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Subject: REVIEW: Loewenstein on Dobrenko, _The Making of the State Writer_
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 17:55:46 -0500
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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
May 2004
Evgeny Dobrenko. _The Making of the State Writer: Social
and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture_.
Trans. Jesse M. Savage. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2000. xxi + 484 pp. $75.00 (cloth),
ISBN 0-8047-3364-3.
Reviewed for H-Russia by Karl Loewenstein
([log in to unmask]),
Department of History, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
How Soviet Writers Learned to Love Socialist Realism.
Evgeny Dobrenko has written a thought-provoking analysis
of the development of Socialist Realism and the creation
of a corps of Soviet writers. A sequel to his _The Making
of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of
their Reception of Soviet Literature_ (Stanford University
Press, 1997), it approaches the subject from the inverse
perspective. In the first work, he examined the way in
which readers were taught to demand certain forms of
writing. Here, he argues that writers were conditioned to
write in certain ways under pressure from both above and
below. The core of his argument is that journeyman Soviet
writers essentially internalized the principles of
Socialist Realism in response to the pressures of the
1920s and 1930s. Reversing traditional thinking about
Soviet literature, Dobrenko argues that the process
leading to the First All-Union Congress of Writers in 1934
made censorship unnecessary for the vast majority of
Soviet writer.
"The problem of censorship cannot exist for a Soviet
Writer." (p. xv), writes Dobrenko. He then suggests that
the binary oppositions of "sovietology," freedom/unfreedom
and truth/falsity, do not apply to Soviet literature and
do not aid our understanding of it. The key piece to
Dobrenko's argument is a reconceptualization of what
Socialist Realism was. Instead of being simply a type of
literature, it was a self-managed sea of artistic
production. Soviet literature became a self-regulating
entity that did not need censors. Writers became
bureaucrats and watched over other writers.
Dobrenko begins by tracing the evolution of revolutionary
writing from the 19th century to the 1930s. He notes that
Russians have been obsessed with finding 'people's poets'
at least since Pushkin. Then, Dobrenko argues that
Socialist Realism has its roots in the 1860s. With the
rise of the revolutionary movement, literature became tied
to struggle and heroism. The greatest exemplar of this
trend was Nikolai Nekrasov. As these raznochintsy
writers tried to connect with the people, they combined
the high and low parts of Russian culture. Dobrenko
describes this process as "transforming high literature
into lubok and lubok into high culture" (p. 60). These
are the roots of Socialist realism.
He then follows the process through which literature was
shaped before the revolution. He discusses a series of
authors who were emblematic of the bridge between high and
low culture. Writers, such as Mikhail Sivachev, hated the
intelligentsia while striving to be a part of it. Once
the October revolution had come about, however, the
questions began to change. First was the rise of the
proletcult movement, which wanted to create a 'flood of
proletarian writers.' This movement, however, was divided.
The leaders struggled to decide between those who
advocated 'proletarian literature' and those who insisted
on 'party literature.' Party literature, or writers who
put the interests of the Bolshevik party first, won.
Dobrenko believes that this victory was inevitable.
In chapter three, he examines the Young Guard (Molodaia
gvardia) movement. Writers associated with the journal
of the same name were minor players in the debates over
literature in the 1920s, but their approach foreshadowed
the one that would win in the end. They stressed that
writers should desire to write in the way the party wanted
them to. Although this movement collapsed by the mid-20s,
they had seen the future.
In the course of that decade, the terms of the debate
shifted again. The question became how new literature
could be created. Young Guard had argued that
professional writers should freely choose to follow the
state. RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers),
the dominant literary organization of the late 1920s,
wanted to discard established writers completely. The
organization advocated the creation of a "mass literary
movement," where writers would naturally arise from the
working class. They sponsored contests and literary
circles by means of which they hoped to find proletarians
who would be able to write for the state. This was an
important component of Soviet literary policy through the
late 1930s, though RAPP would eventually be disbanded in
1934. After the First Congress of Soviet Writers, in
Dobrenko's perspective, Soviet writers would be primarily
readers who wrote books. In other words, the new
generation of writers, created out of the crucible of the
revolution, read works written in the official style and
then tried to copy them. They did not (and could not)
create anything but Socialist Realist works. This new
type of literature became, in Dobrenko's words,
"unconscious parodies of 'high literature'" (p. 247).
Mass literature copied other, more famous works in the
most simplistic, jargon-laden way, but authors seemed not
to notice the irony in their twisted phrases.
Next, Dobrenko looks at how this untrained mass of
proletarian writers was transformed into those who made
of the core of Socialist realist writers. RAPP came to
believe that the main question was not one of creativity,
but of proper training. That is to say, masters were not
born, but could be drawn from the working class and
created. He particularly investigates the institutions
for training these new writers. There were a series of
journals dedicated to this task. Maxim Gorky edited the
most important, entitled _Literaturnaia ucheba_. However,
these organizations were not very successful in creating
new, good writers, and began to exist primarily as a
threat to bring professional writers under control.
The entire process came to an end with the formation of
the Writers' Union in 1934. It took fifteen years to
prepare for Socialist Realism. The professional writers
returned to prominence, and the amateur writing that had
been so important for the last few years was jettisoned.
Only those trained at the Gorky Literary Institute in
Moscow would ascend to prominence in Stalinist Russia.
Professionally produced Socialist Realism became the
official literature of the Soviet Union. Writing about
"reality in its revolutionary development" had been
transformed from necessity to freedom. New individuals,
created by reading and accepting the established texts of
the Communist party, could produce Socialist realism
quickly and joyously, as if a shock-worker on an assembly-
line became the backbone of culture.
Dobrenko's argument here, very carefully developed, is
that it is a misunderstanding to see Socialist Realism as
repression. Coming through the forge of the 1920s,
professional writers came to accept Socialist Realism both
as truth and freedom. If one looks at the vast majority
of Soviet writers, one can see that censorship and control
was not the issue. More often the issue became one of
quality and interest, not ideology. As he concludes,
"Thus, between the Soviet writer (to the degree, of
course, that he remained Soviet) and authority, no "gap"
existed: Soviet literature was the natural form of
'bureaucratic writing' and needed no repressions against
bureaucrats (Soviet writers)" (p. 405). Dobrenko wants us
to break from traditional binary visions of conformity/
nonconformity to look at the way that all writers created
in the 1930s internalized the tropes of Soviet culture.
This pattern continued until the end of the Soviet state.
As new generations arose in the 1950s and 60s, the Writers'
Union devoted great efforts to train them as the first had
been trained. The leadership stressed that talent had to
be nurtured, and did not arise spontaneously. Although
the cadres at the union aged and fretted over the small
number of writers emerging after the war, mass literature
remained unchallenged and self-perpetuating through the
1970s and 80s.
Dobrenko shows the ways in which Socialist Realism was
more than simply an imposed style of writing. His
approach provides great insight into the mechanisms of
Soviet culture and the ability of the state to shape it.
The emphasis on the way that writers became their own
editors and supervisors is a persuasive one. It is
useful to think about the majority of Soviet writers who
accepted and sometimes enthusiastically joined in the
production of Socialist Realism.
I am not completely ready to accept the extreme dismissal
of the role of coercion, however. Notwithstanding the
self-censorship mechanism, a powerful bureaucracy oversaw
literature. Regardless of the fact that the Writers'
Union was a quasi-independent organization, the party
leaders kept a close eye on writers. See, as only one
example, a report about "counter-revolutionary activities
among Leningrad writers" sent to Zhdanov by the NKVD in
1935.[1] This particular document lists dozens of writers
who were meeting privately and complaining about the
current situation in literature. Although these writers
published Socialist Realist works, they did not seem happy
about it! It is clear that many writers, good and bad,
famous and unknown, chafed at the system of administration
and editing that they were all forced to deal with.
This work also has a difficult time addressing the growing
problems of dissent in the post-war era. Dobrenko's
approach is to argue that these dissenters were a very
small subset of writers and were rarely, if ever, part of
mass literature. By their dissent, they separated
themselves from the main channels of Soviet writing. Even
though challenges flared up regularly, they never shook
the deeply embedded, routine constructions of Socialist
realism. In other words, the exception of dissent proved
the rule of the Socialist Realism. I am not sure that
this model captures the deep cynicism and disillusionment
of the last decades of the Soviet Union, but perhaps
someone else will trace the threads developed here into
the second half of the twentieth century.
In any case, this book is a provocative and useful
rethinking of Soviet culture and the mechanisms of control
as they emerged during the 1920s and 30s. I would
recommend it to scholars and graduate students interested
in understanding Soviet literature and cultural life.
NOTES:
[1] Artizov, A and Naumov, O., eds., _Vlast' i
khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia: documenty 1917-1953_
(Moscow 2002), pp. 238-50.
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