, the

11 “Uroki ‘Metropolia’,” Nash Sovremennik, No. 4 (1999). 12 Popov interview. 13 “Zapiska Komiteta Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti SSSR v TsK KPSS, Feb. 12, 1980,” Voprosy literatury No. 5 (1993): 338. 14 Popov interview.


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Writers’ Union, and dissidents. Viktor Yerofeyev told me that Metropol did not really qualify as dissidence, and was political only in the sense that it was a defense of free speech and artistic pluralism, of “neodnoznachnost',” ambiguity and multiple meanings.15

Although eleven of the twenty-three contributors to Metropol were members of the Writers’ Union, Metropol’s editors did not seek any official involvement from the Union, knowing, as Aksyonov put it, that the Union’s participation would “crush the project at the outset—or at least disfigure it beyond recognition.” 16 They produced only 12 homemade copies of the almanac, since, according to Aksyonov, anything more would have qualified as illegal book production.17 (This stated desire to conform to the letter of the law was characteristic of Soviet dissidence of the 1970s.18) Metropol’s editors planned to bypass the Writers’ Union and the censors and present the “printed” (or rather, typed, glued, and drawn) almanac to the chairman of the State Committee for Publishing (Goskomizdat), the All-Union Agency for Authors’ Rights (VAAP), and the publishing house “Soviet Writer,” after a public presentation of the book at a Moscow cafe. They would offer Goskomizdat’s chairman the chance to publish the collection, but only on the condition that it would not be altered in any way. This was a bold challenge, rejecting the (ostensible) secrecy of dissident writing and the withdrawal from the public sphere of nepodtsenzurnye writers, but also rejecting the official channels—the rituals—through which literature was edited, approved, and published. The form of the protest was more important than the content of the almanac. As Aksyonov himself observed, “I believe authorities were far less upset by the content of the almanac than by our action, our solidarity, and our disregard for the usual official channels.”19

The KGB soon caught wind of the Metropol editors’ plans, and a session of the Secretariat of the Moscow Writers’ Union was convened. A range of writers spoke out against the project, calling it a political provocation without literary merit. Metropol’s editors passed the almanac on to foreign contacts, however, and it was published in the United States and France. The editors’ distaste for tamizdat was not so absolute,

15 Interview with Viktor Yerofeyev by Sophie Pinkham, Moscow, June 2013. 16 “Zapiska Otdela Kul'tury TsK KPSS, Feb. 2, 1979,” Voprosy literatury No. 5 (1993): 326. 17 Aksyonov, “The Metropol Affair,” 155. 18 Serguei Alex. Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat” Public Culture 13(2) (2001): 206–209; Ann Komaromi, “Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics” Slavic Review, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Spring 2012): 70–90. 19 Aksyonov, “The Metropol Affair,” 156.

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after all.20 Metropol’s writers were punished with varying severity, some for a short period and some until perestroika.21 The affair became a minor international scandal, and was soon shaped, in Europe and the United States, into another classic narrative of brave dissident writers standing against the oppressive Soviet state.

Today, Metropol is remembered less for its artistic quality than for the challenge it posed to the literary ecosystem, with its well-established schemes of give and take between official literature and dissidence, ritual conformity and coded meanings, massive print runs and dog-eared, hand-typed manuscripts. Metropol’s editors emphasized their desire to assume a third position in a world of binaries, to escape the symbolic system of Soviet literature, as well as the mutilation of texts by Soviet editors and censors. Yet in vigorously rejecting official literature, dissident literature, and Aesopian language alike, Metropol incorporated elements of all three, while being shaped—even created—by editing and censorship practices of the period. Through mimicry and mockery, irony and impudence, Metropol took as its subjects the very state power, Aesopian devices, and dissident traditions that it claimed to reject.

Mirroring the Heterogeneity of Restrictions Though many of the editors and contributors had close personal relationships, Metropol did not represent a unified group of writers or a specific political or aesthetic position. Instead, it encompassed an almost miscellaneous assortment of styles, and a wide variety of writers. As Viktor Yerofeyev put it, contributors included people who smoked American cigarettes and people who smoked papirosi. 22 The heterogeneous selection found its logic in the heterogeneous grounds for censorship. Metropol combines Yerofeyev’s obscene postmodernism, the existential explorations of Fridrikh Gorenshtein, the satirical parables of Arkadii Arkanov, the ribald comedy of Fazil' Iskander, and the cultural criticism of Leonid Batkin mainly because Soviet standards rendered them all unpublishable. Metropol gives a clear sense of the hodgepodge of Soviet prohibitions: post-modernism, irony, cynicism, alcoholism, sex, disillusionment, despair, scatology, religion, existentialism. As with Aesopian devices or samizdat, the protest confirms the prohibition.

Understandably, the theme of censorship surfaces again and again in the almanac, underscoring the specific aspects of censorship that were most troublesome to Metropol’s editors and contributors. In Iskander’s 20 Popov interview. 21 Zalambani, “Delo ‘Metropolia’.” 22 Yerofeyev interview.


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short story “A Sexy Little Giant,” 23 Marat, the protagonist, is a photographer whose apolitical work is censored for ideological reasons, after a long, absurd editorial debate. Later, Marat is involved in a court case after the discovery of pornographic photos that he reshot from a foreign magazine and claimed as his own, as part of a scheme to seduce one of his female colleagues. These episodes are not the crux of the story, but they surface repeatedly. It is interesting to note that in neither case does Marat get into trouble for openly challenging the political system; rather, he has difficulties because of abstruse and puritanical censorship, two forms that received little attention in the heroic narrative of dissidents, but were thorns in the sides of Soviet writers.

Andrei Bitov’s “Days of Leavetaking” includes an ironic reference to censorship. The narrator is drinking with a peasant who asks him, “How come they publish bad books and they won’t publish good ones?” With delight, the narrator thinks, “It can’t be! To suddenly find a kindred spirit.” But it soon emerges that the peasant is not talking about some noble, forbidden art work, but about a Stalin Prize-winning work of socialist realism, which he read in a handwritten copy. The narrator observes that “even if they don’t publish quality works, at least they don’t republish that...”24 This high Stalinist work would also have been subject to censorship after de-Stalinization; censorship makes strange bedfellows. The story draws attention to the idea that the illicit quality of literature exists solely in response to a censor; for the peasant, a Stalin Prize winner seems just as bravely defiant as a suppressed poet does to the story’s narrator. We are reminded of how extra-textual factors—the knowledge that a work was circulated in samizdat, or the reaction against it, for example—alter perceptions of the text itself.

Censorship plays a central role in Boris Vakhtin’s story “The Sheepskin Coat,” whose protagonist is a theatrical censor named Philharmon Ivanovich. Philharmon is the second-string censor: not the nomenklatura boss, but the one in charge of seeing every new show and reporting on its ideological soundness. Secretly, Philharmon Ivanovich is entranced by all theater. He sees shows over and over, ostensibly to be sure they are acceptable, but really because he derives such intense pleasure from them. Eventually he succumbs to his lust for a much younger, counter-cultural poetess, whose work he rejects on ideological grounds. Through the poetess’s connections, he acquires a long-coveted sheepskin coat on the black market. Both of these longings are representative of the new Soviet society of the 1960s and 1970s, as

23 Translations of titles are those used in the 1982 English translation of Metropol. 24 Aksyonov, et al., Metropol Literary Almanac, 290.

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censorship relaxed, or at least became less thorough, and as consumer goods and countercultural trends became increasingly accessible and popular. Philharmon, the old-style Soviet censor, is seduced by the new world. He admits to a colleague that he passionately loves the theater. He loses the ability to censor himself, saying what he feels out loud.

Leonid Batkin’s essay, “The Uncomfortableness of Culture,” calls for a more open and dynamic attitude to culture, for making culture not an “amulet,” the “mast to which Odysseus asked to be bound in order to resist the voices of the sirens,” but something more creative, open and ambiguous, something that “creates problems, rather than solving them,” that can use contradiction and thereby stimulate historical movement.25 The essay closes with the lines, “Let us not defend culture. Rather, let us try not to hinder it.”26

Striving for Authorial Control Recognizing the primary role of editors in the censorship process, Metropol took a radical position not only against censorship, but against editing. Popov told me that when something was accepted, the editors did not change a word, publishing the work exactly as it was. As Aksyonov put it in the debate about Metropol in the Writers’ Union, “We want there finally to be an ‘unedited collection.’ You are all writers and you know what kinds of horrible demands publishers and editors often make.” According to Popov, one of the “educated girls” (“gramotnye devushki”) who proofread the volumes corrected some factual errors in a story, and the editors made her undo the change. From their perspective, a factual error was the author’s mistake and the author’s responsibility, a kind of freedom.27 Here, again, the significance of the Metropol project lay more in its process than in its content. Authorial control and textual fixity took precedence over all other concerns.

The authors of Metropol asserted their copyright with a © symbol, which established publishing rights according to international law; this was significant since Soviet law did not grant authors the right to publish their work and sell it independently of state publishing houses, or allow authors to give permission for publication of their work abroad. Metropol’s introduction stated, “The almanac Metropol is issued as a manuscript. It may be issued in print only in its current form. No additions or deletions are permitted.” The works were presented as they had been written by the authors, and they were fixed (at least in theory), 25 Aksyonov, et al., Metropol Literary Almanac, 628–29. 26 Ibid., 636. 27 Popov interview.


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precluding the possibility of future censorship. After scandal erupted, in their appeals to the Central Committee and to the Writers’ Union, Metropol’s editors continued to emphasize the idea of authorial rights. For instance, they wrote, “We addressed a letter to VAAP, proposing that VAAP put the almanac under its protection to safeguard our authorial rights and to complete the final correction of the text.”28

This emphasis on authorial rights was in keeping with the dissident focus on the rights of the individual, including the right to self-expression.29 Yet Metropol diverged, in significant ways, from samizdat standard practice. The specific print run, with its implication that only 12 copies would ever be released—i.e., that the almanac would not be reproduced through traditional samizdat methods—indicated a desire to prevent interference from official editors and censors, but also from careless or opinionated samizdat copyists. A specific print run, as well as the graphic elements (Boris Messerer’s frontispiece, a set of line drawings by Anatolii Brusilovskii, and a Voznesenskii poem consisting of the word “MAT'” (“mother”) repeated in a circular arrangement, with varying degrees of effacement), which could not be reproduced by a home typist, brought the almanac closer to the realm of official publishing, constituting a rejection of the samizdat tradition as exemplified by Solzhenitsyn’s manuscripts, for example. (Nepodtsenzurnye writers were also producing samizdat collections in limited editions during this period, with extensive graphic and material elements that made the volumes impossible to reproduce; these samizdat almanacs differed from Metropol, however, in that they were never offered for official publication.)

The form of the Metropol almanac as a physical object, with a fixed presence in the public sphere, was essential. The books were huge, folio-size, with four small pages pasted onto each larger page. They were large, unwieldy, and impossible to conceal; Popov told me that when he and his fellow editors gave a copy to their French contact, his eyes widened in alarm. Aksyonov wrote that “bulky as they were, we nevertheless managed to smuggle two copies out of the country,” to Éditions Gallimard in Paris and to Carl Proffer’s Ardis Press, in Michigan.30 The size of the editions was a way of flouting the authorities, a form of “impudence” (“naglost'”), in Popov’s words.31 Popov said that the sight of pictures of Carl Proffer sitting in Michigan, holding a copy of the enormous Metropol, enraged the authorities, who were confronted with

28 “Pis'mo sostavitelei al'manakha ‘Metropolia’ v TsK KPSS i Soiuz pisatelei SSSR, Feb. 8, 1979,” Voprosy literatury No. 5 (1993): 329. 29 Komaromi “Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics,” 76. 30 Aksyonov, “The Metropol Affair,” 155. 31 Popov interview.

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their failure to intercept a dissident volume that was, in Aksyonov’s words, “approximately the size of a gravestone”—a far cry from the microfiche often smuggled across the border for publication abroad. Aksyonov wrote that the volume was “intended to be more than a stack of papers secretly circulated among the ‘right’ readers. We wanted it to be an attractive public object.”32 The creation of a bulky, designed object, almost impossible to hide (and not very easy to read), was a slap in the face of the authorities, and a rejection of traditional dissident identity, which relied on subterfuge and surreptitious copying. The almanac was compiled without any effort at secrecy, according to Popov: writers did not feel they were engaged in any criminal activity, though one poet got cold feet just before the 12 copies were released, and asked that his work be removed. (The editors did not try to change his mind.)33

At first, Feliks Kuznetsov, First Secretary of the Moscow branch of the Writers’ Union, tried to cajole Metropol’s editors into submitting to editorial oversight from the Writers’ Union. Popov and Yerofeyev rejected his overtures, as did Aksyonov during the debate about Metropol in the Writers’ Union, when he said flatly, “You proposed not that we work together, but that we make [Metropol] together, and the work is already done.”34 Kuznetsov then made one statement and three demands:

1. That in the almanac they have made a serious political mistake, bordering on a crime. This is [the implicit claim] that in the USSR there is a group of persecuted writers. 2. That jackal-journalists (from the West) do not get involved. 3. That no dissidents participate in the collection. 4. That they do not make an ultimatum—to print it or not.35

It is interesting to note that Kuznetsov demanded that dissidents be excluded, implying that Metropol was not an inherently dissident work. It is also striking that he only identified one “political mistake” in the almanac: the idea that there was a group of persecuted writers in the USSR. Political statements in the individual works included in Metropol were not the cause of Kuznetsov’s outrage. In fact, it is unlikely that he had even read it; its content was beside the point.36 Rather, his anger had

32 Aksyonov, “The Metropol Affair,” 156. 33 Popov interview. 34 Zalambani, “Delo ‘Metropolia’,” 5. 35 Ibid., 5. 36 A later report from the Culture Department of the Central Committee noted that some of the works in Мetropol depict “negative sides of our life,” and that others are “ambiguous in their ideological-political direction,” with many “abounding in erotic,


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to do with the attraction of negative publicity from the West, and the assertion of authorial independence. The central problem was not Metropol’s content, but whether or not it would be subject to editing—that is, to the authority of the Writers’ Union. During the debate in the Writers’ Union, Kuznetsov clearly stated that it was Metropol’s unconventional form and rejection of traditional publishing structures that troubled him. The Writers’ Union voted unanimously to reject the almanac, and threatened to punish the editors and contributors.37

Dissidence and Bad Taste Documents released after perestroika show that the Writers’ Union cooperated with the KGB and the Party Central Committee on a campaign against Metropol. An investigation was opened by a special committee “for the investigation of extreme anti-state crime,” according to Aksyonov.38 Internal documents from the Party’s Central Committee and from the Government Security Committee show how the Party linked the ideas of “bad literature” and political provocation, refusing Metropol’s editors’ attempt to separate the aesthetic from the political. The official documents take it for granted that good literature and good politics go together; this correspondence is embodied in the successful collaboration between the Central Committee and the Writers’ Union. Throughout its reports, the Central Committee takes pains to emphasize the unanimous opinion of Moscow writers that Metropol is bad literature, intended solely as a political provocation. A top-secret report by Yurii Andropov for the Government Security Committee claimed that Viktor Yerofeyev himself said that many of the pieces in Metropol were of poor quality, while Popov supposedly admitted their provocative aims, and compared himself to Solzhenitsyn. (The report does not elaborate on Popov’s reasons for comparing himself to Solzhenitsyn, but presumably he is implying that he too is an important dissident figure.)39 By his own account, Yerofeyev was motivated to participate in Metropol partly because he wanted an outlet for postmodern, explicitly sexual work, which, when he read it aloud at the Actors’ Club, had provoked a “rabid” negative reaction and gotten him booed off stage. He told me that

even openly pornographic scenes.” (“Zapiska Otdela Kul'turyi TsK KPSS, Feb. 2, 1979.”) These criticisms put more emphasis on content than Kuznetsov did, perhaps because, by that point, there had been time to read Metropol more carefully. 37 Ibid, 24. 38 Aksyonov, “The Metropol Affair,” 158. 39 “Zapiska Komiteta Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti SSSP v TsK KPSS, June 24, 1979,” Voprosy literatury No. 5 (1993): 333.

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dissident writers were horrified by his work, and “even Popov” did not understand his writing.40 Metropol asserted the freedom to write what both the establishment and dissidents considered vulgar, worthless, or incomprehensible.

Members of the Writers’ Union were pressured to denounce Metropol, and many of them did—even writers such as Grigorii Baklanov, who was relatively liberal, had himself had difficulty publishing some of his work, and would go on to publish previously suppressed writing as editor of the literary journal Znamia during perestroika.41 Aksyonov stressed the role of coercion and incentives in the denunciations: “If a certain writer was reluctant, he or she was reminded that his or her book was soon coming up for publication, or that his or her request for a new apartment, a new car, or a trip abroad was now coming up for consideration.”42 But Natal'ia Ivanova, a respected liberal literary critic who has worked as an editor at Znamia since 1972, gave me another perspective on why some writers rejected Metropol. She told me that writers did have the choice of whether or not to denounce the almanac: they were free to say that they were too busy to attend the Writers’ Union meeting on Metropol, for example. In fact, Ivanova said, many members of the Writers’ Union felt that, with its sex and substances and scatology, Metropol violated the ethics of Russian literature, what she called its “humanitarian nature” (“gumanitarnost'”), its emphasis on the social and moral value of literature. Moreover, she said, writers genuinely felt that Metropol was not up to artistic standards and was, to use a favorite Soviet term, merely “graphomania.” In this understanding, Metropol fell on the wrong side not of official or unofficial, conformist or dissident, truth or lies, but of “good” and “bad” on an aesthetic or moral level. Ivanova argued that Yurii Trifonov, a successful novelist published through official channels, accomplished more in his work than any of the Metropol authors ever did.43

Though, as they compiled it, Metropol’s editors took pains to distance the almanac from dissident writing, they soon slipped back toward it—partly as a way of rejecting accusations that Metropol was just “bad writing.” In a 1982 article for the Wilson Quarterly, Aksyonov likened Metropol to earlier repressed literature, saying:

Kuznetsov and company were busy trying to convince the various literary circles that there was really nothing to get worked

40 Yerofeyev interview. 41 Interview with Natal'ia Ivanova by Sophie Pinkham, Moscow, July 2013. 42 Aksyonov, “The Metropol Affair,” 157. 43 Ivanova interview.


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up about. Metropol was just second-rate literature, pornography, a bag of modernist tricks. The hypocrites in the Writers’ Union were delighted to hear this: It justified their complicity in the KGB-style persecution. Too many writers seemed to forget that this was precisely how they justified themselves during the anti-Pasternak and anti-Solzhenitsyn campaigns—‘First of all, old fellow, this is bad writing.’ Of course, it was a level of ‘bad writing’ that most of them could not hope to attain.44

There is Pasternak, the great writer repressed because he refused to conform, and Solzhenitsyn, the heroic political dissident and crucial figure of samizdat and the Thaw. Aksyonov downplays the aesthetic protests (“it’s bad writing”), dismissing them as an excuse for a politically motivated rejection. He implies that Metropol is distinguished, like Pasternak’s work, by its political heroism—which is inextricable from its literary quality. Aksyonov’s assertion, at the end of his article, that the anti-Metropol campaign was “the response of provincial and ignorant apparatchiks to the threat of literature—of literature itself” is not entirely consonant with the statement made by the release of Metropol, which had more to do with process and power structures than with “literature itself.”45 Aksyonov groups all of Metropol’s opponents into a single camp of toadies and apparatchiks. Exploiting the Soviet and anti-Soviet conflation of political and artistic merit, he falls back into the binary system of official and unofficial, conformist and heroic, Party hacks and repressed geniuses, that Metropol had purported to reject. Not only did the Writers’ Union, the Central Committee, and the KGB draw Metropol back into the category of dissident writing; so did its creator, Aksyonov.

This tendency to return to a narrative of state vs. dissident is also evident in the international response to Metropol. From the beginning, the Party and the Writers’ Union were gravely concerned about the possibility that Metropol would be published abroad. Aksyonov pointed out that this could happen simply because it had been released in the USSR, and that it was more likely to be published abroad because of the publicity caused by the Writers’ Union assault: as he put it, “In Moscow there are 100,000 foreigners. And then there has already been such a furor caused, and not by us…”46 Indeed, by the late 1970s there were so many foreigners in Moscow that it was very hard to prevent tamizdat or to control bad publicity. (Tamizdat was so easy that some writers contented themselves with careers based entirely on illicit foreign 44 Aksyonov, “The Metropol Affair,” 158. 45 Ibid., 159. 46 Ibid.

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publication.) The authorities were anxious about another public relations debacle, and their fears were well founded; when Craig Whitney, The New York Times’ correspondent, caught wind of what had happened, he wrote the first of what would become a long string of articles on the Soviet Union’s persecution of talented and well-meaning writers who hoped to usher in a new era of Russian literature. The New York Times’ 1983 review of the translated Metropol is glowing but vague, and seems more a response to the scandal than to the literature.47

The Russian émigré old guard at first responded to Metropol negatively, shocked by what they perceived as its vulgarity. In Popov’s opinion, the émigré newspaper Russian Thought (Russkaia mysl') made the same criticisms of the collection that Feliks Kuznetsov had made, only from the other side; while for Kuznetsov the almanac was anti-Soviet, for Russian Thought it was Soviet, base, soulless, not in line with the émigré idea of “good” literature, which had to adhere to specific aesthetic as well as political standards.48 (Some dissidents within the Soviet Union were not pleased, either: Vladimir Voinovich said of Metropol’s decision to exclude known dissidents from the almanac, “Once you already establish such conditions, then you don’t have a free literature or a free challenge.”49) But after news spread of the crackdown on the Metropol writers, the project was seen much more positively, as an act of heroism.50 Here, yet again, we see how Metropol was pushed into the familiar narrative of Soviet dissidence, despite its editors’ efforts (however inconsistent) to blaze another trail. The project attracted positive attention only once it started to fit more neatly into the narrative of dissident writers who boldly publish forbidden work and are harshly punished in return.

Though Metropol launched Viktor Yerofeyev’s international career, the almanac has been largely forgotten in the United States. In Russia, however, Metropol remains a well-remembered literary scandal. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it has been reprinted twice, and discussed at some length in the media—both positively, as an example of defiant writers standing up to the state, and negatively, as an example of anti-Soviet subversion, a taste of the vulgarity that would be unleashed at the end of the Soviet Union.51 The cover of the 2001 edition is adorned with an almost psychedelic picture of Brezhnev, in acid green and purple, suggesting that the collection is very much about the Brezhnev years; in

47 Helen Muchnic, “From Russia with Candor” The New York Times, Feb. 27, 1983. 48 Aleksandr Kabakov and Evgenii Popov, Aksenov (Moscow: Astrel', 2013), 159. 49 Aksyonov, et al., Metropol Literary Almanac, xii. 50 Kabakov, Aksenov, 159–60. 51 See, for example, Zalambani, “Delo ‘Metropolia’”; and “Uroki ‘Metropolia’.”


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other words, this is not meant to be a collection of classic literature.52 The list of contributors is in Russian on the front and in English on the back, despite the fact that none of the material inside is in English. The book design thus emphasizes the intrinsically political nature of the collection, and its international significance—exactly what Metropol’s editors disavowed. In the place where the original edition contained the admonishment that the almanac could only be reprinted in its present form, without additions or deletions, the 2001 edition states,

The “Metropol” almanac became a symbol of an asinine epoch and of opposition to the authorities [vlast'], which were no longer rolling forward on their ideological bulldozer, but barely crawling, ready to kill everything that was alive. The authors of “Metropol” showed that it was possible to oppose these authorities, that opposition was needed, and how to go about it. Uniting both established and young authors, the almanac was an X-ray, illuminating all of society.53

The demand for the fixity of the text is no longer necessary; the almanac is presented not in literary terms, but as a symbol of its epoch, as an example of opposition at a particular cultural moment. It is defined by the specific cultural and political place it occupied, rather than by its literary qualities in themselves.

Mimicking Aesopian Strategies

Lev Loseff points out that the substitution of one thing for another underlies all Aesopian devices: this occurs on the levels of genre and plot, intended audience, and “utterance.”54 Metropol’s somewhat disingenuous effort to win official publication, and its editors’ insistence that it was not intended for a foreign audience, can be seen as subversions of the Aesopian device of substituting one intended audience for another. Rather than, for example, writing something that looks like a children’s book but is actually meant to be read by adults—a classic Aesopian device—Metropol looked like a samizdat text, but was presented to the authorities with the request that it be published through official channels, even as the editors denied any intent to publish abroad. On the other hand, it was an illicit text that had the physical presence of a “real” book, rather than being a mere stack of typewritten pages. These two 52 Vasily Aksënov, et al., Metropol' (Moscow: EKSMO-Press, 2001). 53 Aksenov, Metropol', 2001. 54 Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship, 60.

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“substitutions” are almost practical jokes, using Aesopian devices to offend and provoke rather than to conceal.

Loseff argues that the ideological ambiguity, within limits, of post-Stalinist artistic texts was “an entirely accurate mirror of the nation’s newfound political atmosphere,” which was characterized not by a “radical break with the old ideology,” but only by “a certain modification of it.” 55 Aesopian texts did not manage to escape the discursive frameworks of the existing political system, because they were always reacting to it; as Loseff puts it, “the subject of Russian Aesopian works is the same as that of propaganda: the power of the state.”56 Aesopian language, then, was constantly reaffirming state authority. By the 1960s, it had been integrated into the Soviet system, and by the late 1970s, it was a device of such long standing that many writers had come to rely on it as a central element of their writing. Natal'ia Ivanova told me that many writers opposed Metropol because they felt that they had reached a workable compromise with the censors, that they were fluent in Aesopian language, and they did not want to compromise the limited creative freedom they had negotiated with censors and editors over the years. 57 Writers had internalized censorship, and prohibition and concealment had been assimilated into the process of production of official writing. Many censors were well educated and knowledgeable, and understood quite clearly what authors were writing “between the lines.”58 Oftentimes, the censors were not being deceived; rather, they were approving the methods by which authors encoded ideologically questionable meanings to make them politically acceptable, even as they remained intelligible to authors, censors, and readers alike. This explains why Metropol’s authors were so contemptuous of Aesopian language, as well as dissidence. And yet, as we have seen, Metropol, like Aesopian texts, Soviet official discourse, and even samizdat, relied largely on the shared knowledge of a certain set of externally imposed, pre-existing restrictions.

Exploiting the Aura of Samizdat There was only one editorial intervention evident in Metropol: copyediting. Typos were corrected in the text of the final version; letters were changed, reversed, inserted, or struck out. Varying styles make it clear that different people copyedited different stories. On one level, these

55 Ibid., 170. 56 Ibid., 221. 57 Ivanova interview. 58 Ivanova interview; Interview with Arkadii Arkanov by Sophie Pinkham, Moscow, June 2013; Interview with Ol'ga Trifonova by Sophie Pinkham, Moscow, June 2013.


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corrections simply reflect the fact that a small number of people typed the books on typewriters; mistakes were inevitable. But the corrections also draw attention to the presence of a copyeditor, someone who is fixing small errors, even as the project insisted on its rejection of editing. The visible corrections, which are, presumably, different in each of the 12 copies, place Metropol firmly—despite the efforts of its editors to distance it from this—in the tradition of samizdat.

When Ardis published Metropol, it chose to release a facsimile copy rather than a more standard version, with typos eliminated, implicitly acknowledging the importance of Metropol’s aura of samizdat. The Ardis facsimile reproduced the visible signs of transgression and danger contained in the almanac as a material object, rather than presenting the work primarily as literature. Legibility was not the most important consideration. In fact, for a foreign reader, the material aspects of the almanac—the dense, hard-to-read type, sometimes dark, sometimes faint, with smudges and handwritten or typed corrections—along with knowledge of the scandal it had provoked, probably signified dissidence and transgression much more effectively than the content of the stories and poems included in the almanac. The choice to reproduce a facsimile copy even abroad also hints at the fact that it was extra-textual features that made Metropol hang together as a volume, and made it something that Ardis would want to print.59 Referring to the ease of self-publishing today, Popov, who started helping to produce handmade (and even hand-colored or hand-drawn) literary collections while still in school, told me, “it’s all too easy now that there are Xerox machines!” Forget the Internet; even a Xerox machine would break the spell of samizdat.60 When Popov showed me his collection of handmade literary almanacs and journals, he did not ask me to read them; he asked me to look at them. The important thing was not their content, but their form, their materiality.

Metropol is characterized by what Serguei Oushakine, in his discussion of political samizdat, describes (paraphrasing Bakhtin) as a “mixture of intentions” that results when discourse uses authoritative rhetoric from a non-authoritative position.61 Metropol constituted a double mimicry and double mockery: of official literature, with its strange assortment of prohibitions, its copyright and public presence, but also of samizdat, with its special aura generated through its material qualities and readers’ knowledge of its illicit nature. While purporting to reject the mechanisms

59 For discussion of how Ardis chose what to publish, see Komaromi, “Samizdat as Extra-Gutenberg Phenomenon,” Poetics Today, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2008): 644. 60 Popov interview. 61 Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat,” 203.

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of samizdat and dissidence, Metropol also replicated them, even as it found its form and purpose in a negative image of official prohibitions.

To what extent did Metropol share the “mode of existence” of samizdat texts? Like all samizdat texts, Metropol was produced outside official institutions. But if samizdat represented an alternative way of defining oneself, Metropol’s bid for “zdesizdat” represented an alternative to this alternative means of self-definition.62 Like samizdat texts, it sought a “place in the discourse of the wider community,” but it did so through a public assertion of authorial independence, rather than through secret distribution or publication abroad. The huge, illustrated folios were a bid for permanence, a fixed existence. Samizdat was ephemeral and often subject to distortion through recopying; officially published texts were subject to extensive editing and censorship. Metropol tried to insist on its own solidity, its fixed nature, through its emphasis on authorial rights, through its size and design, and through the production of a limited number of volumes during one supervised typing session, rather than informal, unsupervised retyping of manuscripts by individuals who felt the text was worth passing on. In this sense, Metropol was a conscious effort to move away from what Ann Komaromi calls the “epistemic instability” that constitutes the essential quality of samizdat.63 At the same time, Metropol was an unusually aggressive, straightforward attempt to encroach on the field of official discourse. These contradictions contributed to Metropol’s ironic, impudent quality, and generated a tension that created yet another kind of epistemic instability.

Metropol purported to exist outside the system of binaries that characterized Soviet literature, but it did not really succeed in exiting the system; it was formulated as a response to that very system, and relied on many of its devices. Metropol’s rejection of secrecy and hiddenness, which the editors depicted as essential aspects of samizdat, was a less decisive break with samizdat than it was intended to be, since (as Oushakine points out) samizdat was not about maintaining a strictly private, hidden space beyond the reach of official discourse and state power, but rather about using dominant discourse from a different position, while still inhabiting the public sphere. Just as dissident discourse and behavior was shaped by authoritative discourse and symbolic structures, Metropol’s bid for zdesizdat was shaped, despite its efforts to distance itself from both official and dissident discourse, by both. 64 Metropol’s emphasis on openness, free speech, and the letter of the law, and its attempt, however quixotic, to achieve official publication, despite refusing to adhere to 62 Quoted in Komaromi, “Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics,” 78. 63 Komaromi, “Samizdat as Extra-Gutenberg Phenomenon,” 638–52. 64 Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat,” 191–214.


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aesthetic norms or participate in the rituals of censorship, editing, and publication, was very much in keeping with the practices of political dissidents of the 1970s.65 Though it was a clever play on Soviet and dissident discourse, Metropol never truly managed to find a third way.

65 For discussion of dissident practices, see Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat,” 191–214, and Komaromi, “Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics,” 73.

The Paradox of Thick Journals: The Place of “Thick” Literary Journals in Contemporary Russia

Evgeniya Vorobyeva Independent scholar, Moscow

“Thick” literary journals are a foundational institution for the Soviet literary system and post-Soviet literary culture, so much so that this format might be regarded as part of Russian literature’s genetic code. The fact that this institution has proven so long-lived and immutable must be regarded is an appropriate subject for research and academic consideration in its own right. Interest in this subject can be found as early as the 1990s, when Boris Dubin analyzed the institution of thick journals as a “routinizing” force which had lost its connection with the real trends shaping the development of literature.1 In 1993, he wrote:

The process through which the existing, habitual worldview and aesthetic code developed by several generations of journal-style authors in the 1960s–1980s, are combined with […] republished avant-garde work and tamizdat texts [material by Soviet bloc authors published abroad] from the same period, which were constructed according to new, postmodern archetypes, produces

1 Boris Dubin, “Zhurnal'naia kul'tura postsovetskoi epokhi” [1993], in his Slovo–pis'mo–literatura (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), 135–48.

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the impression of parody, the likely intentions of the authors and publishers to the contrary notwithstanding, and of a shift, in the sociological sense, towards the cultural periphery, where [thick journals] function as a space for joining together “ready-made” (to use Tynianov’s term) meanings and models.2

He followed the same line of reasoning ten years later, when taking stock of the general trends of development in the 1990s:

More and more frequently, we can see thick journals functioning as a routinizing element of the literary system, which preserves the literary standards and archetypes of the past; whether this is done consciously or by force of habit is of no importance. In essence, for the first time in history they do not represent a literary institution, or avant-garde literary explorations, or a field for inter-group communications, or a channel for interactions with readers (including the most sophisticated groups of readers); instead, they represent nothing more than the conservative segment of the literary system. In that sense, we may now speak of the end of the era of journals in Soviet literature.3

More than ten years have passed, however, and thick journals continue not only to function, but also to play a rather important role in the literary process as a whole. If one conceives of the development of literature in the post-Soviet period as a “step-by-step” process in which the “old” (everything Soviet, associated with government regulation of the economy and ideological regulation of culture) is displaced by the “new,” i.e. the products of the tendencies that became dominant during the period of institutional restructuring (perestroika) and radical reforms to entire cultural systems which occurred at the end of the 1980s (the end of censorship, the formation of free markets, including the marketplace of ideas, the stratification of audiences, the end of what had been a single, all-inclusive cultural hierarchy, etc.), then the resilience of this irrelevant, practically dead “routinizing” institution seems inexplicable. In order to understand and describe this phenomenon, one must begin by thinking of the literary process as “non-linear.” One logical starting point could be the status of literary journals in the early 2000s, based on empirical research and data from a participant observer.

2 Ibid., 146. 3 Boris Dubin and Lev Gudkov, Intellektual'nye gruppy i simvolicheskie formy: Ocherki sotsiologii sovremennoi kul'tury (Moscow: Novoe izdatel'stvo, 2004), 122.

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It is true that if the literary system is viewed from the outside, in terms of the relevance of its structure to the needs of the reading community (or, more accurately, communities), then thick journals certainly seem to have been in an unenviable position after the early 1990s. Demand for this form of publication reached its peak during the period of perestroika, when such journals became “opinion-makers” for their traditional readership, the largely homogenous mass of the “Soviet intelligentsia.”4 This was followed by a collapse; economic crisis led to a drop in circulation and shifting interest and attention led to a loss of readership. The (late-)Soviet intelligentsia lost its homogeneity, divided into different layers, some joining other strata and others transforming into intellectuals of the western type.5 Thick journals began to experience economic difficulties that they have yet to overcome. For the last twenty or so years, miniscule circulations and an almost total lack of retail distribution have made it impossible for a journal to survive on its “core business” alone. Even in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, to say nothing of the rest of Russia (the so-called “regions”), one has to know where to look in order to find a copy of these publications. Even in the country’s two main cities such journals are only sold at their own editorial offices and in a handful of specialized stores focusing on intellectual literature. Furthermore, selling journals outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg often entails losses for the publisher, because of the high cost of delivery and the low volume of sales. Based on my own observations of journals’ internal workings in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg, it is apparent that the economic challenges faced by thick journals were understood by their editors to be immutable, and up until 2014, there seem to have been no attempts to expand audiences by applying more advanced commercial or PR technology. Instead, as difficulties emerged, they provoked a paternalistic pattern of economic behavior; journal editors appealed directly to government authorities in the hope of receiving grants or subsidies for library subscriptions. It is precisely due to these subscriptions that mass circulation (relatively speaking) among the reading audience is achieved. As such, the bulk of the audience for these

4 See B. Menzel, Grazhdanskaia voina slov: Rossiiskaia literaturnaia kritika perioda perestroiki, G. B. Snezhinskaia, trans. from German (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2006), 132. 5 It is illustrative that as early as I.F. Deviatko and S.S. Shvedov’s 1990 study (“Zhurnal i ego chitatel'. Sotsiologicheskii otchet,” Voprosy literatury 1990 (1): 3–24), which deals with the audience of the journal Voprosy literatury (“Questions of literature”), two mutually exclusive prospects for the journal are suggested; it must either become more specialized or appeal more to a “general interest” audience. See also Boris Dubin, “Literaturnye zhurnaly v otsutstvii literaturnogo protsessa,” in his Slovo–pis'mo–literatura, 148–55.


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journals comprises visitors to libraries (especially provincial libraries), as well as librarians themselves. This income alone would not be enough to fully cover the overhead and payroll costs, were it not for the favorable rental rates the journals receive. Only Novyi mir (“New world”) and Oktiabr' (“October”) have retained the editorial offices they inherited from the Soviet past. Znamia (“Banner”) has moved twice since its building on Nikol'skaia Street was requisitioned for other purposes, and the editorial offices of Druzhba narodov (“Friendship of the peoples”) found themselves without any location at all.

All of this makes it clear that the economic situation of thick journals is quite precarious and that demand for them, judging by the sales of the paper copies, is negligible, and, if one judges by the makeup of their audience, marginal.

Unsurprisingly, the editors of the thick journals observed for this study regard their situation as a “crisis” (in terms of financial losses and even with a certain degree of resentment), yet oddly they simultaneously emphasize their publications’ leading role in the formation of the contemporary literary “mainstream.” 6 In the words of thick journal editors themselves, there is something about them that “no one needs anymore,” but that is still “essential for literature.”

In addition to this paradoxical self-assessment, there is another factor which complicates the picture of thick journals as a dying, anachronistic institution: the open-access online resource Zhurnal'nyi zal (“Journal hall”) which has existed since 1996 and now attracts 7,000–10,000 visits per day.7 In addition to journals’ offline audiences, which are mostly marginal in composition, this site attracts a relatively broad (though small by internet standards) online audience. It is true that the composition of this audience has yet to be studied carefully, but several reasonable extrapolations can still be made. According the general statistics available

6 Sergei Chuprinin writes that the mainstream “does not remotely overlap with a catalogue of the latest trends, instead it selects only those phenomena which not only attract curiosity from readers, but are also approved by public opinion,” and further, “in general, national tradition attached itself to the same concept of national literature, advanced, as a rule, by thick literary journals” (Sergei Chuprinin, Meinstrim. Zhizn' po poniatiam: Russkaia literatura segodnia (Moscow: Vermia, 2007), 186). This optimistic declaration stands in sharp contract to the generally alarmist tone of V. Elistratov’s article, “Ne nado boiat'sia burzhuia c rublem, ili V poiskakh russkogo literaturnogo meinstrima,” (Znamia 2006 (7): 197–203). See also the broad divergence of opinion in the roundtable discussion: “Produktovyi nabor ili oskolok vytesniaemoi kul'tury: Kruglyi stol,” Druzhba narodov 2005 (1): 166–99. 7 For the history of this site, see Sergei Kostyrko, “Magazines.russ.ru — k desiatiletiiu ‘Zhurnal'nogo zala’ v Internete. Istoriia i kontseptsiia saita, spravka o nyneshnem sostoianii,” Novyi mir 2006 (3): 195–204.

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on the Russian Internet, this audience is young, well-educated, less conservative, and more economically prosperous than the audience for paper circulation. Furthermore, it is geographically dispersed; the electronic versions of thick journals are read not only throughout Russia, but also across the Russian-language diaspora around the world.

At the same time, it is quite apparent that this new thick journal reader is not the familiar kind of reader which editorial boards have lamented losing since the peak of circulation during perestroika. The journals (all of them except Novyi mir in the last 8–10 years) orient their editorial policies towards a “general [broad] reader,” who has no special training, but is still “smart,” “cultured,” and thirsty for exposure to “high culture.” Considering that the journals no longer attract many of these readers, one might argue that the journals which have adopted this strategy against all evidence, in order to compensate for the experience of instantly losing their audience and influence in the 1990s. We will see later how this phantom strategy, when multiplied by an institutional factor, leads to very real consequences for the entire contemporary literary system.

Taken together, all of these factors make it possible to speak of “the paradox of thick journals” as a distinct phenomenon. Despite the objective and systemic factors that make them an anachronism, and the fact that their existence is incompatible with the new paradigm according to which literary culture functions, for twenty-five years now they have not simply existed, but have actually found a new habitat for themselves while maintaining editorial practices practically unchanged (“exhibiting the achievements of literary work for the general reader”) despite changing audiences. What is the symbolic and institutional resource which enables them to continue to exist? Who is their real audience? In order to answer these questions, and understand the true place of thick journals in contemporary literature, it is necessary to pull the argument back a few logical steps and touch on another aspect of the “collapse” which they experienced at the end of the perestroika period.

One of the unchanging components of thick journals is their structure. A thick journal usually consists of two parts. The first is dedicated to prose and poetry, while the second contains nonfiction: essays, criticism, journalistic writing, memoirs, and bibliographies. Priority is given to literature as a “picture of the world” transmitted by the journal. The structure of the journal demonstrates that literature is an unremarked and unnoticed component, a given, of its conversation about modernity and the world, which makes (and has made, over the two-


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century history of the format) the journal the center of generally accepted semantic exchange and a transmitter of the central ideas of the age. Created within the Soviet literary system, the several “traditional” thick journals still alive today are structured in such a way that they reinforce the model of literature they were tasked with transmitting. The ultimate source of this model is what might be called a literature-centric paradigm, a cultural function which sanctifies the author of a work of literature and assigns him the role of a creator, a prophet, or even one who teaches others how to live (this is the origin of Yevtushenko’s phrase “a poet in Russia is more than a poet”).8 Literature itself functions as a public tribune, a department of philosophy, and much more; it is the primary place where generally accepted symbols are engendered and transmitted. This model also presupposes that this process of transmission is conducted by a unified, mass audience (which is not, however, stratified) within a unified, undifferentiated axiological field. Literature is figured as a homogenous field with a unitary, institutionally reinforced center; as such, the boundaries of recognition and official status correspond with one another, and the aesthetic and axiological boundaries of literature as a field correspond with its institutional boundaries. “Foreign” or “marginal” elements in this system, such as “genre” or “mass” literature, for example, were compelled to either incorporate themselves into that system in terms of its established elements, or lose their status as “literary” texts. In this “official” space, literature was conceived of as homogenous and monocentric. Thick journals were the center of this literature. The mass readership of these journals, the “Soviet intelligentsia,” or at least the part of it which was not directly involved in samizdat or dissidence, perceived thick journals as conferring literary legitimacy on an author and his or her work. As such, there is basis to claim that the mass interest in republications of samizdat and tamizdat during the “publication boom” in the second half of the 1980s was partially caused by the fact that readers interpreted the publication of these texts in thick journals as a sign that previously prohibited texts were being incorporated into the “system” and their “legitimacy” was being recognized.

During the 1990s, the cultural system underwent a steady, yet quite rapid transition away from the literature-centric paradigm, associated partly with the weakening and decentralization of government power as the primary source of ideological direction for literature, and partly with the transition to a post-industrial market economy, which offered 8 For more on this literature-centric paradigm, see Mikhail Berg, Literaturokratiia: Problema prisvoeniia i pereraspredeleniia vlasti v literature (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2000), esp. 352.

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consumers of culture a choice between many different forms of entertainment. As early as the beginning of the 1990s, economic causes (an increasingly impoverished population and the establishment of the free market) led to a drop in the value assigned to reading in general, and especially the reading of literature, by the former audience for thick journals.9 This moment corresponded with a drop in the circulation of thick journals, which led to the disappearance of mass demand and the collapse of their audience.

It would seem that thick journals, by definition, ought not to have survived the ruination of the system which created them.

Yet, as we know, that did not happen. As a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union—until the formation

of a structured book market in the mid-1990s—literature was left to its own devices. The thick journals, counter to their own expectations, found themselves in competition with literary publications (new journals, almanacs), which were intended almost exclusively for demand within the literary world, and were essentially elitist in nature. 10 Against the backdrop of these publications, within the context of a book market that was not fully formed and the total lack of an image of the intended reader among salon authors with their underground baggage, the thick journals, with their existing strategies, seemed somehow odious, and indeed temporary and unstable. A gradual process of change did, however, occur. After the rise of major literary prizes and the development of the book market, so-called “smart managers” along with a local equivalent of “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians) emerged, which in turn gave rise to demand for “good literature for everyone” (including domestic literature). It became obvious that it was precisely the thick journals that held the influence in this area. Members of the editorial boards of thick journals can be found on both prize committees and among the primary nominees. Among writers, there is a strongly held opinion that publication in one of the leading thick journals is simply indispensable for anyone wishing to build a successful literary career. This opinion appears to be confirmed by the survey conducted for this study among publishers of domestic prose, who affirmed that they regard 9 “I’m not up to reading anymore” was an oft-repeated response in interviews for this project. 10 Unfortunately, a full catalogue of these publications, many of which were ephemeral and did not last beyond their second or third issues, has yet to be compiled. Examples include: The Bronze Age (Bronzovyi vek 1993–99); Babylon (Vavilon 1989–2004); Agreement (Soglasie 1990–91); and Solo, dedicated to literary debuts (1990–2000). It is curious to note that the majority of the publications that emerged in the new literary, cultural, and economic situation did not survive through the 2000s—unlike thick journals. It is precisely their institutional resilience which is the subject of this inquiry.


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thick journals as an authoritative source of new texts for publication. One of the most influential publishers of Russian prose fiction, Elena Shubina, stated at a meeting with students of the Russian State University for the Humanities that she begins her mornings by reading literary periodicals, primarily thick journals. The survey of members of the literary community conducted for this study, in the spring of 2012, indicated that while loyalty to thick journals among writers was quite low in the early- or even mid-1990s, now it is actually quite high. Almost all of the writers surveyed (34 respondents) demonstrated that reading thick journals plays some kind of role in their work. The way they read thick journals, however, has changed since the time when these publications were at their height and enjoyed the support of a broader swath of the literary system. They are now more likely to view individual articles on the Zhurnal'ny zal website, most often by following links posted on social media by authoritative colleagues rather than by navigating through the site itself. In this way, each individual writer compiles a “meta-journal,” containing materials directly related to his or her interests. The importance of reading thick journals for any particular author is directly proportional to his or her distance from the country’s two major cities, and inversely proportional to his or her involvement in the events of the literary world, which provide opportunities for direct interaction with colleagues. Most of the authors, however, even those who do not regularly read thick journals, stated that they regard being published in one of the thick journals based in one of the capitals as very significant. (This significance can only be symbolic in nature, since the honoraria offered by contemporary thick journals are modest to say the least.)

All evidence indicates that thick journals have transformed into specialized publications, intended for producers (in the broad sense of the word), including those who function as intermediaries between the literary community and the community of readers.

A theory proposed by Pierre Bourdieu in “The Field of Literature” is highly applicable to the process of interpreting this transformation.11 Bourdieu described two “principles of hierarchization” of the field; the “heteronomous” (external) and the “autonomous” (internal). The external principle imposes the field of power upon the field of cultural production (specifically literature) and “advantages those who are economically and politically dominant in the field,” while the internal principle values “art for art’s sake,” “the most radical followers of which see failure as a sign of being one of the elect, and immediate success as a 11 P'er Burd'e, “Sotsiologiia kul'turnykh polei. Pole literatury,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 2000 (45), 22–87. Original: Pierre Bourdieu, “Le champ littéraire,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1991 (89): 4–46.

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sign of compromise with ‘worldly’ concerns.”12 The struggle between these two principles defines the state of the field at any particular moment. The more the external principle of hierarchization is subordinated to the internal principle of hierarchization, the more autonomous the field becomes. Bourdieu writes,

The more autonomous the field, the more advantaged the balance of symbolic power becomes for producers who are independent of demand, and the more distinct the boundary between the two poles of the field becomes: the sub-field of limited (elitist) production [sous-champ de production restreinte], in which producers produce for other producers—their direct competitors—and the symbolically excluded and discredited sub-field of broad (mass) production [sous-champ de grande production].13

Bourdieu demonstrates that there are two extreme poles in the field of culture (which still interact with one another). For the purposes of this analysis, Bourdieu is important not so much as the creator of a metalanguage suitable for describing sociocultural processes, but as a scholar who described a “pure,” uncomplicated model of the literary field (based on an analysis of French literature).

The Soviet literary field, however, could not be autonomous in the same way as its French counterpart. As noted earlier, the contemporary cultural field rejected a literature-centric worldview at the beginning on the 1990s. One could read this rejection as the literary field’s sharp, “traumatic” leap back from engagement in larger issues of politics and social life and toward the pole of autonomy. Literature at the time became, both aesthetically and philosophically, “in itself” and “for itself.”

Thick journals are currently incorporating themselves into the newly autonomous literary structure. At the same time, the initial “literature-centric” model, which cast aside the ideology that gave birth to it like a rocket discarding its booster stage, still retains two important dispositions: the unity (by default) of literature, a natural given, outside of reflexive efforts, i.e. a natural taste leading to the development of a framework of tradition, to the idea of an aesthetic “norm” and of the institutionalizing gesture exercising a right delegated to it by history. Obviously, the publications under consideration here did not entirely shed their propensity for ideologically driven behavior, but their “liberal”

12 Ibid., 26. 13 Ibid.


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ideology has turned out to be a forerunner of an “autonomous” conception of literature, free from the dictates of external factors. This conception leads to the conclusion that literature itself defines its own boundaries and the criteria by which it is to be evaluated. It is precisely in the struggle to redefine these criteria that the struggle for power in the field of literature is enacted, according to Bourdieu. Thick journals are entering into that struggle, on the basis of foundational concepts that are new to them.

Like all participants in this struggle, they manifest their own foundational concepts. It is in this process that the paradox of the thick journals emerges. Thick journals invoke the figure of an “external” reader and thereby declare that they are governed by the heteronomous principle. Thick journals function as a venue for external representation of all of the “main,” “essential,” or “central” phenomena in contemp-orary literature; this very space of “main” or “central” phenomena, with the potential for external manifestation, i.e. those which can be easily removed from their context and incorporated into a broadly understood, broadly accepted context, into a kind of potential “national canon” which is manifested as the “mainstream.” The fact that this construction turns out to be non-functional, that it never reaches the “general reader” (as discussed above) is figured in thick journal publications as “the problem of the mainstream.” To put it in Bourdieu’s terms, their position is autonomous and heteronomous simultaneously.

The factual picture is as follows: thick journals withdraw from the struggle for readers, since they do not participate in the market, as evidenced by their extremely low circulation and lack of distribution. Actual subscribers are not the stratum for which the journal is de facto intended. The actual audience for the declarations made by thick journals is the community of producers itself. The heteronomous principle functions in such a way that it produces an effect of autonomy. Symbolic capital is represented as material capital.

Furthermore, since it is a pure “construct,” the mainstream ultimately functions for thick journals as a kind of real position in the field of literature, institutionally reinforced by the system of prizes and a range of publishing programs, though in this case they are purely prestige publications, not supported by demand, but rather by income from “commercial” publications.

At the same time, the field of genuine mass (relatively speaking) intellectual demand and production (the field of intellectual fashion oriented towards bobos, now called the “creative class,” or the “new intelligentsia”), which has taken shape in contemporary Russia, is not equivalent to the specifically thick-journal mainstream; there is some

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overlap in terms of the texts selected, but the broader intellectual mainstream uses other media channels that are more external in their approach to literature.14

In essence, what we are dealing with is an idea of the mainstream divorced not only from demand, but also from fashion. It is the ideas of norms and a canon that are closest to this version of the mainstream, yet these are canons and norms, which model through the literary field a paradoxical (that is, utterly unrelated to “external” recognition) average, or central zone that is not attached to literary life, with its group interests and criteria.

At this point one must recall the idea of dispositions. Unlike any other group competing for a position in the new literature, the thick journal community is struggling to avoid losing the position they already occupy, rather than to occupy a new position. They might be said to be pursuing the “status quo 2.0.” The right to set the institutional boundaries of literature, which is associated with them in the literary community, was “cashed in” during that struggle.

The function of thick journals in the contemporary literary space is to “materialize” literature, to reproduce its institutional boundaries in their historically assigned delineations, which are potentially recognizable from the outside; in other words, to retain social forms for their own sake and within their own frameworks, as forms of intra-literary identity, perhaps even identity constructed negatively in relation to that same “institutional coercion.”

Addendum While work on this article was underway, 2015 was announced as “The Year of Literature” in Russia. To the extent that it is possible to judge at the present moment, this symbolic gesture by the authorities was meant to be a substitute for instituting a new cultural policy in regards to literature. While practically the entire post-Soviet period has been characterized by the lack of any sort of demands made on literature by

14 While work on this article was ongoing, these phenomena were combined under the umbrella term “hipster,” which primarily refers to youth culture, but in a broader sense to a particular lifestyle focused on intellectual consumption, so-called edutainment, etc. (See: M. Kuleva, “‘Umnyi i eto vidno’: stsena neformal'nogo kul'turnogo dosuga i novaia ‘intellektual'naia molodezh'’ Peterburga” Novye molodezhnye dvizheniia i solidarnosti Rossii, eds. E. L. Omel'chenko and G. A. Sabirova (Ul'ianovsk: Ul'ianovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet), 118–26.) For this group, it might be argued, the role of thick journals is now being played by intellectually-oriented glossy magazines (especially Snob, which periodically publishes literary issues, and Afisha, a lifestyle journal focused on youth culture.)


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the government (a tendency which was perceived as an unequivocal good), the government is now once again invoking its right to literature as a tool of ideological propaganda. The structure of the relationships involved is not simply a transposition of Soviet mechanisms into a contemporary context, however; instead, these relationships are now commercial in nature. Specifically, the government is only prepared to support that which serves the new ideology of unifying spiritual tenets (and is not prepared to support projects from sources falling anywhere on the liberal spectrum). This policy, coupled with the suppression of any independent source of financial support for culture (by designating NGOs as “foreign agents,” for example) also directly affects thick journals, in which an extreme emphasis on “liberal values” is paradoxically combined with a paternalistic economic model.15 Does this mean that thick journals are about to leave the literary world for good? That remains to be decided. In any case, the new situation will involve substantial changes in the institutional structure of Russian literature.

Translated from the Russian by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

15 See, for example: E. Vinokurova, A. Artem'ev, S. Smirnov. “Ot sumy do zakrytiia. Posledstviia priniatiia novogo zakona ob NKO,” Gazeta.Ru, February 7, 2012, accessed June 24, 2016: http://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2012/07/02_a_4659269.shtml.

“A corporation called Aleksei Ivanov”: Aleksei Ivanov on Local Identity, Writing, and Success

Interview by Bradley Gorski Columbia University

Introduction

In mid-2002, Aleksei Ivanov was working part-time as a river rafting guide and part-time in a local history museum in the northwestern Urals. A year and a half later, he was the most talked-about author in Russia. That year, his genre-bending historical fantasy, The Heart of the Parma, or Cherdyn'—Queen of the Mountains (Serdtse parmy, ili: Cherdyn'—Kniginia gor 2003), launched him to immediate national prominence. The novel recast the history of fifteenth-century Ural colonization as a mythic struggle between reluctant Christian conquerors and the supernatural powers inherent in “pagan lands.” Shamans, shape-shifters, and golden idols combined with real historical figures in a fantastical past that borrowed as much from Tolkien and George R.R. Martin as from Solov'ev or Karamzin. Ivanov recounted this mythic history in a strange hybrid language crowded with archaisms, unfamiliar toponyms, and his own linguistic inventions. His challenging prose, one skeptical critic wrote, was full of “linguistic thickets with thousands and thousands of phonetic

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catastrophes,” adding, for good measure, “you most likely won’t read it.”1 But the public did read it, finding the language musical and even magical.2 “It casts a spell,” wrote one online commenter.3 For many readers, the difficult language was not a distraction from, but rather an essential element of the novel’s particular admixture of history and fantasy. It sold extremely well, even as doubtful critics raised a collective eyebrow, and the Russian Booker Prize committee struck the work from its long-list due to the “absence of novelistic traits.”4

The same year, Ivanov published another manuscript that had, prior to The Heart of the Parma, garnered nothing but rejection notices for almost a decade. That book, The Geographer Drank Away His Globe (Geograf globus propil 2003), a fantasy-free narrative in clear, contemporary Russian about a struggling geography teacher in post-Soviet Perm, would go on to become one of the most popular novels of the 2000s, and in 2014 would be adapted for the screen (dir. Aleksandr Veledinskii). The success of The Geographer began to turn the tides of critical opinion in Ivanov’s favor. “Personally, I begin to respect a writer when he is able to produce at least two books that don’t resemble one another,” wrote the literary critic and writer author Dmitrii Bykov. “It seems that a very good writer has arrived.”5

Over the following years, as Ivanov produced another genre-defying, historical thriller—The Gold of the Rebellion, or: Down Along the River Narrows (Zoloto bunta, ili: Vniz po reke tesnin 2005)—and published another manuscript completed in the 1990s—The Dorm of the Spilt Blood (Obshchaga-na-Krovi 2006)—critics began to view him as a serious writer, even something of a homegrown genius. His lack of formal philological education, years toiling in obscurity, and avowedly Ural persona consciously positioned him against the capitals’ literary establishment, and crystallized in the journalistic stamp “permskii samorodok.”6 The term, 1 Lev Danilkin, “Kniga ‘Serdtse parmy’,” Afisha, 28 Mar 2003, Accessed 15 Aug 2015: http://www.afisha.ru/book/453/review/147498/ 2 See, for instance, the exchange between users Iuliia Volkova and Marina Aleksandrovskaia, “Prosmotr temy: Serdtse parmy ili Cherdyn' kniginia gory,” Vkontake.ru, accessed August 15, 2015, https://vk.com/topic-712287_671793?offset=0. 3 User: Zhen4ik, “Retsenzii i otzyvy na knigu Zoloto bunta ili Vniz po reke tesnin,” Imhonet.ru, accessed August 15, 2015, http://books.imhonet.ru/element/52689/ opinions/ 4 According to Ivanov. See Sergei Kudriashov, “Istoriia vsegda krovazhadna,” Gazeta “Trud-7”, June 9, 2005. 5 Dmitrii Bykov, “Knizhnaia polka Dmitriia Bykova,” Novyi mir 2003 (8), accessed August 1, 2016, http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/2003/8/bykov.html 6 The stamp became clichéd enough by 2006 that interviews of Ivanov and reviews of his work often used the term without quotation marks as a simple synonym for the author’s name. For instance, the lede to an interview that year reads, “The Dorm of the

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which literally means Perm’s “sui generis,” emphasizes both Ivanov’s distance from the capitals and his closeness to his native land. Indeed, Ivanov seems uncomfortable in the role of a refined littérateur. He often takes offence at interviewers’ questions or answers too honestly about his profit-motivations. He feels (and often looks) out of place in the literary establishment, and for several years after his initial disqualification, he refused to take part in national prize competitions. Instead, he travels around his native Urals, where he grew up and where almost all of his fiction is set.

Both his historical and contemporary novels grow out of his local experience and convey a deep and powerful sense of place. Struck by the “unusual and intense experience of the landscape” in Ivanov’s works, the Perm cultural theorists Marina and Vladimir Abashev have made his writing a centerpiece of their project on the “geopoetics” of the Urals.7 Depictions of the local landscapes in Ivanov’s novels, they argue, imbue the natural environment with new meaning and might even draw new visitors to the area. Vladimir Abashev and one of his graduate students interrogated this latter hypothesis in their article, “The Work of Aleksei Ivanov as a Factor in the Development of Internal Tourism in the Perm Region.”8

Though at first glance such a premise seems speculative, in his own activities Ivanov has sought to transform his readers from passive audience members into active participants in real-world projects. In 2006, he started the annual Heart of the Parma festival in Cherdyn', the historical capital of colonial Perm. Festival programming has included archery lessons, trebuchet construction, battle reenactments, and even a fifteenth-century-style wedding festival featuring local brides and grooms. The goal of founding the festival, said Il'ia Vilkevich, Ivanov’s agent at the time, was to create “a space in which the traditions and realities of the past transform into the present, and perhaps even into the future”—never mind the fact that those past “realities” derive from Ivanov’s fictional reimaginings. 9 Since its second year, the festival has been

Spilt Blood is only coming out now, after the publication of the permskii samorodok’s major works” (Dmitrii Murav'ev, “Aleksei Ivanov: ‘Ia pishu kak chitatel'’,” interview with Aleksei Ivanov, Vzgliad: delovaia gazeta, 9 May 2006, accessed 23 October 2015: http://vz.ru/culture/2006/5/9/32952.html). 7 See Abashev, V.V. and M.P. Abasheva, “Literatura i geografiia. Ural v geopoetika Rossii,” Vestnik permskogo universiteta, 2 (2012); and V.V. and M.P. Abasheva, “Poeziia prostranstva v proze A. Ivanova,” Sibirskii filologicheskii zhurnal 2 (2010): 81–91. 8 Abashev, V.V. and A.V. Firsova, “Tvorchestvo Alekseia Ivanova kak faktor razvitiia vnutrennego turizma v Permskom Krae,” Vestnik Permskogo universiteta: Rossiiskaia i zarubezhnaia filologiia 2013, 3(23): 182–90. 9 Qtd. in Il'ia Kukulin, “Geroizatsiia vyzhivaniia,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 2007 (86).


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partially funded by the Perm Region Ministry of Culture, and attracts between 10,000 and 25,000 participants annually.

Ivanov has proposed other projects to draw readers into an immersive experience of his novels. In an attempt to recreate the search for treasure in The Gold of the Rebellion, Ivanov suggested scattering souvenir coins near the site where, legend has it, an eighteenth-century river barge wrecked and scattered a trove of Catherine the Great’s gold.10 Tourists would be informed of the coins’ history and encouraged to dive after them. Though Ivanov’s vision was never realized in full, this summer an outside group built a similarly interactive experience inspired by The Gold of the Rebellion.11

Ivanov encourages this type of cultural ferment around his novels, suggesting that he measures the success of his novels in part by their afterlife in other media. He envisions each of his projects as a “corporation,” a term that reads only slightly less commercial in the original Russian: each fiction builds a world that invites audiences to participate, first imaginatively through the process of reading and then in the various other modes offered by ancillary projects, which he calls “interpretations,” including film adaptations, interactive games, festivals, and tourism. He sees his fiction as the origin of these “corporations,” but by no means as their only or most important incarnation: “Cinema,” he says, “is the most important interpretation.”

Perhaps thanks to his distance from the literary establishment, Ivanov perceives the cultural landscape in a way fundamentally different from the literature-centric view that many authors and literary critics are accustomed to taking. For him, literature is just one in a constellation of various aesthetic modes, each more or less effective in how it marshals “interactivity,” or how it draws its audience into active participation. In an illuminating section of the following interview, Ivanov describes what he calls a “a new type of novel” (“roman novogo tipa”) as drawing on the lessons not of any literary predecessors, but of hit HBO dramas like Game of Thrones. For Ivanov, literature is not a sacred domain of refined culture, but an aesthetic experience like any other. Perhaps it is telling that Iuliia Zaitseva, through whom I arranged my interviews with Ivanov, does not call herself his literary agent, but his “producer.” Although she negotiates his publishing contracts, devises media strategies, and

10 Neugodova, Margarita. “Permskii krai—territoriia kultury. Zolotoe kol'tso Urala.” Kultura Permskii krai. Publikatsii, February 4, 2015. Accessed August 18, 2015. http://kulturaperm.ru/publication/permskij-kraj-territoriya-kultury-zolotoe-kolco-urala/ 11 Pavel Raspopov, “Selo Kyn,” Nash Ural: Poznaem nash udivitel'nyi krai vmeste, accessed August 17, 2015: http://nashural.ru/Goroda_i_sela/kin.htm

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coordinates public appearances, her broader role is the production of what the author calls “a corporation called Aleksei Ivanov.”

The interview below reveals an author who sees himself both as a corporation and an artist: as a professional writer, but one who creates worlds that can be used to cultivate local identity, or that can just as quickly be franchised to film studios or video game producers. Even in acknowledging these aspects of his work, Ivanov seems unconcerned with any potential contradictions among them. In this spirit, our conversations ranged widely and covered some material more than once. I have attempted to focus this interview by condensing our hours of meetings into three thematic blocks, while also editing for length and clarity. The first section deals primarily with Ural identity, the second with questions of genre and writing, and the third with Ivanov’s understanding of success. As this is Ivanov’s first interview to appear in English, I have found it necessary to provide this brief introduction, but for the remainder of the interview, I have allowed Ivanov’s words to speak for themselves.

“In the popular imagination, there is only one identity—Muscovite”:

Literary Life and Ural Identity BG: I want to start by offering my congratulations. Your latest novel Nasty Weather (Nenast'e 2015) has just been short-listed for this year’s Big Book Award. For a long time you didn’t participate in any national prize competitions. Why did you agree to enter this year? AI: Thank you. I switched to a new publisher and the publisher asked me to participate. I agreed. So it wasn’t your decision? Half and half. Fifty-fifty. Why refrain from these competitions for so long? Are prizes not important for you?


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Prizes in Russia aren’t given out for the quality of the literature. I’ve formulated the three principles according to which Russian books are awarded the major prizes. First: are you loyal to the literary clique that gives out the prize? Second: are you yourself part of that clique? Third: in an extreme case, are you a figure of compromise? When they can’t give the prize to one of their own, we’d better give it to someone who won’t make us quarrel. If you satisfy those criteria, you have a good chance. I don’t satisfy them, so I don’t count on winning. So prizes aren’t markers of success for you? Objectively, no. Subjectively, of course, society thinks they are markers of success. They’re nice. I wouldn’t turn down any prizes. I believe I’ve earned them. But it’s not the reason I do the work I do. I work to create worlds. The worlds you create are most often set in the Urals, and describe the local landscape in ways that strongly affect your audience. After reading The Heart of the Parma, readers say they “experience the surrounding environment completely differently.”12 Some even urge fellow readers to visit the land where the novels are set. Why do your landscapes trigger such strong reactions? Did you intend to create such an effect? It’s not that I intended to create such an effect, but I wanted this effect to come through. It was part of my goal, but not the only goal, and not the main one. For me, it’s evidence, recognition of my literary merit more than of some ability to transmit cultural ideas or worse, to market tourism development projects. As far as what exactly attracts people, it’s hard to say. I think that first and foremost people are attracted by good literature and by the possibility of seeing in person what they read about in books. Especially in Russia, where people don’t know their own country very well, don’t respect it, when you offer readers an interesting glimpse into history, of course they get excited. Marina and Vladimir Abashev have written about you as an author who experiences your environment with unusual passion. Especially in your historical novels, the natural world acts almost as a character. How do you understand the role of nature in your novels and in the lives of your characters? The Abashevs ignore my most important text on this topic, The Alpine-Industrial Civilization (Gornozavodskaia tsivilizatsiia 2013), where I formulate 12 User: Dmitrii Kazantsev, “Prosmotr temy: Serdtse parmy ili Cherdyn' kniginia gory,” Vkontake.ru, accessed 15 August 2015 https://vk.com/topic-712287_671793?offset=0.

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the principles of mutual interaction between the social consciousness and geography, society and surroundings. I believe that Russian geography predetermines the presence in the country of certain cultural projects, which are tied to the economic modes of territorial development. With its geographic specificity, each territory requires a different mode of development, and each mode formulates a distinct social consciousness [sotsium]. Each social consciousness in turn formulates a system of values and aesthetic preferences. Any description of nature should reflect the values of the appropriate social consciousness. When I write, I always try to take such considerations into account. That brings me to a question about local identities. You have quite a bit of work on this topic. What does the term “local identity” mean for you in the abstract? What is the difference between local identity and a general Russian identity? For me, Russia is a collection of identities, just as Europe is a collection of countries. Identities can come in three varieties: first, national identity, clear enough; second, corporate identity, for instance the identity of soldiers, of bureaucrats, or of prisoners, etc.; third, regional or local identity. I’m most interested in regional identity. I believe our country can be divided into several basic regional identities. Central Russia has what I call a peasant identity; southern Russia, a Cossack identity; the Urals, a labor identity; northern Russia and Siberia, an identity based on trade. Each of these territories also has a distinctive mode of economic development. That mode forms the systems of economic management, social consciousness, and values. Each identity produces a hierarchy of values, and the people who belong to each identity express themselves through the highest value of that identity.

Take the Urals, for instance. Here you have the alpine-industrial laborer’s identity. The highest value here is labor. People express themselves through their labor. And the major folk heroes are always working people. For instance, the “Master Craftsman” in Pavel Bazhov’s Ural Tales. In central Russia you have the peasant identity where the highest values are power and property. People there express themselves through power and property, and the major folk hero is the bogatyr', the mythic knight, who defended the peasant community and protected its power and property. In Siberia and in the north, with their trade identity, the highest value is an entrepreneurial spirit and the central figure there is an entrepreneur, like the merchant Savko, or a pioneer who amasses an enormous territory. Southern Russia, with its Cossack identity, holds justice and equality as their highest values, and the major folk hero there is Sten'ka Razin, a Cossack bandit who stole from the rich, like a Russian


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Robin Hood. Identities are differentiated primarily by the values through which the carriers of that identity express themselves. How did the Ural identity form around labor? Under Peter the Great in the seventeenth century these territories were the first in Russia to develop heavy industry, while trade and agriculture dominated the economies of the rest of the country. Industry as a mode of development in the Urals predetermined a specifically industrial identity. There were around 200 factories here at the time, called alpine factories [gornozavody]. These were unique facilities, unlike anything in Europe. They existed only in Russia, because of the landscape and the way serfdom supplied labor to industry. These alpine factories created their own world, which researchers in the early twentieth century called the “alpine-industrial civilization.” It had its own political system, its own administration, at times even its own currency, its own laws on serfs, and of course its own culture. Perm, Yekaterinburg, parts of Izhevsk and the Cheliabinsk region: all of these territories are part of the oldest industrial zone in Russia. As a writer, you seem interested in seeing your characters live through difficult times such as the early colonization of the Urals or the unstable post-Soviet 1990s. Recently such periods have often been conceptualized as traumatic. What does the category of “trauma” mean to you and what role does it play in the development of a character’s personality or of identity on a broader scale? In the development of identity trauma plays no role at all because an identity is not subject to trauma in the human sense. As far as an individual personality is concerned, trauma, naturally, plays a big role, but still a secondary one. A person’s motivations are always primary. Trauma is what people sustain in pursuit of their goals, and so trauma is always a secondary phenomenon. Though sometimes it does influence motivations.

Trauma can be a factor in the function of identity, for instance now in Russia the Moscow identity is recognized as the primary identity. All the rest are either compromised or secondary or unimportant. For carriers of those other identities this situation can feel traumatic. But the identity itself does not suffer. How is local identity developing in Russia today? Are local identities suffering or are they becoming more important?

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In the popular imagination, there is only one identity—Muscovite—and all the others are degraded or compromised versions. In reality, that’s not the case. Identities are still alive and identities still manifest themselves as they always have. Do you think there is any place for a cultural creator in the formation of local identity? Of course there is. There are even well defined practices. Cultural creators can take part in cultural enrichment programs for various territories, for instance, but one should speak of each concrete case individually. I have participated more than once in such programs myself, but the problem is, in our country, such programs are only declarations. They are rarely put into practice. So I have no influence de facto. De jure, of course, I’m often invited, I express my opinion, that opinion is reflected in certain policy guidelines, but those guidelines remain empty documents. You have been part of more than one project that was implemented, though. You created a festival around your novel The Heart of the Parma. Can you say a few words about that festival, and how it was related to the novel and to broader ideas around local identity? The history of that festival is complicated, and not particularly literary. The festival was my producer Iuliia Zaitseva’s idea. She found out what subcultures in contemporary Russia didn’t have a regular event, and she found a movement called role-players [roleviki], that is people who dress up in historical clothing, take up swords, chainmail and shields and do battle against each other. And she decided to put together a festival of these role-players based on my novels and host it in Cherdyn', which is famous for its fifteenth- and sixteenth-century battles. It was a presentation of the territory, meant to attract people, so they would visit the museum, visit local sites, and so on. But the most important part was to offer the festival to the role-players so that they would pull it along, like a locomotive. On a project of a different genre—the four-part documentary film that you made along with Moscow journalist Leonid Parfenov The Backbone of Russia (Khrebet Rossii 2010)—I know that you would have preferred it to be longer. If you had been granted another one or two episodes, what would you have included? That project was the most expensive project in domestic television. I raised two million dollars to fund it. I had very good sponsors. I wanted


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to film a twelve-part documentary, but when I spoke with the producer at the Moscow station, he told me no Moscow station would take a twelve-part film about the provinces. Four parts, maximum. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to cut it down from twelve parts to four. So I didn’t have a chance to discuss a lot of interesting things that I could have discussed about the Urals. There’s only a tenth of what I would have wanted in the film. In reality, the Urals are much more diverse and interesting but alas, alas.

The film has nothing about the civil war, nothing about the execution of the Imperial Family, not a word about Mamin-Sibiriak, one of the most important Ural writers, and the first writer in Russia to take up the Urals as a subject. That was at the end of the nineteenth century. The film says nothing about the patron saint of the Urals and protector of the Imperial Family, Simeon Verkhoturskii. He was the patron saint of factories, industry, and workers. If tragedy struck a worker, that worker wouldn’t pray to Christ or to the Virgin Mary or to Nikolai Ugodnik, but to Simeon Verkhoturskii. He was the protector of factories because in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries identity was still defined by saints. Each social consciousness had a patron saint. For instance workers had Simeon Verkhoturskii, the peasants had Dolma Tysiatskii, the furriers had Vasilii Mangazeiskii, etc. Identity was marked by saints. In the film I didn’t have a chance to speak about that either. And about many many other things besides.

“Real drama is born in the space between two eras”: Time, Genre and a New Type of Novel

A question about genre: You seem to play freely among genres with hybrid novels, such as the historical fantasies The Heart of the Parma and The Gold of the Rebellion, and with other works in markedly different genres, from film to nonfiction, contemporary realism to science fiction. How do you see genre frameworks in your own work and in literature in general? That’s a big question. For me personally genre is always a product of theme. That is, first I define what I want to talk about and based on that, I choose a genre. If I want to talk about the fates of civilizations in the cosmos, for instance, I would choose a genre like cosmic opera and not a ladies’ sentimental novel. If I want to talk about a person in difficult times, I choose the normal realistic novel and not fantasy, and so on. Genre is always a product of theme.

But generally in Russia, the question of genre is more often secondary. Russia got stuck in postmodernism, and the central aesthetic

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of postmodernism is conspiratorial thinking. When an author does not want to search for an explanation—searching takes time, it’s difficult, you have to think—he dreams one up instead. Pull it from a hat, take it out of thin air, explain it all with some kind of alien life form or conspiracy or some global villain, and it’s ready to go. That kind of conspiratorial thinking always predetermines which genres contemporary authors work in. That’s number one. Number two, the problem with contemporary literature is that—and it’s not just a problem with literature, but with contemporary society as a whole—is that the central conflicts that are tearing society apart are not consciously perceived. And if the central conflicts are not perceived, there can be no hero of our time because the hero of the time always embodies that central conflict. An author could write such a hero, but that hero wouldn’t be read correctly. He wouldn’t be perceived, recognized, understood for who he is. And so literature loses its dramatics. Or rather, literature loses its drama. It still has dramatics, but not drama. Literature begins to look like a literary game.

And this especially implicates certain genres. There are some enormously long epic novels which endlessly tell stories about a family or a community, but those stories are not united by a central drama. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Márquez, for instance, is united by such a drama, the drama of solitude. But take any work that’s been popular in Russia, like The Kukotsky Enigma (Kazus Kukotskogo 2001) or any of Liudmila Ulitskaya’s works, they don’t have any consolidating drama. That’s a huge problem for literature. And it’s reflected also in the choice of genres. The genre of the family epic, the family saga, the popularity of that genre is a product of a misunderstanding of the conflicts tearing our society apart. Thinking about your latest works, Yo-burg (Ëburg 2014) and Nasty Weather, both more or less set in contemporary Yekaterinburg, how has the transition from historical to present times and from rural to urban settings has changed your poetics? How do think about that transition as you write? There was no real difficulty in the transition. As a writer I began in science fiction, then I wrote two novels of contemporary urban prose, The Dorm on the Spilt Blood and The Geographer Drank Away His Globe. Then came the historical novels The Heart of the Parma and The Gold of the Rebellion, and then I went back to contemporary urban prose. I don’t really have any trouble moving from one genre to another because I always write about certain phenomena, certain self-contained communities, or self-contained in a historical sense. I don’t write about


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land, I don’t write about history, I write specifically about self-contained phenomena.

In the novel The Heart of the Parma the Greater Perm principality is such a self-contained phenomenon; in The Gold of the Rebellion the self-contained phenomenon is the river navigation of “iron caravans” along the Chusovaia. If you recall To See a Russian Rebellion (Uvidet' russkii bunt 2013), there I describe Russia as a cycle of self-contained phenomena. And what I’ve written about the contemporary world, including my latest novel Nasty Weather, is also about a certain self-contained phenomenon, a community of Afghan veterans turned mafia. Do you feel that your historical novels are distinct from your more contemporary novels in how the interactions between characters and space are presented in each of these self-contained worlds? For me, no, there’s no distinction. I always evaluate the plot and the descriptions of nature on equal terms. Your descriptions of nature, and more broadly your use of language, were major themes in interviews and reviews when your historical novels first appeared. How did you create the language you used in your historical novels, and how did you intend your readers to experience it? I never meant to make it easy for my readers. I knew it would be hard, but that didn’t bother me, or really even interest me. I was working towards an aesthetic goal I had set for myself. I have three works with invented languages, or rather that feature linguistic pictures of the world: the historical novels The Heart of the Parma and The Gold of the Rebellion and the science fiction novel Ships and Galaxies (Korabli i galaktiki 1992), where I invented a cosmic language. All of these languages, in both the historical and the science fiction works are obviously invented. They are constructions. In reality people in the past did not speak that way, and many of the words I use never existed. I made them up. When I imagined the language for The Heart of the Parma, I built my foundation from local languages: the Finno-Ugric languages of the Komi and Mansi peoples, and old Russian. I forged them into a single alloy and got this enchanting mixture. It was done deliberately, consciously. In the same way, for the novel The Gold of the Rebellion, I took the archaic technical language of river navigation from a dictionary that is more than a hundred years old, a dictionary for foresters, ship-builders, and river captains. I used words from there. I specifically created a linguistic picture of the world so that the reader could not only envision unfamiliar

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realities, but could also hear the sounds of the speech, the names of things. I needed this kind of language in order to make the work interactive, so that it resonated phonetically as well. One online comment suggests readers shouldn’t necessarily worry about meaning: “If you stumble on lots of incomprehensible words,” this reader suggests, “listen to them like music.”13 Do you agree? Is this the right way to approach your difficult language? Yes. Notice that these books don’t have glossaries.

When you submit a book to a publisher you need to put together a special document called an author’s page where you write out all the potentially difficult words in your book and indicate stress and so on. So I did all that work already, but the books have no glossaries because I specifically did not want readers to understand everything. I wanted them to pick up on certain things by intuition and simply enjoy the sound of certain words. Even so, every word has a real meaning. Two of your books—The Geographer Drank Away His Globe and The Gold of the Rebellion—are of different genres, but explore the same, or at least similar themes, the experiences of one person in difficult times. Why did you choose such different genres? In this case, I can’t agree with you. Those aren’t really books about difficult times. There have been a lot of difficult times in Russia. Take any time, they were all difficult, and every work that chronologically relates to a certain time inevitably depicts that. In The Geographer, sure. It’s built on the fact that a person embodies within himself society’s most basic conflict. That novel was written in 1995, during that wild decade in Russia. The major conflict at the time was an absence of harmony. People didn’t understand what was happening, where everything was going, why everything was falling apart, and what to do. It was harmony that was needed. There was a feeling that the world needed to be collected into some kind of unity in order to be livable. And this is exactly what occupies my hero. He’s a person of harmony, but the world around him is dissonant. And in that dissonant world he seems dysfunctional, he looks like a loser, like a laughing stock. But that is a problem with the world, not with him.

But The Gold of the Rebellion is not about that at all. That is a novel about how to preserve your soul when you have to do things beyond human strength. For that novel I invented an eighth sacrament: the 13 User: Marina Aleksandrovskaia, “Prosmotr temy: Serdtse parmy ili Cherdyn' kniginia gory,” Vkontake.ru, August 15, 2015: https://vk.com/topic-712287_671793?offset=0.


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sacrament of the extraction of the soul. I’m very proud of that invention. It’s the structural foundation of that work. Can one do things beyond one’s strength and preserve one’s soul? Speaking completely primitively, can one be Napoleon and remain a moral person? Your next novel, Tobol, is rumored to be another historical novel. Right now, I’m writing the screenplay for Tobol. It’s an eight-part dramatic miniseries about Siberia during the reign of Peter the Great. I’ll adapt my novel from the screenplay.

The novel will be in two volumes. The first comes out this fall and the second will come out next year. Alongside the novel, there will also be a book of non-fiction about those times, not as an artistic imagining, but what happened in reality, complete with photographs. That book will likely come out this winter. I’m coauthoring it with [producer] Iuliia [Zaitseva]. But Tobol will be a novel, and it will be something of a return to the form of historical novel as in The Heart of the Parma and The Gold of the Rebellion? Roughly, yes. There won’t be a new language, but there will be a huge linguistic complex compiled from various cultures: schismatics, indigenous tribes, Chinese settlers, Central Asians, Russian servicemen, etc. But I want to structure it specifically in the format of a dramatic series, in the format that HBO uses, because it seems to me that the new type of novel will come from cinema. Cinema has become the most important art form and it defines the format of literature as well, just as, in its own time, literature defined the format of theater and cinema.

In my opinion, the new type of novel is not built like a traditional novel. The new type of novel is both mainstream and realistic, despite the fact that it might contain dragons and miracles, etc.

What exactly the new type of novel is I can best explain with the example of Game of Thrones but specifically the HBO series. I haven’t read [George R. R.] Martin’s book and I won’t read it, but the format is clear enough from the series. The new type of novel is compiled from various paradigms, at minimum three. Two of these paradigms have never been combined before and the third is from a completely different genre of art. What do I mean concretely? If we take Game of Thrones, from what paradigms is it composed? First, of course, is fantasy. Second is historical naturalism. Fantasy and naturalism are diametrically opposed and have never been combined before. And here they were combined. The third,

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the completely anamolous [inorodnaia] paradigm is, let’s call it the guidebook, because Game of Thrones was filmed in the most beautiful places in the world: Scottish castles and Malta and Dubrovnik, I could go on. And the combination of those three different paradigms produced the supersuccess of Game of Thrones.

But the historical novel, not the fantasy paradigm, is primary here. What is the essence of a historical novel? In a historical novel the characters’ actions are always determined by history. That is, the protagonist acts as historical circumstances demand and not just how he wants to or as the plot demands. That’s the defining characteristic of a historical novel. In the new type of novel there might be demons and dragons and magic, whatever, but if the characters act as history demands, then it’s a historical novel despite the trappings of fantasy. I wrote Tobol in this format. There are shamans and miracles and enchanted places but nevertheless, it’s a historical novel, a new type of novel. But Game of Thrones uses no factual history, while your novels are based on real history. The names are recognizable and the geographical settings are known. It seems your readers’ attraction to the land is connected to the reality of the history and geography you work with. Your readers can visit the settings of your novels and even check your facts against the historical record. What role does the real history and geography play in your work? And how important is the distance between fact and fiction? I don’t mean that I write in the mode of Game of Thrones, but according to the principle of Game of Thrones. I’m not imitating Game of Thrones. And with Game of Thrones you can still travel to see where the show was filmed. In that way it can be interactive. It seems that history, or at least some basis in fact, is an important aspect of the interactivity of your works. History is my personal interest, but it’s not the only basis for interactivity. It could be geography. Readers of The Gold of the Rebellion came to the Chusovaia River not to see history—there wasn’t much history in that novel—but to see the geography where the novel took place. Those who read Yo-burg come for the history. But it’s not important whether it’s history or something else. It’s important that it’s interactive.


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Among the real geographical settings in your novels, rivers feature prominently. At one point, your geographer says that the river is the only geographical formation that carries meaning. Do you share that opinion? And what draws you to river imagery? I am a river person myself. My parents were engineers who built riverboats at the local factory. I’ve always lived near rivers. I’ve always liked rivers. In Soviet times, one of the most popular forms of recreation was a riverboat ride. Rivers are very important to me. They always help me structure a work. Whenever possible, I use them. Old cartography, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for instance, used rivers in this way. Before people knew how to anchor their maps, they based them around a river or a major road. Any map not on the scale of an entire continent was a map of a river or of a road. For me, just like for the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century cartographer, a river is the most effective way to bring history into a unified form. Both your historical and contemporary works often depict eras suspended between an old world passing away and a new world not yet fully formed. What attracts you to such eras? They’re artistically expressive. There are an enormous number of such eras in Russian history, but the average Russian reader probably knows no more than five, so there is a vast store of cultural complexes to mine for the foundation of a new work on any topic. I simply take something I like from that enormous repository. But first you have to know both history and geography. Do you see a connection between the eras you depict and the contemporary world? I see no direct connection. Sometimes there’s a connection, sometimes not, sometimes an indirect one. My novel Community (Kom'uniti 2012) [about the online world of Moscow in 2012 —BG] is directly connected to the contemporary world. My relationship to virtual reality, to the technology that is already invading normal reality and reforms normal reality according to its internal principles—I believe that is a major problem of our times. It’s not fully understood by society or culture, at least not by Russian culture. The Gold of the Rebellion for me was also about contemporary reality. I wrote about a person who was not given the opportunity to do his work and who breaks through everything in order to reach his central goal in life. I myself was that kind of person and that novel is autobiographical. That is, I always wanted to be a writer but I wasn’t given the chance. Then I broke through and I found out to what

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lengths I was willing to go in order to win the right to do my work. That’s what The Gold of the Rebellion is about. For me, it is also a contemporary novel. It’s about that central affliction of the times that I felt then. But of course, it’s not a social novel in the sense that it is not necessarily relevant to all of contemporary society. But for me it is. The time period depicted in The Geographer likewise features an old world disappearing and a new one not yet in place. You know that main principle of science, that real discoveries now happen not in one discipline, but in the space between two disciplines? Real drama is born not in one era, but in the space between two eras. It is the space between that brings forth the drama. It’s born there automatically, just like a spark automatically appears between a cathode and anode. Very often in The Geographer Drank Away His Globe the protagonist, Sluzhkin, talks about the distant past, about those eras in which your historical novels are set. He talks about those times because they’re interesting to me. But the contemporary world in that novel comes through in the image of the riverboats. Sluzhkin sees an enormous number of rusted riverboats docked, abandoned, and unused. That, we could say, is the image of the Soviet Union, already finished and unusable. But Sluzhkin nevertheless finds another way to take to the river: on a small inflatable raft. That’s the image of the new era in which he lives. His vascillation between the old riverboats and the new inflatable raft, on which he sets sail with his newly-formed crew, that is the cathode and anode of that novel.

“I want to be successful within a corporation called Aleksei Ivanov”: Interactivity and the Meaning of Success

In your novel Bluda and MUDO (2007), the protagonist, Morzhov, discusses the concept of success. He’s talking with another character, Milena, who says that success is the achievement of one’s ambitions. But that’s not enough for Morzhov. He wants to understand where these ambitions come from and why. How do you conceptualize success? Do you think about the source of your own ambitions? Morzhov, by the way, also talks about the old and new world, that in Russia, a purely contemporary world has never existed: either the old forms are stuffed with new contents or the old content is poured into new forms.


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That’s the distinctive characteristic of Russian life. We always have both the old and the new together. We are a country not only of many layers, but of many eras. Drive only twenty kilometers from this hotel and you’ll see people growing potatoes in their garden and relieving themselves in a hole behind their houses like it’s the seventeenth century. The government doesn’t touch them, no one forces them to live differently, and they will never live differently. And this is all in one country, even in one city. The twenty-first century and the seventeenth. We probably have worlds still in the twelfth century and even in the fifth. Feudal landholders.

But that’s a separate question. About Morzhov: he tells Milena that ambition is active conformism. You want to achieve some kind of success, but that success is programmed into the system. You can’t conceive of success outside of it. Morzhov is uninterested in success within the system. He’s much more interested in what is outside and so he’s never really had ambitions. His success is happenstance. He got lucky. His drawings sold well. Someone came along and bought them. I got lucky in much the same way. I believe my work warrants success, but I know what kind of country this is and I understand that if I hadn’t gotten lucky, my books would never have been read, never have been published. On the one hand, I deserve my success and have earned it through my work, but on the other, that does not mean success would necessarily have found me. That’s the ambivalent dual situation I’m in. You said that Milena’s idea of ambition is conformism. Do you think of the criteria for literary success in the same way, say about literary prizes? Prizes are conformism. Morzhov, who would rather not succeed on anyone else’s terms, instead builds a simulacrum of success. He makes an empty summer camp look like it’s full of happy children in order to save his and his friends’ jobs. You could read that simulacrum as an art project. Morzhov always created drawings, but the summer camp is his first project in a live medium, a sort of living picture. No, that’s not it. He builds that simulacrum on the basis of laws that he sees in the surrounding world. He can’t give his friends and lovers true happiness so he builds them a simulacrum of happiness and success. That simulacrum is founded on lies and it survives only because Morzhov skillfully uses the laws of our real world, at least of the Russian world. In the end he successfully builds his world. But there’s a tragedy. A young prostitute is killed near the camp and Morzhov feels terrible. He has to choose: either act like an honest person, which would entail destroying that world of lies (but

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which brought people real happiness), or act like a successful person and forgo vengeance. The central conflict of Bluda and MUDO is a conflict between authenticity and success. I believe it’s one of the major conflicts of our time, of the Putin era: the conflict between authenticity and success. You have to choose what you want to be, authentic or successful. Morzhov chooses to be honest and for that reason he drops out of the world of success. He simply disappears. And no one knows where he went. He disappears because he rejected success? He was successful because he understood the laws of the world but when the time came to choose, he rejected that world. He rejected his own success in favor of authenticity. Do you feel the same, that you often have to decide between authenticity and success? It seems to me that right now in Russia the basic form of social survival is corporativity [korporativnost']. We don’t have democracy and our government does not protect the rights of its citizens, so we have neither true competition nor any of the institutions that would require. Under these circumstances, how can a person survive and achieve success? There’s only one way: become part of some powerful corporation that takes care of all your problems and gives you the opportunity to advance. I don’t mean only commercial corporations. Of course, it could be something commercial like, for instance, Gazprom. Work at Gazprom and you’ll have a good salary with benefits, you’ll have a career ladder, respect, and so on. But there are other types of corporations, like Russian government service. Work for the government, you can embezzle as much as you want, you’ll be protected, no one will ever put you in jail. You’ll be a successful and prosperous person. There’s another corporation called the city of Moscow. Move to Moscow! You’ll have a high standard of living, you’ll get paid, you’ll be at the center of cultural life, you’ll have access to everything.

Russia exists on these corporations. If a person wants to be successful, especially in a conformist way, he becomes a member of a corporation. And rises within that corporation. Moves to Moscow, gets a job in government service or at Gazprom. That’s the essence of Russian life. If I want to be a successful writer, I should become a member of some writers’ corporation, become part of some writers’ clique. Then I would have a good chance of winning a prize, going to festivals, etc. But that doesn’t interest me. I’m a non-conformist. I want to be successful within a corporation called Aleksei Ivanov.


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That reminds me of something you once said in an interview, that you like to write because within the world you create you command authority without having to face the reader one-on-one. A distant authority. That too. In principle each of the worlds that I create is that kind of corporation. Since I embody it, I am the most successful there. When you say that each world you create is a kind of corporation, do you mean the novels themselves, or the novels along with their readers, their publics? The novels themselves. Each novel is a description of a world. That world is a corporation. And who can join that corporation? Any reader who reads the book becomes a part of my corporation. To read is to become part of the corporation, or more precisely, to get pleasure from reading is to become part of my corporation. You often build interactive activities around your novels that expand these “corporations,” like The Heart of the Parma festival we discussed earlier. What connection do you see between your novels and these interactive projects? Are they all part of one unified idea, or do the interactive projects allow your readers to experience the world of the novel more deeply? I came to understand the importance of interactivity a long time ago. I used to work in a local history afterschool program and I found that kids only remember what they experience. I could tell them all about the Perm region, but it would not be part of their experience. If I wanted them to remember something, I had to take them to see it, then that knowledge would grow into their life experience and they would remember it. That is, that knowledge had to be interactive. Since then, I’ve always tried to work in interactive formats.

When I was just starting out as a writer, I tried to take control of that process fully. When I wrote The Gold of the Rebellion, I put out a hiking guide for the Chusovaia River basin, I proposed tourism development projects for the areas where the novel took place, I wrote a concept for a computer game, and I was prepared to write a screenplay for a film. It was a whole five-part interactive project. But it never came together. Only the novel and the hiking guide were finished.

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Did you conceive of that project as a single unified idea? Yes. But no one supported it because it wasn’t about Moscow history. And for the people who create these things, non-Moscow history is not interesting. Now I only write novels and screenplays. But if they have the potential for interactivity, sometimes it grows on its own. For instance, I wrote the novel The Geographer Drank Away His Globe and it was made into a movie, it was adapted for the stage. Now there’s even a river-rafting route through the various places mentioned in the novel. But I didn’t plan that myself. It was already contained in the novel’s potential. It naturally grew up around the book without your intervention? It naturally arose. It seems to me that in today’s multimedia atmosphere, a work of art needs to have one very important characteristic: it needs to be interpretable. It needs to have the potential to exist in completely different spheres of culture. If you write a novel, you need to write it in such a way that it can be adapted for the screen and for the stage and made into a computer game or into some kind of tourist attraction. If your novel doesn’t have that potential, it won’t survive long in the culture. It needs to be able to take root on different levels in different areas. And that’s how you evaluate the success of your works, by how they are interpreted? How they take different forms in different media, how they live their own lives? Generally, yes. From that angle, what is your most successful book? My most successful book is of course The Geographer Drank Away His Globe because it was made into a film. Since cinema is the most important art form, the most important interpretation is always the film adaptation. And you think of the success of your novels in terms of what other works grow out of them? Not only in these terms, but these are the most objective. A book can win a prestigious prize or could be called the best book ever. But many books that win highly prestigious prizes turn out to be forgotten after two or three years. No one reads them.


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Do you find it interesting to watch your works, or “corporations,” make their way in the world? To see which are more successful and which less? Of course. It’s interesting, but sometimes sad because they either barely survive, like To See a Russian Rebellion, and I have to reissue them, or they take on a warped and unrecognizable form completely different from what I intended. For instance, the majority of readers see The Geographer Drank Away His Globe as a novel about a weak person, a loser, even though I wrote it about a courageous person, in some sense even a successful person, someone stalwart and very kind. It’s painful to see my novel, my corporation, evaluated so incorrectly.

It’s too personal for me to find it interesting in a detached way. You put your whole soul into these works. Like in The Godfather, it’s supposed to be “business, nothing personal,” but in reality everything is personal, not business.

BOOK REVIEWS Maria di Salvo, Daniel H. Kaiser, and Valerie A. Kivelson (eds.). Word and Image in Russ ian His tory : Essays in honor o f Gary Marker , Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2015. 416 pp.; 33 illus. Word and Image in Russian History is an eclectic volume celebrating the life and work of Professor Gary Marker with a constellation of studies related to his own diverse interests. Organized into six major themes—Word, Image, Gender, Religion, Forms of Literacy, and Civil Society and Politics—the twenty-one essays (including two biographical pieces on Marker) take the eighteenth century as the point of departure for studies that extend the historical scope in both directions. Marker’s own prodigious contribution to Slavic Studies is not simply the inspiration for the collection, it is also the foundation. Most of the essays directly respond to Marker’s myriad discoveries and conclusions about Russian culture and thought. Mirroring Marker’s career, this volume dedicates almost equal attention to the iconic figures and themes of the eighteenth century—Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, westernization, elite culture—as to marginal figures or seemingly isolated events that provide a microcosmic glimpse into much larger issues. The contributors all honor Marker with their own curious investigation of words and images, no matter how small.

Marker is perhaps best known for his work on print culture and literacy, although he published on broader issues of social culture, state institutions, religious practice and organization, and Ukrainian culture. Few of the essays here propose new positions or paradigms for understanding these disciplines; instead they confirm the paradigm shifts that Marker helped bring on in his decades of scholarship. For example, in “Education and the East: The Omsk Asiatic School,” Janet M. Hartley explains the rise and fall of Asian-language education in Russia as evidence of Marker’s assessment of state education motivated by government control rather than humanistic ideals. Other essays likewise commemorate Marker’s contribution to the field by showing how his conclusions can be aptly applied to further case studies. Roger Bartlett’s essay on the Family Eizen-fon-Shvartsenberg uses the case study of a poor German pastor and his increasingly successful offspring as confirmation of Marker’s

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theories of eighteenth-century westernization and Russian elites. Similarly, Patrick O’Meara uses Karazin as a foil for exploring state power and education in “‘The Opinion of One Ukrainian Landowner’: V.N. Karazin, Alexander I, and Changing Russia.”

One of the Image essays is the engaging study “Rozanov’s Peter” by Simon Dixon. Dixon uses the figure of Peter the Great—as genius, mastermind, father of Russia, corruptor of the Russian soul—to chart how Rozanov’s thinking changed over his career. Dixon manages a delicate balancing act—without attempting to systematize Rozanov (imagine!), he shows a sort of coherence to the development of his ideas of history, personality and Russia. In particular, Dixon highlights how Peter embodies Rozanov’s main preoccupations; Peter’s reign was a way of legitimating Rozanov’s ideas, rather than the inspiration for Rozanov’s thought. This essay is one of many that explores the social contours of Russian and Ukrainian society as it transitions into modernity. Another, more gruesome example, is in Robert Weinberg’s essay on ritual murder and the trial of Mendel Beilis. Here we see how medieval Catholic rumors of blood libel played out in the early twentieth-century Russian courtroom. Weinberg’s piece focuses on how anti-Semitic prejudices dovetailed with a drive for scientific reasoning and psychology in late tsarist Russia. In his examination of popular and elite stances towards Judaism, specifically Hasidism and Kabbalist practice, the issue of media sensationalism and the role of journals is a minor consideration, but one that harkens to Marker’s contribution to studies of public education, print media and cultural change.

In some cases, the social anxieties explored in this volume surrounding religion, language, and political allegiance call to mind much more recent conflicts in Ukraine. In Giovanna Brogi Bercoff’s “Dialogue and Conflict in the Ostroh Principality: The Year 1636,” we see how a local skirmish between Orthodox burghers and a Catholic elite is depicted from opposing perspectives. The intersection of conflicting political affiliations (Polish-Lithuanian or Russian) with religious confession (Orthodox or Uniate with a looming presence of Jesuits) borne out by a conflict between classes is a tinderbox in the community of Ostroh. The Ostroh chronicler’s verse injunction “It is not strange that they aim at eliminating heresy/But it is strange that they kill members of their own community” could apply to the centuries of religious strife and is convincing evidence that the town had previously managed a delicate balancing act of diverse religious conviction. Nevertheless, Brogi Bercoff’s conclusion—that the author of the Ostroh chronicle is ultimately a humane ecumenist hoping for tolerance—seems too optimistically modern (perhaps more because of the use of “tolerance” and not the sentiment itself). The essay leaves the reader wondering how this tragedy affected—if at all—relations with Jews and Muslims, a question Bercoff alludes to, but never answers. A similar use of one text or image as a gateway to explore much greater interethnic and inter-confessional issues is found in Elena Smilianskaia’s essay, “Catherine’s Liberation of the Greeks: High-Minded Discourse and Everyday Realities,” which uses a single Orthodox church in Greece—funded

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by the Russian Empire—as a foil for examining Catherine’s shifting policies towards the Balkans and Russia’s interests in the Mediterranean.

The themes of Word and Image are wide-ranging but the volume remains coherent beyond its commemoration to Gary Marker. Ideas and personalities reappear throughout the collection, illustrating how major concerns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—state control, Westernization, local identity, education and social mobility, Russian policy to minority and abroad—play out throughout the Russian Empire and are transmuted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing together philology, history, textual analysis, religious studies and even sociology, this volume provides a variety of new insights that expand our understanding of the eighteenth century and its impact on the course of Russian culture and thought.

Brittany Pheiffer Noble

Columbia University

Sibelan E.S. Forrester and Martha M.F. Kelly (eds.). Russ ian Si lv er Age Poe t ry : Texts and Contexts . Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2015. 618 pp. The Silver Age of early twentieth-century Russia, a time of intense experimentation in literature, religion, and politics, is an historical period that speaks unusually clearly to the concerns of the early twenty-first-century. The writers of the era grapple with the meaning of individual life in a rapidly modernizing and globalizing world and devote themselves to new understandings of love, sexuality, and gender in works of challenging insight and stunning form. In Russian Silver Age Poetry: Texts and Contexts, editors Sibelan Forrester and Martha Kelly make the obsessions and splendor of the Silver Age newly accessible to the Anglophone reader.

Russian Silver Age Poetry introduces the uninitiated reader to the exceptional creativity of Russian modernism, and having inspired a burgeoning admiration, points the way to future study. This impressive and wide-ranging volume brings together texts united neither by literary school nor even, pace its title, by genre, but by an epoch in Russian literary history. Citing this epoch as the first in which Russian poetry found an audience abroad, it self-consciously continues an historical tradition of cross-cultural encounters between Russian literature and foreign readers. Russian Silver Age Poetry links Symbolist, Acmeist, Futurist, and unaffiliated figures to reconstruct the literary milieu in this amazingly generative period. In keeping with the spirit of the age, the book depicts aspects of the authors’ lives in conjunction with their work.

Russian literary scholars Sibelan Forrester and Martha Kelly, in addition to editing the volume, serve as its principal translators, notably contributing translations of lesser-known female writers not often accessible in English. Forrester, a specialist in the theory and practice of translation and a Tsvetaeva scholar, translated over a third of the numerous prose pieces in the volume, including gems such as Vladimir Mayakovsky’s obituary to Velimir Khlebnikov,

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Vladimir Khodasevich’s diagnosis of the ruinous Symbolist approach to love in “The End of Renata,” and Nadezhda Tèffi’s ironic description of the “Demonic Woman.” Between them Forrester and Kelly translated half of the poetry included in the volume; Kelly anticipates her new book, Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and its New Religious Aesthetic (Northwestern UP, 2016) with substantial new translations of Anna Akhmatova, Aleksandr Blok, Zinaida Gippius, Nikolai Gumilyov, and Mikhail Kuzmin.

The book begins with helpfully explicit instructions for its use that will be especially valuable to undergraduates and other readers who wish to explore the subject further but are unaccustomed to navigating scholarly literature. In addition to an historical introduction and general bibliography, Forrester and Kelly offer an especially illuminating essay on the specific problems of translating Russian poetry into English, considering the different literary histories and grammatical structures of the languages, as well as matters of reader taste, explaining, for example, that while exact rhymes may now seem trite to sophisticated Anglophone readers, they have no such connotation to a Russian audience. Using the example of a poem from Akhmatova, Forrester and Kelly show the ways in which different translations emphasize various aspects of the original poem by displaying the original Russian verse beside six translations, which diverge in tone, rhyme, meter, and word choice. This exercise is so revealing, especially to a reader who knows some Russian, that one could wish for a whole book of poems translated in the same fashion.

The main part of the volume consists of two sections of Silver Age texts in translation: ‘Poetry’ and ‘Beyond Poetry’. The poetry section, which is organized alphabetically by poet into twenty-eight sub-sections, provides a short biography and bibliography for each figure. The ‘Beyond Poetry’ section is split into essays, criticism, memoirs, and ‘other prose works’; as a whole it is longer than the poetry section. In addition to the famous poets of the Russian Silver Age, the poetry section includes authors who are better known for their prose contributions to Russian literature, such as Andrei Bely, as well as figures like Vladimir Solovyov who are best known for their extra-literary work. The ‘Beyond Poetry’ section contains only a handful of authors not also represented in the poetry section, among them Benedict Livshitz, Vasily Rozanov, and Viktor Shklovsky. The inclusion of such a wide range of texts and authors in one introductory volume shows the Silver Age as a whole and is perhaps the greatest factor in the book’s overall success, but it also creates potential pitfalls for the reader.

Martha Kelly describes the cultural outpouring of the Silver Age as “dizzyingly rich” and an unfamiliar reader could feel unmoored in the book’s vast selection of original texts. Despite its subtitle Texts and Contexts, the book offers little contextual guidance aside from allowing different kinds of original texts to serve as contexts for each other. Additional contextual curation would have been especially welcome in the prose section of the book: while the editors helpfully explain their intentions for the poetry section, the prose texts are presented without comment, leaving some ambiguity about the editors’ goals for each particular text and for the section as a whole. In addition, the


biographical notes on the writers are nestled within the poetry section, obliging the reader to flip back and forth within the book to identify prose authors. Perhaps organizing the volume simply by author rather than by author within each genre would have contributed to a more cohesive introduction.

As a valuable broad exhibition of literary texts and original translations, Russian Silver Age Poetry is both a rewarding self-contained volume for general lovers of poetry and a convenient starting point for those seeking a more scholarly introduction to the literary age. Accessible and appealing to a general reader, the book would also serve well as a course textbook for undergraduates or as a resource for self-directed study.

Alana Hein Columbia University

Alexander Cigale (ed.). Atlanta Rev i ew 21.2 (2015), Russia Feature. The poems in the Russia feature of Atlanta Review 21.2 are almost universally superior to the featured translations of them. I say this not as a sworn detractor of translated poetry à la Robert Frost, but with the eye of an editor who spies the diamonds in these rough drafts. Without careful polishing by translator and editor, translations simply cannot hope to exist “as English poems in their own right,” the professed aim of the guest editor for this issue, Alex Cigale (33). For someone who needs over four single-spaced pages to introduce his project to the reader, Cigale does not accord much importance to “the relative shortage of women poets” he notes but “can’t, due to space limitations, discuss” (30). To compensate for this imbalance of thirty-six male poets to fifteen female—a situation partly attributable to the entrenched patriarchy of the Russian literary tradition that is only now, in the twenty-first century, starting to level out—he might have tilted the translator scales in the other direction, privileging the voices of female translators even as they translate male poets. But no: while not so extreme, the inequality persists, twenty male translators to fifteen female. Mum is and isn’t the word on this one.

Demographics aside, the translations printed here by and large read like working drafts in need of reworking. Rookie mistakes proliferate: non-idiomatic phrasing (“on the intersection”) where there’s a ready idiom (at the intersection), animate possessives (“the forest’s edge”) where they were better inanimate (the edge of the forest), and instances of cultural obsolescence or insensitivity (“Peking” and “Farsi” instead of Beijing and Persian). Unfortunately, Atlanta Review didn’t print the originals alongside these translations, as is standard practice in most magazines that specialize in translation (especially poetry translation), so bilingual readers can’t judge for themselves without extra legwork, but take, for example, two lines from Vadim Mesyats’ “This time of year…” in Dana Golin’s translation: “The winter road goes through here: the sled tracks, / Stray scattered straw, manure, a mitten lost by someone” (72). Whether or not the verb in Russian translates most literally to “to go,” I want a bolder verb, because English must do with lexical pop what Russian does with intricate syntax. The Russian language has no articles, so it’s

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always at a translator’s discretion to use one, but often none is needed. And why the redundancy of stray and scattered? Did the straw actively stray, or passively scatter off the back of the sled? The phrase “a mitten lost by someone” commits three sins in my book: an unnecessary article, an unnecessary preposition, and unnecessary passive voice. In my first-glance edit, even without referencing the original, Golin’s lines would read, “The winter road cuts through here: sled tracks, / scattered straw, manure, someone’s lost mitten.” This phrasing is tighter, quicker; and poetry wants tight quickness. Infelicities of even this scale undermine the reading experience and strengthen Frost’s contention that poetry is what gets lost in translation.

All this is not to say there isn’t exemplary work in the feature, much of it the effort of duos. Translator Katie Farris teamed up with poet Ilya Kaminsky to produce what they call “a version” of Anastasia Afanasyeva’s “To See Things with Clarity,” which begins, “Of our plain things—whisper, whisper—not / touching the ear of another— / believe—in another’s—eardrum / So February stalks us, opens— / the time / in a straw—whistles— / as if a child sips from a glass of sparkling water” (35). These lines demonstrate an expert command of line breaks, dividing “not” from its auxiliary verb to achieve both negation and affirmation, and dividing a verb from its direct object to achieve both intransitivity and transitivity. And it’s no wonder that husband-and-wife team Derek Mong and Anne O. Fisher won an NEA fellowship for their translations of Maxim Amelin, with phrases in “The Temple with an Arcade” like “it doesn't strike / the random rubbernecker as much—protruding / like a codger’s last tooth, there is a cupola / plopped on a stub-necked octahedron / that glows, a hemisphere’s bowl” (37). The soundscape here is densely woven with alliteration, consonance, assonance, and internal rhyme, to name several of the sonic devices they employ. And the female duo of Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich capture Dina Gatina’s fine control over register in “A Text of Appalling Strength,” which concludes, “you must not confuse poetic and epic heroes / this one’s epic / he descends into hell / he believes that he is an explorer / he descends into hell and he doesn’t look back / wow” (49). To punctuate this list of epic feats with an informal exclamation like “wow” indicates that this hero of more self-control than Orpheus is a modern hero, that heroes belong not only to the elite but also to the masses, and that epic feats can and do occur in our time.

Genevieve Arlie University of Iowa

Viktor Pelevin. Smotr i t e l ' (The Watcher), in 2 volumes. Moscow: Eksmo, 2015, 352 pp. (vol. 1) and 352 pp. (vol. 2). The Watcher could be much shorter. Many critics have already called it a boring prophecy. Yet, Pelevin’s central question is hard to ignore: “Why can’t we build an ideal world?” As the story unfolds, he explores how simulacra have changed human life. Once, appearances were in God’s hands. The deity was the one to


decide how people look, why they exist, and how they should behave. If God is dead, Pelevin’s protagonist Alexis de Kige wonders, “What if we’re just the debris of God’s consciousness?” His mentors Menelaj and Angel counter: “No, we are debris of culture.” But how does this help?

The Watcher is an exploration of an obscure territory in the human mind that neither surgeon nor biochemist can access. This is the territory where religion, philosophy, and literature have evolved. Pelevin’s characters, Brother Benjamin and Franz-Anton join him on his journey. Brother Benjamin has a double identity, both Benjamin Franklin, “Le Duc des Antipodes,” the king of America, and a conspirator, drawn from Walter Benjamin, who wants to use the power of culture to change the world. At one point, Brother Benjamin “reports that the Illuminati under his guidance are plotting major unrest. This will not be just another rabble riot but the first revolution of its kind, an unstoppable whirlwind of colors and hues, something of a big bloody carnival, which all idle minds will immediately join since they suppose they are free because of their depravity.” Franz-Anton, based on Franz Fanon, is the Archimedes of the conspiracy. He guides the characters out of the “Fluid,” the flux of meaning that appears in human minds. In short, culture. Yet, he doesn’t believe in the success of Benjamin’s initiative.

On the surface, The Watcher is a story about an alternative universe in which Tsar Paul I, in the wake of the French Revolution, evacuated the European gentry to a place called “Idillium.” He and his peers joined a group hallucination brought on by Mesmer’s hypnotic machine. As their power grew, they started experiencing that hallucination as reality. Time stopped, and eternity was guaranteed through constant rebirth. The hallucinators simply forgot about the origin of their world and continued living in a dream.

Idillium is no personal fantasy. As Angel, the protagonist’s mentor explains, “We are all projections of each other’s consciousness.” In other words, we live in a collective fantasy where a demiurge, an author, has power over his character, who is also himself—yet, he is as dead as his God: culture writes him back. So Brother Benjamin is right, there is a way to overthrow old ideals. Yet, Franz-Anton’s skepticism is correct too. To control culture does not mean to improve it.

The protagonist of the story is another of Tsar Paul’s creations. Paul fooled the masses into believing that Alexis de Kige was real, and de Kige became Paul in a sense. “He has my face, my body,” says Paul. “The fluid that created him went through me, so in some known way he and I are one.” The protagonist has so many names that it’s hard to call him by only one: he is less a human being and more a function that propels the story along.

De Kige/Paul learns to manipulate the Fluid, and he becomes an author while still being a character. “I don’t even know who I am, either a guardian in Idillium, or Paul the Alchemist who successfully lost himself, or a banal ghost with a dent from a snuffbox on my ephemeral temple [efemernom viske].” There is no one world but many worlds inside each other. The protagonist compares life to a video loop, where everything repeats without knowing it.

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Everything is possible in de Kige/Paul’s world: sex with avatars, cloning, walking through walls. But a nagging question refuses to leave the protagonist in peace: “Why is there still pain?” He searches for the truth until he begins to doubt his own existence. He loses his ideal girlfriend. Yet, once he tries to understand from inside the Fluid rather than trying to escape it, he understands. If the world is neither God’s creation nor a controlled fantasy, there is another question to be asked. The protagonist, who knows nothing about himself and believes no secrets, quotes his grandparent Paul,

“Omnia est nihil. Nihil est omnia.” How much these words mean to the understanding […] How little sense they have to a fool, rushing nowhere, who’s assured that there is nothing new to him because he, a fool, couldn’t understand them so many times before […] Knowledge, if you really reach it, annihilates any sorrow. But instead we stay with our pain, supposing that it is who we are. So if it’s taken from us, we will lose ourselves…

As we read these lines, the protagonist’s name changes again, now to Alexis the Second. There is nothing stable and nothing to hold on to. “This game has no name,” as one of Pelevin’s earliest prophesies asserted. With The Watcher, he announces a second testament: once the game is done, there is no one left to play. There is no culture without authors and there are no authors without characters. Culture is our new God but we see it only in the place where the dice were rolled.

Serhii Tereschenko Columbia University

Douglas Rogers. The Depths o f Russ ia : Oi l , Power , and Cul ture a f t e r Soc ia l i sm . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. 370 pp. In the late 2000s, the Russian city of Perm took extraordinary steps to promote contemporary culture. An avant-garde theater director was named Minister of Culture, controversial public art sprang up around town, and Governor Oleg Chirkunov announced that Perm would soon “dethrone Saint Petersburg as the cultural capital of Russia” (212). The region opened a new contemporary art museum, built an experimental theater, and launched a near constant stream of public festivals. Culture, as Douglas Rogers argues in his new book, The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism, became the best way for Perm “to extract itself from postindustrial torpor” and put itself back “on the map of Russia and the world” (213). As Rogers investigates both the effects and the antecedents of what became known as the Perm Cultural Project, he shows how profits from the oil industry mixed with neoliberal governing technologies and how they led to an unprecedented boom in Perm’s cultural profile.

As a microcosm of some of the key factors facing Russia at large, the Perm region offers a fascinating case study. With oil and gas reserves at the center of


its economy, the region saw high-stakes battles for extraction rights and distribution networks play out locally throughout the 1990s. In the twenty-first century, Perm witnessed gubernatorial administrations devoted to consolidating central control and normalizing the state’s role in the new economy. Finally, starting around 2006 the Perm region began to channel private and public resources towards cultural revival. Rogers presents scrupulous portraits of each of these stages in his book’s three sections: “From Socialist to Postsocialist Oil,” “The Boom Years,” and “The Cultural Front.” Instead of prioritizing one of his three topics, Rogers builds a case for their mutual dependency. The Depths of Russia is no more a book about the oil industry than it is a book about provincial governance or cultural revival. It is about all three of these things and about the connections among them.

Nevertheless, each section delves deep into the technical details of its particular subject to show how institutional mechanisms and patchwork solutions led at times to unexpected outcomes. In Part One, for instance, Rogers shows how veksel exchanges—the replacement of currency with commodity-based IOUs—arose in response to the immediate problem of mid-1990s monetary instability. Veksels allowed the oil industry to operate in the absence of a reliable currency, but at the same time they deprived the federal government of a mediating role (and the concomitant profits) in many commercial exchanges. It was a work-around that unintentionally but effectively distanced major industry from state oversight. In Rogers’s portrait of the 1990s, familiar tropes of Wild West capitalism and the nefarious intentions of oligarchs are less important than how such piecemeal solutions to immanent problems pulled industry away from an unreliable state.

In Part Two, Rogers shows precisely how a re-emergent state reclaimed authority in the 2000s. Instead of attempting to build new institutions or even to regulate or reshape existing structures, the government asserted its authority primarily “by putting state officials at the meeting and coordinating points of nearly all sectors of society” in order to surveil and profit from exchanges already taking place (158). This minimally invasive strategy allowed 1990s-style capitalism to continue along an apparently “natural” course, while at the same time bringing that course under state guidance. Though Rogers limits himself to Perm’s extraction industries, his carefully researched insights might easily be applied more broadly.

To suggest one example from the world of Russian media: in 2001 the opposition radio station Ekho Moskvy was acquired by the state-adjacent hydrocarbon giant Gazprom. Instead of staging a hostile takeover, as the state would do against NTV in 2004, Gazprom simply bought a majority stake in the financially struggling station, and even promised to protect editorial independence. This strategy has proven mutually beneficial: Gazprom Media Holding retains oversight privileges, including approval of the editor-in-chief’s contract, while Ekho Moskvy continues to enjoy a reputation as one of the centers of liberal opposition, despite being effectively a subsidiary of the state. Like the reassertions of state power that Rogers traces, the pseudo-state management of cultural institutions like Ekho Moskvy appears to allow the free

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development of enterprise, while nevertheless retaining a supervisory role over the direction that development might take.

The book’s third section tells the story of how Perm’s cultural revival grew out of the nexus of oil money and state power. As Lukoil-Perm’s profits grew and income disparity led to distrust of the oil industry, the company’s office of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) began distributing funds to local communities through grant competitions modeled on Western NGO practices. Rogers positions Lukoil-Perm within a global turn to CSR, but points out that the company’s direct investment in local or indigenous cultural products and handicrafts distinguishes it from multinational extraction companies. While Shell’s CSR in Nigeria, for instance, concentrated on infrastructural or quality-of-life indicators, Lukoil-Perm chose to focus on culture, and specifically culture which was deeply tied to local identity. These efforts, in Rogers’s account, have contributed to a potent symbolic connection between Russia’s oil riches and its national identity, between the materiality of the land and a sense of local pride or belonging.

In the late 2000s, Perm’s regional government picked up on Lukoil-Perm’s focus on culture and launched what became known as the Perm Cultural Project. By 2010 the Project’s activities were so pervasive that “every taxi driver in Perm was talking about culture,” writes Rogers, “if only to blast [Governor] Chirkunov for building a contemporary art museum instead of better roads” (213). Rogers’s quip points to an intriguing set of questions that many Perm residents, from taxi drivers to university professors, articulated to me when I visited the city in 2015: What are the consequences of prioritizing culture over infrastructure? What does it mean—for oil companies, for power structures, for the population—when natural resources are extracted from a territory and compensation is offered only in immaterial aesthetic experiences? Unfortunately (for this reviewer), Rogers does not explicitly address these questions, opting to leave such “metatheoretical” discussions “for another day” (fn. 230). In The Depths of Russia, the intersections of oil, state authority, and cultural production are presented as fascinating, but unproblematized, alignments of power, money, and the arts.

Rogers avoids a direct critique and opts instead to present a more objective account of how culture relates to various industries, institutions, and actors. Though this might leave some readers wanting more, by building a compelling and convincing bridge between oil and power on the one hand and cultural production on the other, Rogers enriches our understanding of both, pushing us to ask and attempt to answer the very questions he leaves outside of his discussion. For this reason, The Depths of Russia is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in tracking—and even critiquing—the interaction of these important spheres of contemporary Russian life.

Bradley Gorski

Columbia University


Irina Sandomirskaia. Blokada v s love : Ocherki kr i t i chesko i t eor i i i b iopo l i t ik i iazyka . Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2013. 432 pp.

The onset of blindness and deafness due to childhood meningitis. The growing hostility of once-familiar household objects that now threaten to burn and mangle a five-year-old’s groping hand. A night that seems to have no end. Panic. An overpowering feeling of abandonment. The reluctant acceptance of the permanence of this condition and the rediscovery of the hostile world through touch, a world where touching is taboo. The deformation of speech verging on a total loss of language. Learning to sign and write, and the eventual recovery of speech.

This is the “allegory” (8)—extracted from the real life of the deaf-blind defectology scholar Olga Skorokhodova—through which Irina Sandomirskaia explores the situation of writing in Soviet Russia from the 1920s to the 1950s. In her award-winning book, Blokada v slove (A Blockade in Language), Sandomirskaia sets out to trace the “fall of revolutionary language into conformist, pragmatic ‘babble’ [boltovnia], the transformation of the word into the center of political violence” (8). Her study covers an impressive terrain: Here Walter Benjamin’s Moscow diary foresees the onset of Joseph Stalin’s symbolic regime; Mikhail Bakhtin and Konstantin Vaginov polemicize over the forms of violence entailed in representation; Lidiia Ginzburg’s writing acts as witness to the biopolitics of the Leningrad blockade and the de-metaphorization of language; the later poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Zabolotskii performs different strategies of resistance, at times independently of the poet’s will. But Sandomirskaia’s work is more than a meditation on the crisis of language in a specific historical context: It is also a reflection on what it means to write a philosophy of language, to write in and out of a “blockade in words.”

The orientation of Blokada v slove towards the process of writing, towards a non-teleological analysis that could be extended further and further, renders any attempt at summary difficult. Nevertheless, I will briefly sketch the architecture of the book before turning to its contribution as a philosophy of language.

Blokada v slove is framed by two essays on deaf-blindness, a physical impairment that informs the allegorical core of Sandomirskaia’s work. The opening essay introduces Olga Skorokhodova as “little O.,” who lost her sense of sight and sound in childhood, but eventually became “a living icon of Stalinist culture […], a living manifestation of the Stalinist plan of universal world order [miroustroenie]” (48). In this essay, Sandomirskaia rereads the Western philosophical cannon from the defamiliarized perspective of a disabled person: Here the Cartesian and the Husserlian doubting subject is literalized in the nightmarish experience of little O., who unwillingly becomes an “eyeless” cogito (16). The symbolic mutilation and violence that is the starting point of philosophy—“to destroy thoroughly all of my previous opinions […] I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no body, no blood, not having any senses” (Descartes, qtd. on 13, 16)—is reexamined from the perspective of a girl who is forced into the role of a phenomenologist as she fumbles her way with her deaf-blind hand.

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Subsequent chapters explore the epistemic potential of the metaphor of deaf-blindness groping its way towards understanding the one who speaks and writes within Stalin’s symbolic order. The first chapter takes up Benjamin’s experiences in Moscow in 1926, focusing on his strategies of observation and suspension of judgment. Drawing on Benjamin’s theory of translation, Sandomirskaia advocates for the optical practice of reading one culture through the critical lens of another in order to produce a hybrid that could not have arisen otherwise. In the second chapter, Sandomirskaia connects the production of Stalinist-era language to a crisis of authorship by playing Vaginov’s fictional universes off Bakhtin’s theories of author-hero relations. Vaginov’s novels, she suggests, instantiate the impossibility of escape from what Bakhtin calls “word-violence” (slovo-nasilie).

The disappearance of authorial responsibility due to the mechanization of writing becomes one of the main themes of the third chapter. Here Soviet literary critic Lidiia Ginzburg, a former student of Russian Formalism, discloses how the literary device (priëm) has displaced the author in the “hackwork” (khaltura) of the 1930s. When the government predetermines one’s ideological position, history, one’s material, and genre, one’s literary style, literary devices begin to write themselves (198, 196). Borrowing from medical descriptions of starvation during the Leningrad blockade, Sandomirskaia characterizes hackwork as language that undergoes symbolic dystrophy, leading to the destruction of difference and emaciated meaning.

In the fourth chapter Sandomirskaia takes up the “phantasmagoric” and “highly subjective” historicizing tendencies of Anna Akhmatova’s late poetry, her scholarly work on Pushkin, and her autobiographical reflections as strategies for resisting the “smooth,” i.e., objective accounts of history told by its victors (269, 329). Sandomirskaia suggests that, by focusing on the personal, Akhmatova deposits “relics” into her texts, developing an alternative mode of writing history based on the critical practice of intertextuality. In her last chapter Sandomirskaia considers post-war writing by juxtaposing the evolution of Zabolotskii’s poetics with Stalin’s intervention into the field of linguistics. In Zabolotskii’s “Reading poetry” (1948), Sandomirskaia uncovers imprints of the poet’s historical time, and suggests that the work bespeaks his Oberiu past despite his explicit renunciation of it in this very poem. Meanwhile, Stalin asserts the transparency and non-ambiguity of language in a series of articles from 1950, explicitly denouncing Nikolai Marr’s linguistics and, implicitly, the poetic experiments of the late avant-garde.

Inextricably linked to the experience of the Leningrad blockade, Stalin’s symbolic regime occupies the gravitational center of Blokada v slove. The book aims not only to deconstruct this regime by exposing its traces in unexpected sources, but also to offer an alternative to Stalin’s philosophy of language. The challenge to such a view, however, cannot be issued from an equally totalitarian position making equal claims to objectivity. Instead of countering it head-on, Sandomirskaia stages her alternative obliquely, through her writing.

Although Sandomirskaia identifies Benjamin’s critical categories as her methodological lens, the performative aspect of her writing builds on Jacques


Derrida’s approach to language. Instead of relying on his vocabulary or extensive citations, Sandomirskaia translates Derrida’s theoretical apparatus into Russian academic discourse. She constructs false etymologies, ties metaphors into Gordian knots, and provides purposefully anachronistic, alternate readings of texts; in short, she undermines, from within, language that lays claims to objectivity.

Thus, Skorokhodova’s experience is narrated through a series of tropes, where causality seems to move bidirectionally: Tropes give rise to real situations as much as real situations give rise to the tropes. Such a silent gesture undermines the distinction between what is inside and outside of language, between words and the world. Sandomirskaia seeks the source of the common perception of deaf-blind people as “disinterested” (35) in the etymology of “interest,” that is, in the Latin inter esse (“to be among,” as she translates it), and in the use of the word “touch” to describe both physical and emotional states: The deaf-blind Olga remains “untouched” by things that do not physically touch her (“chto ee ne kasaetsia, ee ne kasaetsia”) (36). Sandomirskaia reads meaning into these seeming accidents of language, as if they could explain human motivations.

In the chapter entitled “Gorod golod” (“Hunger city”), which plays on the chance phonetic proximity of the two Russian words, the expression “to pour water” (“lit’ vodu”), meaning “empty talk,” comes to reflect the experience of the blockade, where the body of a starved person can no longer process food or water, swelling up and expelling it as diarrhea (200). The metaphor evolves to characterize writing even prior to the Leningrad blockade, as it thirsted for meaning but resulted only in verbal diarrhea (202). Already an ambiguous figure of speech lacking defined parameters of interpretation, in Sandomirskaia’s hands the metaphor becomes a shape-shifter that reappears in different guises throughout the book.

Derrida’s notion of “not my own” language (“ne moi iazyk”) metamorphoses into “mute language” (“nemoi iazyk”) by virtue of an accidental phonological similarity unique to Russian. Sandomirskaia allows this paronomastic play to unfurl her thinking on what it might mean to invent a mute language and thus overcome one’s “estrangement in/from language” (7–8). In the closing essay on deaf-blindness, this mute (anti-)language finds allegorical embodiment in the figure of Skorokhodova’s deaf-blind pupil, little V., who resists “socially sanctioned language” and insists on her own invented “language of gestures and grimaces” (406). But even as the girl begins to accept language imposed on her, she disrupts it with her non-hierarchical perspective, extending the concept of “names” (“imena”) to inanimate objects in a radically equalizing gesture. Suspended between perception and expression, the deaf-blind hand, which touches everything without prior prioritizing (415), becomes a metaphorical alternative to the hierarchies embedded in visual and auditory perception and in language.

At every turn Sandomirskaia’s language protests the illusion of transparency. Her evasive figures of speech are not just a style, but an ethics of writing. If the Leningrad blockade was “an extreme instance of the de-metaphorization of the world” (260), then Blokada v slove is an attempt to suffuse

Book Reviews 193

language with the surplus of meaning. The rule of logos in language is thus replaced with poetics. Such a poetics simultaneously creates a way out of enclosed narratives (narratives of enclosure) and a blockade against potential ideological co-optations of the author’s words. The metaphor of the blockade contains a fitting ambiguity: The blockade is something that we must break out of—out of delusive linguistic clarity—and it is something that we must set up to protect the ambiguity and non-transparency of language.

The chapters of this book form a unity not just vis-à-vis an allegorical reading of Olga Skorokhodova’s loss and the recovery of language, and not just vis-à-vis the polysemous metaphors of deaf-blindness and touch. Insofar as each chapter performs a certain philosophy of language, the book is united by the common task of overcoming the blockade in words. Sandomirskaia not only analyzes the different strategies authors employed to surmount the blockade, but she herself stages an escape from its confines. With her false etymologies, contradictions laid bare, less-than-airtight arguments that openly admit that “everything could have been different” (Bakhtin, qtd. on 171), Sandomirskaia creates escape routes from the totalitarian power of rhetoric for her heroes and for herself.

Irina Denischenko Columbia University

ROBERT A. MAGUIRE PRIZE IN SLAVIC STUDIES The Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University is pleased to announce the 2016 winner of the Robert A. Maguire Prize in Slavic Studies:

MAX DANIEL LAWTON RUSSIAN LANGUAGE & CULTURE

Past recipients: 2015 – Paull Chouchana (Russian Language & Literature) 2014 – Anabel Bacon (Russian Literature & Culture; English) 2013 – Lia Friedman (Russian Literature & Culture) 2012 – Laura Mills (Slavic Studies) 2011 – Tanah Llewellyn Spencer (Slavic Studies) 2010 – Robyn Jensen (Russian Language & Literature) 2009 – Sierra Perez-Sparks (Russian Language & Culture; English) 2008 – John Tilden King (Russian Language & Culture; Linguistics) 2007 – Paul Stephen Sonne (Russian Literature & Culture) The prize is a cash award given annually to an undergraduate of high academic distinction and promise in an area of study concerned with Russian or another Slavic culture, including literature, music, art, religion, or cultural history. Established in honor of Professor Robert A. Maguire.

The award is meant to perpetuate Bob’s legacy and to ensure that his name remains a prominent feature in the landscape of Slavic Studies at Columbia.

That Robert Maguire’s legacy should be associated with excellence seems more than appropriate. Bob’s standards were the highest, and he held himself to them above all. Extraordinary language pro ciency, scrupulous analysis of both the words on the page and the culture behind each word, inspired interpretation, and luminous writing were the hallmarks of his work. The Maguire Prize identi es these qualities with Bob and honors the remarkable students who attain them not only with a tangible award but by linking their names with his. Bob Maguire made the Columbia department one of the top Slavic departments in the country. By awarding a prize bearing his name to the top student in that department, we recognize both the student’s achievements and Bob’s.

Importantly, the Robert A. Maguire Prize is available to students not only in Russian literature and not only in Slavic literatures more broadly, but also in the other disciplines that address those cultures. Bob himself was an accomplished Polonist, and his commitment to music was as profound as his love of language and literature. Even beyond his own breadth, though, lies Bob’s conviction that no single aspect of a culture exists in isolation; he team-taught courses with historians, he educated himself in Slavic religious culture, and he worked for years on the relationship between word and visual image. It is tting, then, that the prize bearing his name includes the elds continuous with his own.

To become a contributor to the Robert A. Maguire Prize in Slavic Studies, please send your contribution, with the check made out to Columbia University, accompanied by a letter expressing your intention that the sum be used to sustain the Maguire prize, to:

The Robert A. Maguire Prize Department of Slavic Languages 708 Hamilton Hall Columbia University, Mail Code 2839 1130 Amsterdam Avenue New York, NY 10027

Ulbandus 17: A Culture of Institutions; Institutions of Culture (2016), ed. Bradley Gorski.

Documents

Transcript of Ulbandus 17: A Culture of Institutions; Institutions of Culture (2016), ed. Bradley Gorski.