Bogdanov. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Bog-danov emerged as an articulate critic of Vladimir Lenin. Bogdanov contended that in order for a proletarian revolution to succeed, the working class had to develop its own ideology and proletarian intelligentsia to take and wield power. His insistence on working-class autonomy put him at odds with Lenin’s interpretation of revolutionary change. Bogdanov’s influence was clearly evident in the Proletkult’s political stance; its leaders insisted that the organization remain separate from government cultural agencies and the Communist Party.
At its peak in the fall of 1920, the Proletkult claimed a mass following of almost half a million people spread over three hundred local groups. These figures must be viewed with caution because they cannot be verified by existing records. Moreover, they imply a kind of cohesion that the organization did not possess during the chaotic years of the Russian civil war (1917-1922), when the Bolshevik regime was fought for its survival. Certainly, not all participants understood that they were supposed to be creating original forms of proletarian culture. Probably even fewer were aware of the national leadership’s demand for independence from the Soviet state and Communist Party.
Much of the organization’s work during the Civil War continued the activities of prerevolu-tionary adult education schools called People’s Homes (narodnye doma) and people’s universities. Proletkult participants took part in literacy and foreign language classes, as well as lectures on current events and recent scientific achievements. They also attended musical concerts, plays, and readings offered by professional artists. In addition, the organization sponsored classes in music, literature, and the visual arts. A number of important artists from middle- and upper-class backgrounds took part in the Proletkult’s many workshops, including the symbolist writer Andrew Bely, and the avant-garde painter Olga Rozanova. Some came for the salary and rations that teaching positions provided. Others found a sympathetic environment for artistic experimentation. The future film director Sergei Eisenstein, for example, transformed the First Workers’ Theater in Moscow into one of the nation’s most inventive stages.
Proletkult studios nurtured new talent, such as the actress Judith Glizer, who went on to a very successful theatrical and film career. However, the best-known proletarian artists associated with the Proletkult had already begun their creative work before the Revolution. Writers were particularly prevalent. The poetry, plays, and stories of authors such as Vladimir Kirillov, Michael Gerasimov, and Paul Bessalko formed the creative center of Pro-letkult publications. Eventually they left the organization to form an influential writers’ circle called The Smithy (Kuznitsy), which was an important contributor to debates on the place of art in Soviet society during the 1920s.
Although much of the Proletkult’s work was on a rudimentary educational level, its demands for autonomy put it on a collision course with the Communist Party. In December 1920, Lenin issued a devastating critique of the organization, attacking not only its independence but also the very idea of a unique proletarian culture. In short order, the Proletkult was made into a subsection of the governmental cultural agency, the Commissariat of Enlightenment. In an attempt to stabilize the economy after the conclusion of the Civil War, the government slashed funds for all cultural projects. These steps drastically reduced the organization’s size and influence.
During the 1920s, the Proletkult continued to operate on a small scale in Moscow, Leningrad, and a few provincial cities. In the creative arts, it was overshadowed by newer professional organizations, such as the Proletarian Writers’ Union, which claimed to represent workers’ cultural interests. Instead, the organization invested most of its energy in providing services to trade union clubs. During the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), it saw a brief period of growth. However, in April 1932, the Communist Party summarily closed down the Proletkult along with all other cultural associations that assumed special ties to workers. From now on, the Communist Party decreed, Soviet artistic works had to appeal to all social classes, not just the proletariat. The Proletkult’s final demise marked an important step on the path to socialist realism. See also: CULTURAL REVOLUTION; LENIN, VLADIMIR IL-LICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1970). The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts Under Lunacharsky, October 1917-1921. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mally, Lynn. (1990). Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Sochor, Zenovia A. (1988). Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Steinberg, Mark D. (2002). Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
(1895-1970), folklorist, best known for Morphology of the Folktale, a structuralist analysis and fundamental work on the theory of narrative.
Vladimir Iakovlevich Propp was born and educated in St. Petersburg, where he received a degree in philology. After teaching Russian and German for a short time, he concentrated exclusively on folklore, chairing the Folklore Department of Leningrad State University from 1863 to 1964.
Morphology of the Folktale (1928) was an attempt to reduce all folktales to one structure. Dissatisfied with the classification system in the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index, Propp proposed a different tale unit, a plot element he called the function. He found that all the tales in Alexander N. Afanasev’s Russkie narodnye skazki (Russian fairy tales) had the same thirty-one functions appearing in the same order, and that the actors in the tales could be reduced to a dramatis personae of seven. Morphology of the Folktale became known in the West through Claude L?vi-Strauss, who criticized Propp’s construct and favored a different approach, and Alan Dundes, who showed that it applied beyond European tales.
Propp’s next book, The Historical Roots of the Magic Tale (1946), sought to show that folktales originated in ritual, especially initiation and funeral rites. In 1948, along with other Soviet scholars, Propp came under official attack. His Morphology was criticized for being too formalist, and his Historical Roots was said to be too dependent on Western scholarship and too willing to place Russian narrative in a global context. While he was never arrested and retained his university position, Propp shifted his focus, and his Russian Heroic Epic (1958) is a more Marxist interpretation, linking epic to stages of socioeconomic development. In his final major work, Russian Agrarian Holidays (1963), Propp returned to his earlier methodology and elucidated common elements in calendrical ritual. See also: FOLKLORE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Propp, Vladimir. (1975). Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd ed., tr. Laurence Scott, ed. Louis A. Wagner. Austin: University of Texas Press. Propp, Vladimir. (1984). Theory and History of Folklore, tr. Ariadna Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin, ed. Anatoly Liberman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Until the mid-eighteenth century, Russian authorities treated prostitution as a crime against morality and public decorum, and enacted laws and decrees to keep prostitutes invisible and isolated. Nevertheless, contemporary observers often remarked the presence of prostitutes in Moscow and, by the early eighteenth century, in the new capital of St. Petersburg. In the late 1700s prostitutes became regarded more as sources of venereal disease, and policies changed accordingly. The first attempts to reduce the medical danger associated with prostitutes took place during the reign of Catherine the Great, with the designation of a hospital in St. Petersburg for their confinement.
The nineteenth century brought the rise of a system of medical and police regulation to control prostitutes in terms of both their public behavior and the threat they represented to public health. In 1843 Tsar Nicholas I’s minister of internal affairs subjected prostitution to surveillance based on a European model of inscription, inspection, and incarceration. Ministry guidelines called for licensing brothels, registering streetwalkers, regular medical examinations for women identified as prostitutes, and compulsory hospitalization for those apparently suffering from venereal disease. Prostitution remained officially illegal, but the ministry’s regulations superseded the law so long as prostitutes registered their trade and brothels were under police supervision. Thus, medical-police
