from, say, Anna Karavaeva’s trilogy
to Peter I (hardly the most merciful of rulers). It is equally illuminating to compare the Socialist Realist novel with Third Reich fiction, with the Catholic novel of mid-twentieth-century France, Italy, and Ireland, or indeed with formulaic genres such as the ‘Harlequin romance’ and the detective novel in Britain and America.
A second position is to ignore Soviet art’s relationship with political power. If Dostoevsky may be stripped of the Pan-Slavic messianism and anti-Semitism that are painfully obvious in
Alternatively, ethical judgement may be suspended altogether: Soviet literature may be studied in and for itself, and discussed from an ‘anthropological’ perspective. This means replacing the question of whether the composition of five-year plan novels or odes to Stalin was morally and aesthetically justifiable by the question of what it meant to write them and how they were understood by contemporary readers. Katerina Clark’s pioneering study of Socialist Realism,
the devices of traditional Russian folklore on the one hand and classical epic on the other. More recently, other critics, such as David Shepherd, Thomas Lahusen, and Jochen Hellbeck, have analysed the active process of self-shaping undergone by Socialist Realist writers themselves, as they struggled, in private diaries as well as public statements, to mould themselves in the manner required by Party dictates, repeatedly rewriting early versions of their works in order to make them conform with changes in policy. Processes of this kind may not suit Western ideals of artistic and ethical independence, but they were in no sense unambiguous and easy to interpret: one central tragedy of the Stalinist era, indeed, was the amount of complex thought and agonized intelligence that went into producing the simple-minded propaganda novels and poems required by Party policy.
Whichever way, the view of the writer as ‘master of minds’ was a constant of Russian literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even so studiedly ironic a Modernist as Vladimir Nabokov was happy to assert that he was no ‘frivolous firebird’, but ‘a moralist kicking sin, scoffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel – and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride’. Dissent crystallized round the manner in which ethical or aesthetic edification was to be imparted, and the material that it should impart, rather than the question of whether such edification might be tolerated in the first place. The author’s right and duty to give such edification was a central plank of Soviet literary culture, in which officially approved authors not only enjoyed material privileges, but were also treated as experts on topical issues of the day. (A typically grotesque example of this was the participation of the prominent Soviet poet Pavel Antokolsky, then in his sixties, in a debate about ‘the youth of today’ that ran in the Young Communist League newspaper
insight into psychological, moral, and aesthetic problems. They were appealed to by intelligent fellow citizens not only as patrons and authoritative readers of literary texts, but as experts on everything from painting, music, architecture, right down to manners, dress, and household decoration.
The fact that regard for writers was so high was one reason why, during the Soviet period, large numbers of Russians became sufferers from ‘graphomania’, the compulsive desire to spew out writing, and if possible get this into print, irrespective of its merits. Stirred up by 1920s propaganda, which exhorted the Soviet masses to express themselves (‘anyone can write!’), graphomania was ubiquitous until the end of Soviet power. It encompassed lyric poems and fiction as well as letters to the press, and avant-garde work as well as official literature. As the emigre writer Svetlana Boym has pointed out, graphomania was ‘an embarrassment to literary institutions’ of all kinds, unofficial as well as official, since it raised uncomfortable questions about the grounds upon which it was possible to discriminate between the talented and the talentless. Some of the most inventive and interesting novels and stories created under Soviet power were tragi-comic examinations of the fatal affinities between good and bad art. If the genius of Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach in ‘Death in Venice’ has to be taken as a given, and the sensibility of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert at least mimics that of the true artist (though he makes the fatal mistake of confusing fantasy and life), the talents of many Soviet writer-heroes were of a more questionable kind. For example, in Yury Olesha’s
The more reflective writers of the 1930s and 1940s, then, were concerned that under a regime which accorded at best a secondary weight to aesthetic criteria in setting down guidelines for publication, all literary production might turn into graphomania. (That such worries were not necessarily chimerical was illustrated by the case of Olesha himself, who sank into alcohol-fuelled despair and the composition of fissiparous fragments during the mid-1930s.) After Stalin’s death, though, the term ‘graphomania’ acquired a different force, as the prize-winning novels of the Stalin era were examined and found wanting, and Socialist Realism itself came under scrutiny. Though the doctrine officially remained in force until 1991, it was irrelevant to a fair amount of the literature published after 1956, even during the relatively repressive ‘period of stagnation’ (1964–87) which succeeded the ‘Khrushchev thaw’ of 1954–64. The future of Soviet literature was the subject of heated debates, which occasionally reached journals and public meetings, but were more often carried on over kitchen tables. Those who proclaimed the virtues of artistic autonomy, ‘art for art’s sake’, could point to the many solemn, huge, and forgotten novels that littered the
