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Subject: TOC: New Literary Review (NLO) # 101 (2010): SUMMARY

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.