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Genre in Socialist Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Greg Carleton
Greg Carleton*
Affiliation:
Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature, Tufts University, Harvard University
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Extract

Of all the things socialist realism has been compared with, perhaps the least pejorative is its characterization as a kind of twentieth-century incarnation of neoclassicism. That is to say, socialist realism can be seen as a system based on clearly defined and delimited genres, and these genres exist in a strict hierarchy. Eighteenth-century literature certainly provides a comfortable metaphor because it invokes a picture of restraint, stasis, clarity and rigidity, in other words, those modifiers that so often characterize the monologic tendency of socialist realism.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , Winter 1994 , pp. 992 - 1009
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1994

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References

1. Morson, Gary Saul, “Socialist Realism and Literary Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38, no. 2 (1979): 121–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katerina, Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981 Google Scholar.

2. For descriptions and condemnations of the canal in the west, see David, Dallin and Boris, Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947 Google Scholar; Lebed’, Andrei and Yakovlev, Boris, Transportnoe znachenie gidrotekhnicheskikh sooruzhenii SSSR (Munich: Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR, 1954), 51–55 Google Scholar; Aleksandr, Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag (Paris: YMCA Press, 1974), 3–4: 77–102Google Scholar.

3. “Zadushevnoe slovo,” Literatumaia gazeta, 29 August 1933; M. Charnyi, “Liudi i shliuzy,” Literatumaia gazeta, 29 August 1933.

4. Cynthia Ruder, who has conducted archival research on Belomor, gave a detailed description of the unusual and complex circumstances surrounding its composition in “The Belomor Canal: Fact and Fiction,” at the 1993 conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Honolulu, Hawaii.

5. “Kniga na stole delegata s “ezda,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 28 January, 1934. A later article states that 2500 copies alone were sold at kiosks at the Congress (“Chto chitaiut delegaty,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 12 February 1934). For major press accounts of the trip and the composition of the book, see articles (often published in groups filling up an entire page) in the following issues of Literaturnaia gazeta of 1933: 29 August, 17 October, 23 October, 23 November, 23 December. For a late-Soviet, Russian condemnation of the writers' participation, see Viacheslav Vozdvizhensky, “Put' v kazarmu, ili eshche raz o nasledstve,” Literaturnaia kritika 5 (1989): 180. The wife of Vsevolod Ivanov, Tamara Ivanova, who accompanied her husband and Zoshchenko on the trip, counters this charge by stating that both writers sincerely believed in the experiences of the select prisoners whom they were allowed to interview. (“Eshche o ‘nasledstve, ’ o ‘dolge’ i ‘prave': Byl li Vsevolod Ivanov ‘zhdanovtsem'?” Knizhnoe obozrenie 34 [1989]: 6).

6. “Kniga o Belomorstroe,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 23 December 1933.

7. “Na trasse sotsialisticheskogo tvorchestva,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 29 August 1933.

8. Parenthetical references are from the 1934 single-columned edition published in April 1934, which differs slightly from the double-columned January edition. An English translation was quickly published on whose jacket it is described as “one of the most fascinating human documents ever penned” (Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea [New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1935]).

9. A measure of the consternation caused by Zoshchenko's Youth Restored can be seen in the diversity of opinion in the following: G. Munblit, “Kak vazhno byt’ ser'eznym,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 20 February 1934; B. Begak, “Povest’ i kommentarii k nei,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 18 March 1934; B. Rest, “Pobeda ili porazhenie?” Literaturnaia gazeta, 26 March 1934; N. Semashko, “Mozhno li vozvratit' molodost?” Literaturnaia gazeta, 6 April 1934; A. Beskina, “M. Zoshchenko v poiskakh optimizma,” Literaturnii Leningrad, 8 May 1934; E. Zhurbina, “Kriticheskaia alkhimiia i balans poiskov molodosti,” Literaturnyi Leningrad, 8 May 1934; A. Ol'gina, “Sekret molodosti i krasoty,” Khudozhestvennaia literatura 6 (1934): 16–19 Google Scholar; Drugov, B., “Porazhenie geroia i pobeda avtora,” Kniga i proletarskaia revoliulsiia 9 (1934): 99–102 Google Scholar; Nemilov, A., “Mikh. Zoshchenko i problema omolozheniia,” Kniga i proletarskaia revoliutsiia 9 (1934): 95–99 Google Scholar; Gorelov, A., “V poiskakh formuly molodosti,” in Ispytanie vremenem (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1935), 89–98 Google Scholar.

10. Of course, leaders are identified by name and given individualized portraits, but they essentially amplify the qualities given above. See, for example, those of Matvei Berman (in chap. 3) and Iakov Rapoport (at the beginning of chap. 5) with their near superhuman ability.

11. Ernst, Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Trask, Willard R. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967 Google Scholar. I find his use of topoi more suitable for socialist realism than usual terms such as “obligatory motif,” “myth” or “masterplot.” Regarding the first, I want to stress the transgeneric nature of these rhetorical tropes; regarding the second, I am not just speaking of models of the world but of models of composition; and with the third I want to emphasize that the topoi need not form a linear progression.

12. William J., Brandt, The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966 Google Scholar; Beer, Jeanette M.A., Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages (Geneva: Droz, 1981 Google Scholar; Suzanne, Fleischman, “On the Representation of History and Fiction in the Middle Ages,” History and Theory 22, no.3 (1983): 278–310 Google Scholar; Joseph, Duggan, “Medieval Epic as Popular Historiography,” Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen dss Mittelalters 11, no.l (Heidelberg, 1986): 285–311 Google Scholar; Ruth, Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation, and Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991 Google Scholar.

13. Of many possible examples, Morse's description of how historical figures were presented offers the most clear parallel. In fact, one could argue that it almost reads like a guide to writing and understanding Stalin's Short Course: “Any expectation that writers [in the Middle Ages] were interested in the study of ‘personality’ must be discarded at once. When medieval writers narrated the lives of famous men they purported to record their deeds and sayings, sometimes including a physical description, even more rarely an analysis of mores… . Not only did the composition of lives follow patterns, but the lives themselves were often, in hagiography almost exclusively, signs of something. The life of a person through time, like history, or the natural world, could be interpreted like a book. That is, incidents were included (or invented) because they belonged to a pattern, because they signified something quite specific about the status, the symbolic being, of the their subject. As with many of the topoi mentioned…, circumstantial narratives may be included because they fulfill expectations rather than because they are true” (128).

14. See especially chaps. 5 and 6 in The Soviet Novel.

15. Key formulations of this understanding of genre can be found in lurii Tynianov, “Literaturnyi fakt” and “O literaturnoi evoliutsii” both in Arkhaisty i novatory (1929; rpt. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), 5–29, 30–47; in Boris, Tomashevsky, Teoriia literatury: poetiha (1928; rpt. Ann Arbor: Ardis, no date given)Google Scholar; and in Roman, Jakobson, “The Dominant,” trans. Eagle, Herbert, in Selected Writings (Hague: Mouton, 1981), 3: 751–56Google Scholar. The vitality of this idea can be measured, in part, by the diverse scholars who in some way or another make use of genre in a similar manner. See, for example, Hirsch, E.D., Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967 Google Scholar; Jonathan, Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975 Google Scholar; Stanley, Fish, Is There a Text in This Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980 Google Scholar. For a recent monograph on genre theory and its importance in interpretation, see Thomas, Kent, Interpretation and Genre: the Role of Generic Perception in the Study of Narrative Texts (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1986 Google Scholar.

16. Within the scope of this paper, one could not begin to outline this domain. Clark has made a useful contribution; what I would like to stress is that the components of this domain are not generic specific.

17. These are precisely the two factors lacking in Zoshchenko's dissolution of generic boundaries in Youth Restored. To a great extent, their absence underlies the contemporary confusion over what the text represented: a serious rendition of the “intellectual-reconciling-with-the-state theme,” a parodic variant of the same, a serious medical treatise, a parodic variant of the latter, etc.

18. References to Bol'shoi Konveier are to the Moscow, 1934 edition (Molodaia guardiia); L. Mekhlis, eel., Liudi stalingradskogo traktornogo (Moscow: OGIZ, 1933 Google Scholar. (Il'in is listed as the compiler)

19. Quoted by Khokhlov, G. in his review, “Posmertnyi roman la. Il'ina” Literaturnyi kritik 5 (1934): 208 Google Scholar. For similar sentiments, see Shcherbina, V., “Kniga bol'shikh problem,” Oktiabr’ 8 (1934): 168–78Google Scholar; and Goffenshefer, V., “Sorevnovanie s deistvitel'nost'iu,” Literaturnyi kritik 1 1 (1934): 70–93.Google Scholar

20. Khokhlov, 211.

21. This is most evident in the substantial attention devoted to workers’ lives before arriving at the plant. The civil war, as expected, figures prominently in these accounts.

22. Khokhlov, 208.

23. Shcherbina, 177; 176.

24. Il'in, 2.

25. Grigory Petrovsky, “Vmesto predisloviia,” Kak zakalialas’ stal' (Leningrad: Molodaia gvardiia, 1936), 5–6.

26. Cited from Brovman, G., “O inolodezhnoi literature voobshche i o ‘Molodoi gvardii’ v chastnosti,” Molodaia gvardiia 10 (1933): 168.Google Scholar

27. This could be extended to current debates in historical studies where scholars such as Hayden White have suggested (entirely outside of the field of socialist realism) that we often confer notions of “authority” and “authenticity” onto texts based on specific narrative tropes rather than on the foundations of the “facts” alone. See his collections of articles in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), especially “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” and “Historicism, History and the Figurative Imagination,” and in The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), especially “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” White's position, to be sure, holds out no less problematic ethical implications as is evident most recently in the collection of essays, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), to which he is a contributor and serves as a primary target/object of discussion as well.