The Soviet Novel - History as Ritual
Citation
Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981
Introduction: the Distinctive role of Socialist Realism in Soviet Culture
I. Socialist Realism before 1932
1. What Socialist Realism Isand What Led to Its Adoption as the Official Method of Soviet Literature
2. The Positive Hero in Prevolutionary Fiction
3. Socialist Realist Classics of the Twenties
II. High Stalinist Culture
4. The Machine and the Garden: Literature and the Metaphors for the New Society
5. The Stalinist Myth of the "Great Family"
6. The Sense of Reality in the Heroic Age
III. An Analysis of the Conventional Soviet Novel
7. The Prototypical Plot
8. Three Auxiliary Patterns of Ritual Sacrifice
IV. Soviet Fiction since World War II
9. The Postwar Stalin Period (1944-53)
10. The Khrushchev Years
11. Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained?
Katerina Clark is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She is author of Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution and coauthor (with Michael Holquist of Mikhail Bakhtin.
middlebrow- more like police novel, rests on canonical examples
tools for studying medieval hagiography or other formulaic genres better suited than highbrow lit tools
question of extratextual meaning, aesthetics not important ideology is
started in 1932 with writer's conference
canon
Gorky - mother, klim Sangin
Furmanov - Chapeau
Gladkov - Cement
Sholokhov - quiet flows the Don, virgin soil upturned
Ostrovsky - how the steel was tempered
Fadeev- The rout, the young guard
***
Master plot is a ritual in the anthropological sense, a focusing lens for cultural forces, parables which confirm Marxist-Leninist stages of history over course of Soviet novel the cliches represented different things.
[Patristic Texts]
Lenin 1905 - "Party organization and party literature" - foundational text, party-mindedness
Gorky's mother as putative foundational text / Borges on Kafka: each writer creates his own precursors
1927- Stalin consolidates power
Gleichschaltung - a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of society, "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education".
comic combination of verisimilitude and mythicization
bad because it's schitzophrenic
German debates (Lukacs and Brecht) not found in USSR
topics @ the congres: form vs. content, bracketing of modernism
-Lenin and Stalin as classic texts, dismissal of use of dialect as alienating (peasantry)
-validity of realism and surpassing of critical realism, good and bad romanticism, sense of history and the new man
Trotsky - against neologisms and regionalisms
skaz - oral form of narrative
Babel - Odessa tales (dialects)
obsession with transparency
"a monologic dream of cultural and ideological homogeneity"
Skaz and experimentation of 20s came under strict militaristic regimentation in 1930s
***
-it makes (perfect) sense to study socialist realism “from the point of view of the semiotics of culture, to discriminate the meaning of texts and the tradition they form, as opposed to their brute structure, by appealing to differences in different culture systems.”
-
Contents
Introduction: the Distinctive role of Socialist Realism in Soviet Culture
I. Socialist Realism before 1932
1. What Socialist Realism Isand What Led to Its Adoption as the Official Method of Soviet Literature
2. The Positive Hero in Prevolutionary Fiction
3. Socialist Realist Classics of the Twenties
II. High Stalinist Culture
4. The Machine and the Garden: Literature and the Metaphors for the New Society
5. The Stalinist Myth of the "Great Family"
6. The Sense of Reality in the Heroic Age
III. An Analysis of the Conventional Soviet Novel
7. The Prototypical Plot
8. Three Auxiliary Patterns of Ritual Sacrifice
IV. Soviet Fiction since World War II
9. The Postwar Stalin Period (1944-53)
10. The Khrushchev Years
11. Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained?
Author
Katerina Clark is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She is author of Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution and coauthor (with Michael Holquist of Mikhail Bakhtin.
Context
Thesis
the Soviet novel "in terms of the distinctive role it plays as the repository of official myths."Methodology
Key Terms
Socialist Realism, the Master Plot, the Positive Hero, the "spontaneity"/"consciousness" dialectic, the "Great Family,"Criticisms and Questions
Notes
middlebrow- more like police novel, rests on canonical examples
tools for studying medieval hagiography or other formulaic genres better suited than highbrow lit tools
question of extratextual meaning, aesthetics not important ideology is
started in 1932 with writer's conference
canon
Gorky - mother, klim Sangin
Furmanov - Chapeau
Gladkov - Cement
Sholokhov - quiet flows the Don, virgin soil upturned
Ostrovsky - how the steel was tempered
Fadeev- The rout, the young guard
***
Master plot is a ritual in the anthropological sense, a focusing lens for cultural forces, parables which confirm Marxist-Leninist stages of history over course of Soviet novel the cliches represented different things.
[Patristic Texts]
Lenin 1905 - "Party organization and party literature" - foundational text, party-mindedness
Gorky's mother as putative foundational text / Borges on Kafka: each writer creates his own precursors
1927- Stalin consolidates power
Gleichschaltung - a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of society, "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education".
comic combination of verisimilitude and mythicization
bad because it's schitzophrenic
German debates (Lukacs and Brecht) not found in USSR
topics @ the congres: form vs. content, bracketing of modernism
-Lenin and Stalin as classic texts, dismissal of use of dialect as alienating (peasantry)
-validity of realism and surpassing of critical realism, good and bad romanticism, sense of history and the new man
Trotsky - against neologisms and regionalisms
skaz - oral form of narrative
Babel - Odessa tales (dialects)
obsession with transparency
"a monologic dream of cultural and ideological homogeneity"
Skaz and experimentation of 20s came under strict militaristic regimentation in 1930s
***
-it makes (perfect) sense to study socialist realism “from the point of view of the semiotics of culture, to discriminate the meaning of texts and the tradition they form, as opposed to their brute structure, by appealing to differences in different culture systems.”
-
“There are at least six major elements in Soviet society and culture that play a part in the generative process of literature. First, there is literature itself; second, there is Marxism-Leninism; third, there are the Russian radical intelligentsia’s traditional myths and hero images, which the Bolsheviks brought with them when they took power in Russia in 1917; fourth, there are the various non-literary forums through which the official viewpoint is disseminated (the press, the political platform, theoretical writings, official histories, and the like), which I shall refer to in this book by the general term ‘rheroric’; fifth come political events and policies; and, sixth, there are the individual persons who are the principal actors in these political events together with their roles and values.” (8)
“The one invariant feature of all Soviet novels is that they are ritualized, that is, they repeat the master plot, which is itself a codification of major cultural categories.” (9) – this is the major hypothesis and starting point of the book. In two words, all Soviet novels are about the workings of the Marxism-Leninism in history. This ritualization is used to generate myths to legitimate the Stalinist regime.
Clark then identifies main structural elements of the system of socialist realist novel. They include “consciousness,” “party allegiance,” etc. Discusses temporality of socialist realist novel: it aspired to bridge the gap between the world as it ought to be (“epic,” in Bakhtin’s terms) and as it is (“novel,” in Bakhtin’s terms). “This subordination of historical reality to the preeexisting patterns of legend and history [in socialist realist novel] bridged the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought to be’.” (41) Heroes of this genre realize certain biographic strategies and patterns --- those which they, in turn, are supposed to inculcate in readers. Spread of new metaphors: machine and garden, in particular. Struggle with nature (and its conquest) as a prototypical element, wilderness transformed into garden by the virtue of strong will and other positive features and by the help of strong machines.