http://www.nlobooks.ru/rus/magazines/nlo/196/1717/1752/

NLO # 101 (2010)
SUMMARY

DISCREET CHARM OF STALINISM
 

Hans Günther's (University Bielefeld, Germany) article is dedicated to the evolution of the Soviet discourse on the beautiful. The "cult of beauty" (Susan Sontag) which is typical of the dictatorships of the first half of the 20th century did not develop all at once after the October revolution. Left-wing avantgarde authors like V. Mayakovsky or B. Arvatov disapproved of beauty as a bourgeois illusion in the name of a future proletarian society. During the first half of the 1930s, however, the idea of the beautiful experienced a powerful renaissance. The Stalinist society embellished itself by borrowing motifs from the female myth of the native country (Rodina) and other sources. At the same time, all kinds of "ugliness" (the naturalistic "deformation" of reality, the representation of injured bodies etc.), were rejected as opposed to the perfect harmony of the Soviet society. These official aesthetics culminated in V. Ermilov's formula "The beautiful - this is our life".

The article of Andrei L. Zorin (Oxford University, Great Britain) deals with Lydia Ginzburg's efforts to find during the time of siege of Leningrad some sort of historical and philosophical justification for Stalinist system. In her notes and essays she developed an intellectual system based on Hegelian tradition deeply rooted in history of Russian social thought. Thus system allowed her to retrospectively explain in the terrorist practice of the system and to aspire for its gradual reconciliation with the nation and intellectual elite. However, these way of reasoning happened to be short lived and already in 1944 ended in bitter disappointment. probably because of this disappointment Ginzburg never published some of her writings of this period, but chose to preserve them in her personal archive.

Evgeny Dobrenko (University of Sheffield, Great Britain) in his article «Stalinist Culture: Discreet Charm of Anti-Semitism» examines new approaches to the political underpinnings and cultural and ideological implications of the «struggle against cosmopolitanism» and the destruction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee by reviewing most recent publications in Russia on anti-Semitic campaigns in post-War Soviet Union. The article focuses on the place the events of 1949 took in the evolution of Soviet cultural elites.
 
ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE (POST)SOVIET MILIEU
 

The block opens with an article by Alexandra Arkhipova and Sergey Nekhlyudov (RSUH, Moscow) «Folklore in a closed society». The authors analyse specific features of the rich folklore material of the NEP period (that had to do with mass population movement and a collapse of the previously existing cultural hierarchies) within the chronological framework of the 1920s- 1040s as well as the methods the scholars of the period employed when working with it. The authors describe how starting as early as the mid-1920s the regime reacted to this upsurge of folk creativity partly by creating a far-reaching system of registering and suppressing unwanted «anti-Soviet outpourings». Special security reports dealing with this «folklore protest» represent an important source for modern scholars. On the other hand, the Soviet regime also used folklore specialists and some storytellers to actualise practices of «directing folklore»: selection, censorship, propaganda and brining forth required forms and plots.

Sergey Alymov (The Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography, Moscow) in his article «A non-random village (Soviet collective farmers and ethnographers on the way "from the old to the new" and back)» looks into the Soviet practice of ethnographical research not only of the «old» tradition but also of the current social life (starting with the works of Vladimir Tan-Bogoraz and his students in the 20s). In the center of this analysis lies the story of a village called Viryatino of the Tambov region that became a target for field trips (since the early 1950s) and monographic description (1958) for a group of Soviet ethnographers lead by a major scientist of a previous generation Petr Kushner. The author uses materials gathered from his own trips to Viryatino and collected from the local and Moscow archives to demonstrate the mechanism of "translating" real parameters of Soviet collective farm life into a specific language of Marxist-Leninist ethnography.

The article by Olga Sosnina (Moscow) and Nikolay Ssorin-Chaikov (Cambridge) «Canon and improvisation in Soviet political aesthetics: gifts to Soviet leaders» is a part of the NLO thematic series on "the anthropology of closed societies". The concept of "closed society" seems to be applicable to the Soviet Union as a whole as well as to its internal strata and groupings that were encompassed and separated by different social and political barriers in ways which made a "closeness" of individual group or segment a microcosm of the overall Soviet society. This article critiques this view using a perspective that charts social life of material objects that criss-cross this social space. Objects in questions are gifts that the Soviet leaders received from Soviet citizens and from international movements and leaders. First sections of the article chart what we call "gift governmentality" - a subtle work of power relations in these gift practices and in constituting Soviet subjectivities. Then we turn to issues of gift value and aesthetics. We argue that the language of these gifts, and the social life of these gift objects, highlights extensive networks of relations that connect ordinary people and state leaders in complex relationships while conveying an inner workings of Soviet cultural perspective that casts itself as open and expansive.

Stefano Garzonio (Italy) «The "Russkiy Shanson" (Russian Chanson) between Tradition and Innovation. Genre. History. Themes». In the present article the author tries to offer a historical typological description of a special genre of contemporary Russian musical poetry, the so called "Russkiy Shanson", an hybrid form of song remaining in between the rich tradition of Russian urban folklore and the genres of Russian and Soviet pop songs (the so called "estradnaya muzyka"). In his analysis the author points out the evident relationship between the poetical and musical tradition of blatnaya pesnya (songs of the prison and criminal world) and the recent popular forms of Russian Chanson (e.g. songs of the popular group «Lesopoval» or of such singers-composers as Misha Krug or Ivan Kuchin) in its formal and thematic variety and at the same time analyses it from a social and geographical point of view. The aim of the article is to show the real working of traditional poetical and song patterns under the new social conditions of Post-Soviet Russia.
 
PRIVATE PUBLIS SPHERE OF LATE SOCIALISM
 

Kevin M. F. Platt and Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania, USA) «Socialist in Form, Indeterminate in Content: Late Soviet Culture and Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More». Alexei Yurchak's influential 2006 book, «Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation», dismantles the binarisms of official and unofficial, coercive and resistant, mendacious and truth-seeking that have dominated scholarship on late Soviet culture - even as it claims not to address the causes of the Soviet collapse. The present essay contests and develops Yurchak's central concepts of "being vne" and "deterritorialization," proposing an alternative account of their origins and historical consequences. Drawing on Natalia Baranskaia's iconic 1969 story "A Week Like Any Other," as well as other works from or about the post-Stalin era, the authors revisit the peculiar discursive conditions of late Soviet culture, calling into question Yurchak's own antinomies of "activists" and "dissidents."

Irina Kaspe's (Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, State University - Higher School of Economics, Moscow) article «Boundaries of Soviet Life: The Concept of "Private" in an Isolationist Society. Part Two» poses a problem of describing the decades of the late-stage Socialism. The author (employing the terminology supplied by Alexei Yuchak while questioning certain intentions of his work) studies the special post-totalitarian type of social life where protective forms of social control start to dominate over the propaganda-based ones that are peculiar to an "isolationist society". The study uses films by Eldar Ryazanov as material for analysing specifically isolationist ways of manifesting and transmitting the concept of "private life" and those meanings that stood behind the daily images of "Soviet life" ("Soviet everyday life", "Soviet humanity").

IN MEMORIAM
 

This block is dedicated to the memory of Aleksandr Moiseyevich Pyatigorsky (1929-2009), a prominent Russian philosopher, a scholar of Buddhism and a writer who lived and worked in London since 1974. Arnis Ritups (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) gives a detailed picture of the formative period and the creative career of a thinker whose multifaceted activities does not fit within the limits of academic philosophy and still awaits conceptualisation.

In his conversations with Nikolay Mitrokhin (Bremen) Pyatigorsky speaks of his childhood, his parents and his first teachers; and reminisces about those people who had an important impact on him in his youth. Sergey Grachev (London) speaks about Aleksandr Pyatigorsky's last project- his «philosophic class», whose purpose was to foster independent thinking in his student, or, using Pyatigorsky's own words to teach them to apperceive «one's thought about oneself as an external object alien to that thought ant to apperceive that very thought as something alien to all one's past and present objects, and first and foremost to oneself». In his lecture «Phenomenological concept of death» delivered on 13 December 2008, Pyatigorsky poses a question on how the phenomenon of death could be conceived. The block closes with an essay by Kirill Kobrin (Prague) «A Philosopher in a situation of a novel» devoted to Pyatigorsky as a writer.
 

RUSSIAN UNDERGROUND LITERATURE 1950 - 1980s:
MODERN READING

N.I. Nikolaev's article (St. Petersburg) «Reminiscences of Aleksandr Mironov's poetry» deals with thematisation of modern culture with its erotic obsession as a new "barbarism". In A.Mironov's poetry this "barbarism" is linked to totalitarianism and not so much with its ideology as with its practices where human beings are presented in their final physiological nakedness. How could one in this situation make a poetic statement that wouldn't be mere phrase-mongering? According to the researcher this is the central question posed - and answered - by Aleksandr Mironov's poetry. Aleksandr Etkind's (University of Cambridge) article «Sinyavsky's saddle: prison camp critics in the cultural history of the Soviet period» looks into Andrei Sinyavsky prison camp experience as a constitutive element of his literary studies. The author turns to recently published prison camp letters of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuliy Daniel as well as to critical works that Sinyavsky wrote or conceived while in custody - «Strolls with Pushkin» and «In Gogol's Shadow» - to demonstrate that Sinyavsky's prison camp experience influenced not only the content but also the genre of his works. Etkind thinks that prison camp criticism is a separate and original phenomenon of Russian criticism of the 20th century on par with the Soviet and émigré criticism.
 
LITERARY PRIZE AS A METATEXT
 

In his article «A short-list of a literary prise: genre and text» Anatoly Barzakh (St. Petersburg) looks into a phenomenon of a short-list as an independent literary genre. For four years (2005-2008) Barzakh served on a panel of the Andrei Bely Prize for the Prose category. As a result, he came to a conclusion that a rather diverse aggregate of texts bearing inevitable impact of personal and group biases and idiosyncrasies, «politics» and traditions, comes to constitute a certain metatext that has its own «plot» and «core motifs». Barzakh's analysis of this metatext aims at diagnosing the modern Russian literary situation as a whole.