The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

material nature forms an interconnected whole, there is nothing absolute or eternal in that whole. Development is not the result of a uniform evolutionary process but is punctuated with periods of cataclysm: qualitatively different, revolutionary change. All change is the result of a conflict between opposing tendencies, which in principle can be resolved temporarily in a new synthesis. During the Stalinist years, what it means to know, act, and succeed within the confines of such a doctrine had a profound effect on the psychological motivation of literary heroes, as well as on the shape of the plot in which they moved.

What was socialist realism?

In April 1932, by official decree, all independent writers’ organizations were dissolved and replaced by a single Union of Soviet Writers. The word “union” [soyuz] in the Soviet context has nothing in common with employees’ “unions” in the West (trade unions and the like), which exist to defend the rights of worker-clients against employers. In the USSR, no such rights formally existed; also, there were no private employers, nor were there neutral courts to adjudicate conflicting claims. “Creative unions” were conduits for social commands. Novels, poems, poster art, and symphonies were perceived as cultural products that could be put to work for the good of socialist society, just as pig iron, an industrial product, was put to work. This does not mean that the unions were monolithic or unmindful of the needs of their respective artistic disciplines. But only in its bosom could one live professionally by one’s art.

Stalin called Soviet writers “engineers of the soul.” To be recognized as a writer – and thus to be officially employed (a non-trivial obligation in a state with anti-parasite laws) – one had to do more than write and submit one’s work. One had to be a member of the Union. Since the Writers’ Union had a financial division (Litfund) in addition to an organizational bureaucracy (Orgbyuro), it functioned both as literary agent and as ideological monitor. In reward for compliance and high productivity, the Union provided its members with royalties, commissions, access to vacation resorts operated by cultural agencies, quality living quarters, forums for discussion of their work, and foreign travel (under certain conditions: that the writer be engaged in an approved study of a foreign culture, be willing to serve as propagandist for Soviet art, be available to file reports for the security police, and have family members who could be left behind as hostages). Soon after its founding, the Writers’ Union, in collaboration with the Communist Party’s Central Committee, worked out its

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literary policy, a vital part of Stalin’s second Five-Year Plan (1933–37) that was to enact Soviet Russia’s official transition to a classless society. The ideological charge to writers was “socialist realism,” defined in the statutes as “demanding of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development.”

The weirdly abstract nature of that definition was first explicated for a Western audience in 1959, by an insider, Andrei Sinyavsky – that same writer who, as an e?migre? two decades later, would publish his Sorbonne lectures on Ivan the Fool. In his essay “What Is Socialist Realism,” published under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, Sinyavsky explained that the doctrine seems odd to outsiders because the concept of “revolutionary development” has nothing to do with any visible or palpable reality. The “socialist realist” writer is neither realist in the old way – he does not attempt to describe “what exists,” as did Tolstoy or Chekhov – nor is he socialist in an overtly political fashion, oriented toward today’s struggles. This new type of writer hardly sees the present. What is seen, Sinyavsky remarks with some irony, is “Purpose with a capital P.”5 Focus steadfastly on this Purpose, and your consciousness will be transformed. However fleetingly, you will see the future goal manifest in the messy and mediocre present. Skeptics laugh at these ardent true believers, Sinyavsky admits, just as the urbane pagan Romans laughed at (and crucified) the early Christians. But the nineteenth century, with its doubts and quests – “soft, shriveled, feminine, melancholy” – was a disaster from the perspective of Purpose. Sinyavsky concludes his essay by suggesting that twentieth-century socialist realism is actually closer to neoclassicism, a favored carrier for the ideological certainty and patronage art of the eighteenth century.

Sinyavsky’s tone in this 1959 essay is caustically provocative, as befits a Purpose that had grown decrepit and cynical over a quarter century. But Sinyavsky faithfully repeats many of the points Gorky made in 1934, even though Gorky uses the phrase “socialist realist” only once. For its time and place, Gorky’s speech was astonishingly cosmopolitan. Much of it is devoted to the history of world literature, and how Soviet Russia might enrich that history by overhauling its repertory of heroes and plots. We consider only two of his most influential positions: his blistering critique of “bourgeois literature,” and his hopes for a new Russian alternative to it.

Throughout his 1934 speech, after the manner of so many Russian critics from Belinsky to Bakhtin, Gorky projects onto the world at large what are essentially native Russian values: traditional folk worldviews, prejudices against mercantile activity, Russified Marxist truisms. He begins by confirming that labor, the spoken word (incantations, spells), and a “materialist mode of thought” lay at the base of all primitive cultures.6 He then insists that “when

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the history of culture is written by Marxists, we shall see that the bourgeoisie’s role in the process of cultural creativity has been grossly exaggerated” (p. 233, Gorky’s emphasis). Especially repellant to Gorky is the fact that the heroes of bourgeois literature are all “swindlers, thieves, murderers, and detectives” - the detective novel being an idle game between propertied capitalists, the “favorite spiritual repast of satiated people in Europe” (p. 238) - devoid of plots that could engage or inspire the working class that actually produces the wealth. In addition to crooks and the detective who stalks them, the nineteenth century showcased the “superfluous person.” This empty and Purposeless individual had been featured in both lines of progressive European literature familiar in Russia: “critical realism” and its softer, more ecstatic precursor, “revolutionary romanticism.” The former “-ism” saw clearly the ills of society but offered no constructive alternative to them; the latter did not see at all.

What should the new Soviet person strive to see? This person should not dwell on the dark or perverse sides of human nature. Those are “survivals,” relics, reality not in its “revolutionary development” but reality stuck motionless somewhere far back on the path. Access to the “truthful, historically concrete representation of reality” depends on one’s Party-disciplined eye picking out the proper details on which to focus, and ascertaining where, on the ladderto the future, they belong. Truth in this context might be compared to an energy field surrounding and infusing the subject; immersed in the proper class or collective milieu, any person could become “conscious” and begin to see. Under the new regime, literature was no longer primarily a record of self-expression, and not even “a form of passive ideological reflection, but an active, ‘healthy,’ controlled ideological instrument, not a mirror any more but a weapon.”7 History could be hastened along by attitude alone, an energy resource that never runs out - even when a population is devastated by every conceivable type of war, famine, economic collapse, personal loss, and grief.

Four socialist realist principles eventually governed what a conscious subject, inside and outside the fictional text, is privileged to see.8 Partiinost', “party-mindedness,” decrees that every artistic act is also a political act. The source of all authoritative knowledge is the Party. Ideinost', “idea-mindedness,” is specifically topical: the “idea” of the artwork should embody the current high- priority party slogan (reconstructing a ruined factory, abolishing drunkenness, building the Moscow metro, destroying the fascist enemy). Klassovost', “class-mindedness,” both acknowledges the social-class origin of art and obliges it to further the struggle of the proletariat. Narodnost', “people- or folk-mindedness,” requires art to be accessible and appealing to the masses by drawing on their traditions, language, melodies, rhythms, and values. Since the Soviet Union was a multinational state, narodnost''authorized considerable

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