Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All about It!

Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All about It!Author(s): Jeffrey BrooksSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Winter, 1994), pp. 973-991Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2500842 .

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ARTICLES

Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All about It!

Jeffrey Brooks

The adoption of "socialist realism" by the first All Union Congress of Soviet Writers (17 August-I September 1934) was a seminal event in Russian cultural history on a par with Peter's embassy to the west or Catherine's Instruction to her legislative commission. Henceforth literature and the arts lost some of their public identification with civil society and gained a formal place in the official culture of the Soviet era and in the overbearing discourse of leading newspapers such as Pravda. Writers and artists had to accept the metamorphosis of public discourse itself, as editors and journalists plunged into a kind of hyperreality in the face of the disjunction between the promises and results of stalinist policies. Those who lived through this crisis in public perception and experienced its outcome imbued "socialist realism" with its poignant contemporary meanings. "Socialist realism" was both less and more than a literary tradition: less because the meanings of the phrase depended so heavily on extra-literary commentaries, and more because these commentaries were always part of a larger system of authoritative discourse.

Scholars often stress aesthetic or political dimensions of socialist realism, e.g. art's function in state policy and links between political and cultural actors, or the interplay of art and tradition. Among those who look to politics, Igor Golomstock underscores art's role in trans- forming "dry ideology into the fuel of images and myths intended for general consumption" and Evgenii Dobrenko depicts the literary "representation of power" (vlast').2 Others accent censorship and political interventions, including Stalin's.3 Alternatively, some stress com-

I would like to thank my friends, graduate students and colleagues for helpful com- men ts.

1. Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the 7hird Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), xii-xiv. See also Mikhail Heller, Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man (New York: Knopf, 1988); V. Strada in "Le realisme socialiste," in Histoire de la littirature russe: Le xxe siecle-Gels et degels, E. Etkind, G. Nivat, I. Serman and V. Strada, eds. (Paris: Fayard, 1990) III, 11; Gleb Struve, Russian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin, 1917-1953 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 275.

2. Evgenii Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti: Literatura stalinskoi epokhi v istoricheskom os- veshchenii (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1993), 74; see also V. Papernyi, Kul'tura "dva". Sovet- skaia arkhitektura, 1932-1934 (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983) for a discussion with an em- phasis on architecture; and Abram Tertz [Andrei Sinyavskii], The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Random House, 1965).

3. See Richard Taylor and Derek Spring, eds., Stalinism and Soviet Cinema. (New York: Routledge, 1993); and narrower political treatments: Kh. Kobo, ed., Perestroika: Slavic Review 53, no. 4 (Winter 1994)



974 Slavic Review

mon interests and experiences among political and literary figures.4 Among those who emphasize the aesthetic dimension, Regine Robin takes the longest view, tracing "the discursive base" of socialist realism forward from the mid-nineteenth century and arguing that by 1934 some form of realism was inevitable.5 Katerina Clark sees a reworking of largely early twentieth century traditions.6 In contrast, Boris Groys argues that socialist realism arose from a convergence of the dreams of early twentieth century avant-garde artists and the grand schemes of bolshevik leaders.7 Lost, particularly in these cultural approaches is the historic moment of this phenomenon.

"Socialist realism" was a catch phrase in leading Russian newspapers and the newspaper was the context in which most Russians en- countered it. The press presented it in tandem with other catch phrases such as "the active Soviet public" (sovetskaia obshchestvennost'), "heroism" and "the new people." 8 These phrases appeared primarily not in criticism of the arts but in commentaries on other subjects, and one can recover something of the original meaning of "socialist realism" as it pertained to subject, author and audience within this larger linguistic environment.9

Socialist realism has often been studied as if the phrase and the artistic phenomenon were largely identical. Yet equivalence between words in the press and their realization by writers and artists was never

Glasnost' demokratiia sotsializm: Osmyslit' kul't Stalina (Moscow: Progress, 1989); V.A. Ku- manov, 30-e gody v sud'bakh otechestvennoi intelligentsii (Moscow: Nauka, 1991); and A. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928-39 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991).

4. See particularly Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Rev- olutionary Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 248, 256. Vera Dunham in In Stalin's Time: Middle-class Values in Soviet Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), Matthew Cullerne Brown in Art Under Stalin (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1991); Peter Kenez in Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Dmitry and Vladimir Shlapentokh in Soviet Cinematography, 1918-91: Ideological Conflict and Social Reality (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993) de- scribe such interactions but do not focus particularly on the early and mid-1930s.

5. Regine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic (Stanford: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 1992), 78, 81; Rufus W. Mathewson,Jr. developed the notion of this hero earlier in The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975); see also Hans Gunther, ed., The Culture of the Stalin Period (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990).

6. Katerina Clark explains, "the only thing that was absolutely new about Socialist Realism was the term itself" (The Soviet Novel [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 29).

7. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton, University Press, 1992).

8. I draw on the ideas ofJacques Lacan for this notion of the linkage of signifiers. See his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Pgycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1978), 198-99. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizez also describes the interdependence of "floating signifiers" in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 87.

9. Michel Foucault developed the idea of a field of discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972).



Socialist Realism in Pravda 975

exact."' The phrase had one set of meanings as it was articulated in the newspapers, another at the congress and a third in the world of the arts, where it was gradually enriched with various practices and experiences. For this reason, to equate the phrase with actual works of art or even statements of purpose by writers and artists is to lose its original thrust as it appeared to Soviet society in a very particular medium-the central newspapers.

The existence of a single overarching discourse, concentrated in the leading newspapers and legitimated by the full punitive power of the state, was a chief feature of Soviet society. Within this discourse Pravda was paramount." Yet affixing officially sanctioned meanings to phenomena of daily life was not entirely a manipulative process. This huge linguistic operation, so baffling to the outside world, was driven in part by a very human need for public explanation. Editors and authors produced newspapers following party directives of varying dis- tinctness but the result, even in Pravda, was a discourse derived as much from the staffs spontaneous, if politically constrained, reactions to Soviet life as from the leaders' wishes. The newspaper was therefore also the work of people who verbalized their own experiences, lexicons and observations in an effort to make the world around them intelli- gible within the official given limits. Beyond the Moscow office, the editorial staff drew on dispatches and contributions from people whose experiences and loyalties ranged still further from the often divided purposes of party leaders.

The editors and journalists of the central press nevertheless produced an image of Soviet society that was accepted among a wide circle of friendly readers who had a stake in the system and were willing to believe in a public explanation that served their interests. The image was also acknowledged by the mass of the population who had no alternative. The resulting commentary in the 1930s increasingly resem- bled what M. M. Bakhtin, writing at that time, called an "authoritative discourse"; that is, a "monologic" discourse like religious dogma or accepted scientific truth, which has to be accepted or rejected in toto.'2

The acquiescence in and the acceptance of this discourse has much in common with what Vaclav Havel described in his essay "The Power of the Powerless." He depicted the impact of such a discourse in terms of a greengrocer who puts the slogan "Workers of the world, unite,"

10. There is a philosophical literature on the issue of the difference between names and the objects named; see Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 1980).

11. Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-29 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 228; Jeffrey Brooks, "Pravda and the Language of Power in Soviet Russia, 1917-28," in press in Media and Revolution, Jeremy Popkin, ed. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press); idem, "Pravda goes to War," in press in The Heart of War: Soviet Culture and Entertainment, 1941-45, Richard Stites, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

12. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emer- son and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas, 1981), 343-48.



976 Slavic Review

in his window. The grocer does not think about the slogan I)ut never- tlheless upholds the system by accepting it. "The primary excusatory funictioni of ideology, therefor-e" Havel writes, "is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian systemll, with the illusion, that the systemi is in harmiony with the lhumnian order an-id the order- of the universe." 13 The ideology, enslhrined in public discourse, had the same function in the stalinist systemii-the differeilce being, however, that disobedience was imuclh miiore sever-ely puniislhed, as Havel acknowledged when he called on people to begin "living in trutlh" by denying the ideology and therefore to face punitive ult not lethal consequences.

When Pravda greeted delegates to the writers' congress on 17 Au- gust 1934, literatture and the arts moved to the fore of this pre-emineniet discoturse for the first time in Soviet history. The party newspaper printed speeches and summations of speeches, as well as edlitorials, coiimmentaries, interviews and illustrations. "A Holiday of Soviet Cuil- tture" read the headline on the opening day and beneatlh it, in an almiost quiarter page poster ly V.N. Denii, Stalini anid Gor'kii griiinecd at each otlher as if they had plannedl a gentle pran-k (Pravda 8/17/34).

The contrast with previous coverage was striking. Pravda hlacd giveni the arts barely a page per imontlh in the early and imiid-1920s, a page anid a hlalf at the decade's end, and two and a half pages in the first fouLr imiontlhs each of 1933 and 1934. But there were 50 pages of coverage in the two weeks of the congress. The size of the paper grew onl somue days fromi 4-6 pages to 8-10 anid occasionally as miiuclh as half this space was allotted to the cong-ress. Anid Pravda was llot alone in its coverage of these events. The goverinmen-t papei, Izvestiza, thlie trade unioni paper, Trud, and eveni the tabloid peasan-t newspaper Krest'ianskaiza gazeta, which appeared every other day at. this timiie, all gave the congress nearly full, front-page coverage at thlie start andl extensive attention as it progressed.'4

This effusive press coverage of writeirs and of the conlgr-ess in 1934 was not fortuitous. The bolshevik reorderinig of the planiet hlad beguLn1 to go seriously astray at the end of the 1920s and a crisis occulrrecd ill the public understandin-g of the Soviet experience. Millionls of rural people had died in the fam-ine of 1930-1933 and urban living stancl- ari-ds fell as well. ' Although workers' conditions improved in 1934, rationingi, persisted another year and the normns of the 92(90s wvere

1 3. Ilan Vlaclislav, ecl., VaciaI.v Hovel oro Living in Truth. (Bostoni: al)er and Facl)e, 1987), 413.

14. Krest'iaanskazia gazeta, wlich waS uIStually tour p)ages, gave the Congress a toll ftont page oni 15 AuIguIst (Withl the same p)hoto of Stalin and G(or'kii which Dneni used as the l)asis foi- lhis sketeh in Pravda) and an undated special editioIn welcoming the conigr-ess with the saimie front page.

15. Rohert Conquest, The? Harvest oJ/ Sorrow: Sovitet (COlleetivizatio,'o and the Terror- Fantine (New York: Oxford University Pr-ess, 1986); Alec Nove, An F-econonie Histor) of the U.S.S.R. (New York: Penguin, 1989), 166, 198-99.




unsurpassed in the 1930s.'6 The year 1933 was also the decade's worst for "excess deaths," the euphemism for murder and famine.'7 Soviet foreign policy was equally disastrous. Communist revolutionaries toeing Stalin's line went to their doom in China and a triumphant Hitler destroyed the German Communist Party, which had likewise followed Soviet directives.

The writers met in the interregnum between the XVII Party Con- gress in January 1934, at which opposition to Stalin surfaced, and the slaughter of delegates after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in Decem- ber of the same year. Robert C. Tucker dubbed the party gathering "the congress of victims." 18 It was a time when optimism was required and the public vision of the world constituted in the press began to be treated as a kind of hyperreality that active participants in Soviet society were constrained to accept if they were to function in their daily tasks. Socialist realism belonged to this larger recasting of the public discourse in the face of actualities that leaders and journalists alike may have found difficult to confront.

The phrase was sanctioned by a commnittee whomn party leaders had instructed in 1932 to formn a writers' union. Once adopted, it was at- tributed to Stalin. '` Pravda printed a definition from the statutes of the new writers' union on the eve of the congress:

Socialist realismii, the basic imiethod of Soviet ar-tistic literature and literar-y criticismii, demands tl-uthfulniess [pravdivost'] from the artist and an historically concrete portrayal of reality in its revolutionary developmient. Under- these coniditioins, trutlhfulniess anld historical coIn- creteniess of ar-tistic por-tr-ayal ought to le combined with the task of the ideological r-emiiakinig and education of laboring people in the spirit of socialisIml (Pravda 5/6/34).

On the face of it, socialist realism seemiied to concern the proper subject of literature and art. The authorities had prodded artists and writers before for positive portrayals of Soviet life but only haphaz- ardly. Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov had mnocked these prescriptions in

16. J.D. Barber and R.W. Davies, "Employment and Industrial Labor," in The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913-45, eds. R.W. Davies, Mark Harrison and S.G. Wheatcroft (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 102-4.

17. Wheatcroft and Davies, "Population," in The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 74.

18. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York: Norton, 1990), 238-54; recent revelations have shown widespread opposition to Stalin at the time of the congress; see Boris Starkov, "Trotsky and Ryutin," The Trotsky Reappraisal, Terry Brotherstone and Paul Dukes, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer- sity Press, 1992) 78-82; and idem, "Narkorn Ezhov," The Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 23.

19. Kemp-Welch (Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 120-32) discusses various at- tributions of the term, including a statement by Stalin to a group of writers at Gor'kii's house in Moscow on 26 October 1932 in which he used the term to refer to artists who show "our life truthfully, on its way to socialism" (131).



978 Slavic Review

their famous sketch of late 1932 about a writer whose editor insists he create a truly Soviet Robinson Crusoe, cotmplete with a party commnittee and the mnasses.20 By 1934, however, the word "correctly" (pravilUno) and the idea of "truthfulness" (pravdivost') becamne mneasures of artists' and writers' success in fulfilling their assigned tasks. Censorship tight- ened and also in accord with the timnes it was no longer called by its real name but referred to by euphemisms.21

Pressure on writers to sanction the official image of Soviet society increased. F.I. Panferov, the sole author Pravda reported addressing the XVII Party Congress, urged fellow authors, just after the carnage in the countryside, to portray peasants' socialist "joy" at collectivization (Pravda 2/10/34). Sheila Fitzpatrick called such descriptions of collectivized peasants "Potemkinisin." 22 The fact that writers and artists participated in this fraud attests not only to a comnpulsion to say certain things about certain issues but also to their acknowledgmiient of the imnaginary realm of public discourse. P.F. ludin, a bureaucrat added to the organizational bureau of the new writers' union in August 1933 by the Central Commnittee, explained simply that since truth was found in life itself the artist had only to represent it faithfully, for life was "more interesting than it is made to be in artistic literature" (Pravda 2/10/34).2

Gor'kii, who now returned fromn abroad for the last time, also de- mnanded that socialist realismn be a creative retlection on the best of Soviet life. "We live and work in a country where feats of 'glory, honor and heroismn' are becomiiing facts so famiiiliar that miiany of these are already no longer noted in the press," he wrote (Pravda 4/22/34). He too blamed writers for being negative, for seeing life through the prism of the old critical realisnm, rather than its Soviet successor. Yet althougll a notion of the superiority of nature over its depictioni in art call be traced back in Russian literary culture to N.G. Chernyslhevsky, this demand that artists and writers replicate a certain imlage of life had another imnplication.

Pravda's editors and comnmentators had shaped the public imllage of heroism with portrayals of "feats" since the beginning of the first five- year plan and collectivization.21 With such stories, they also legitimnated the public discourse itself and anchored their explanations of various aspects of Soviet life. These accounts had little to do with a new aes-

20. The story is "How Robinson was Created," I. Il'f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochi- nenii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1961), 3:193-97.

21. A.V. Blium, Za kulisami "Ministerstva Pravdy". Tainaia istoriia sovetskoi tsenzury, 191 7-29 (St. Petersburg: Gumnanitarnoe agentstvo "Akademicheskii proekt," 1994), 11.

22. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 16-17.

23. Brief notes on all the participants in the 1934 writers' congress appear in Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s"ezd sovetskikh pisatelei: Stenograficheskii otchet 1934. Prilozheniia (Mos- cow: Sovetskii Pisatel', 1990), 81.

24. E. Dobrenko points to a conjunction of official heroes and fictional ones during this period in Metafora vlasti, 39-43; so does Richard Stites in Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 66-72.




thetic or a return to somie past notion of a "positive hero." On the eve of the congress Pravda's editorialist praised an exem-plary aviator fromn Minsk, the m-anager of an air transport network (Pravda 8/16/34). On the day of the gathering a local correspondent hailed the three "best shock workers" who produced the seventy-five-thousandth tractor at a Kharkov plant. The newspaper for peasants, Krest'ianskaia gazeta, greeted the congress with a mnap of the country on which f:aces of "outstanding" (znatnye) kolkhoz workers were superimilposed. The cap- tion read: "Our great country is remnarkable, our people are remnarkable. Write rem-arkable books about this" (Krest'ianskaia gazeta 8/17/34).

"Heroismn" also mneant heroes and heroines, whose "feats" were big stories in the press. The great saga of 1934 was the air rescue of nmemn- bers of a scientific expedition and sailors fromi the Cheliuskin, a ship which became icebound in the Arctic in Decemnber 1933; that operation and the heroes' return trip to Moscow took place in spring and summer 1934. "The Country Rewards Its Heroes," was Trud's headline when the Central Commnittee awarded the flyers who performned the rescue the title "Heroes of the Soviet Union" in April (Trud 4/21/34). Pravda on the same day gave the story the whole front page, including a huge photo-mnontage showing the faces of the heroes beside the shat- tered ship and miountains of ice.

Four months later, on the second day of the congress, the paper printed a large front-page picture of the "heroic flyers" and the rescued "Cheliuskinites" lined up in Red Square holding flowers and waiting to shake hands with Stalin (Pravda 8/18/34). "Is it necessary to repeat the names of the seven heroes who plucked from icy captivity hundreds of Cheliuskinites whom half the world considered doomed?" read Pravda's leader (Pravda 8/18/34). The Cheliuskin rescue, together with great industrial projects, were symbols of heroism during the congress. "For us," Pravda explained on its second day, "the main figure, the main character in Soviet literature-consists of people from the Mag- nitogorsk Construction Site, the Dnieper [Dam] Project, 'the Che- liuskin,' the builders of a new life" (Pravda 8/18/34). Some of these people were actually brought to the congress and Pravda identified them by name, such as "Nikita Izotov, Stepanenko, Kaushnian, the best miners of the Donbas, holders of medals" (Pravda 8/18/34).

The organizers of the congress presented socialist realism in conjunction with its presumed subject matter: these highly embellished exemplary figures, whose very names called up a cheerful depiction of Soviet life, not heroic archetypes from nineteenth or early twentieth century literary tradition.25 This was also the historic juncture at which the writers themselves became characters in the public narrative, a role they retained until the end of Soviet communism.26 The headline over

25. Kendall E. Bailes showed the patriarchal character of these representations with respect to pilots ("Stalin's falcons") in Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: The Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-41 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 386-89.

26. During 1936 Pravda devoted roughly ten pages per month to the arts, four times the pre-congress coverage.



980 Slavic Reviezv

poster-artist Deni's picture of Stalin and Gor'kii on the opening day of the congress read, "To the Advanced Detachment of Soviet Culture, 'Engineers of Human- Souls,' Writers of Otur Great Mother-land-a Fiei-y Bolshevik Greeting."

Writers and artists had been largely peripheral to the pi-ess for the clecade after 1917, with the exception of the party favorite, Deill'ialn Bednyi, whose doggerel had appeared regularly. Writers had i-egainedl some of tlheir prerevolutionary promninence in the lat.e 1920s, first with attention to nineteenth century authors: Pravda had coilflleilloi-ated. the 75th anniversary of Gogol"s death an-d the 90(th of Ptushkin's in early 1927. Although these events comnpared poorly with the graandiose, state-sponsored Pushkin anniiversar-ies of 1899 and 1936, the presulmlip- tion was widely expressed that "A great. epoch will not remiiain withlout great writers," in the words of critic Tiklhoin Kholodniyi (Pravda. 3/25/27).7

The first Soviet effor-t to canonize Soviet writer-s was MaximCc Gor'kii's birthday celebration on 29 March 1928, which was plannecd when he agreed to return fromn Italy, as he did two months later (28 May l928). 8 Commemorations of deceased Soviet writers Dinitrii Furnmanov ancl Vladimnir Maiakovskii followed two years later. Pravda subsequently noted the 1933 anniversaries of the directoir Konstantin Stan islavskii and the writer Aleksandr Serafinovichi, both of whom were still alive. These were also occasions to display the naines and f'aces of ot:her cultural figures who sent congratulations.

The writers' congress, however, was a production of' anotlher order. The suclden promninence of literati on the front pages of' the newspapers beside airplane pilots and leacling governmenIit officials let it be known that authors now lbelonged to the pullic dramia of eager ldoers and officials. On the first day of the congress, the writers appeared in photographs inside the paper and in the Kukryniksys' drawing of "The Literary Parade" on page tlhree (Pravda 8/17/34). These cartoonists, fa- motis during World Waar II, depicted Gor'kii, Zinoviev, Bukhariin, Ra- dek and several other cultural chiefs reviewing a literary lineup that included Isaac Babel', who was pictured on a scrawny nag, civil war cap and spectacles askew. If the caricaturists mnade the writers seemn too quirky for their new-fottnd role, the newspaper's headlines, cap- tions ancl commentaries conveyed another mnessage, that the literary commnunity was a natural part of Soviet society.

To be a writer now mneant to be comm-itted in public tc) promlloting the Soviet project. The lead editorialist in Pravda began on the opening day:

Today in the capital of oLir state the All-Unlion Congress of Soviet Writers operied. Today fi-onm the tribuLnie of the conigress soundcl the

2.7. Trhe slogan "C"reate a liter-atur-e wor'thly of ouLr- great epoch'" was widely re- P1eated (Trud 8/17/34).

28. Foutr- year-s later- the party leadlership clecicled to inamile things after Gor'kii, accorlding to Kemp-Welch (Stalinl arad the Literary Intelligeentsia, 124).




words of the great proletarian writer Aleksei Maksimovich Gor'kii, summing up the flowering of Soviet literature and pointing out its path of further development.29t

The country honors its artists of the word, "engineers of human souls," the powerful detachment of the builders and creators of Soviet culture with a flurry of greetings and good wishes (Pravda 8/17/34).

Pravda pointedly eliminated neutrality as a literary option: "It is im- portant that the overwhelming majority of writers, the creators of spiritual values, undividedly and unconditionally join with the Party of Lenin-Stalin, the proletariat, the people of the Soviet country" (Pravda 8/17/34).

The word devotion (predannost'), with all its religious connotations, was utilized at this time (Pravda 8/24/34). The press from the late 1920s had cited heroic figures for their selfless devotion (predannost') to the bolshevik Party.3M By 1934, however, Stalin also figured in this political equation and news stories about heroes were sometimes accompanied by their telegrams to the leader. Pravda published one from a group of flyers, whose round trip from Vienna to Moscow was covered on the opening day of the congress, and one from the writers appeared on the next day (Pravda 8/18/34). The writers' telegram appeared below the picture of the rescuers of Cheliuskin. It read in part: "Our own dear losif Vissarionovich, accept our greeting, our full love and respect for You, as a Bolshevik and a person, who with the intuition of a genius leads the Communist Party and the proletariat of the USSR and of the whole world to the last and final victory" (Pravda 8/18/34).

There was no longer any way within the public discourse to represent (or even imagine) a writer who was not an enthusiastic supporter of the system without designating him or her a public enemy. The union's organizer, P. ludin, summed up this way of seeing the literary community in a speech printed on 4 September as a conclusion to the congress:

Soviet writers affirm openly before all the world in their works, with their books and at their first congress that they are proponents of the communist worldview, that they are firmly behind the positions of Soviet power and that they are ready to give their whole lives as active fighters for the triumph of socialism in the USSR, for the victory of the proletariat in the whole world" (Pravda 9/4/34).

To situate writers in this authoritative discourse required the re-imagination of aesthetic occupations; it was for good reason that the phrase "engineers of human souls," prominently displayed in Pravda on the opening day, was ubiquitous. It signified, as DavidJoravsky has pointed

29. The odd usage here, of Aleksei Maksimovich Gor'kii instead of the more familiar Maxim Gor'kii (pseudonym for Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov), accords with the pomposity with which these official figures were honored.

30. Jeffrey Brooks, "Revolutionary Lives: Public Identities in Pravda during the 1920s," New Directions in Soviet History, ed. Stephen White (New York: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1992), 27-40.



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out, a "job category, an administrative slot." Stalin nmade this clear in a 1934 interview with H.G. Wells.>"

Moreover, who could reacd "engineers" in 1934 without recalling the Shakhty trial of 1928 and tlhe arrest of half the engiineers ancl technicians of the Donbas, or the industrial party affair- of 1930, whiclh also had cuit deeply into the technical intelligentsia."" "There tuLrn out to be more wreckers amionig engineers and technologists tllanl was thought possible at the time of the Shakhty trial," ail editorialist had observed a few mnonths before that process got underway (Pravda 2/5/30). These "affairs," with their xenopholbic overtones, uinderminiiied the professions and served notice that standards in all fields wouild be set from above.,' Equally damaging for the standing of engineers and other experts hacl been Stalin's widely promnotecl sloganis emnpower-inig cadres, "The Bolsheviks should miaster technology" (2/2/31) and "technology decides all in the periocd of reconstruction" (Pralvda 1 l/22/32). "' To equate writers with engineers under these circuimstances was to bring literature into line with other occupations that had beein recon- stitutecl to fit the requirements of the enmergent stalinist orcler.

The author of the lead editorial used the oddly sounding "mI naster craftsman" (master) and "apprentice" (podmaster'e) "of the printecl worcl" to express perhaps both the anachronistic char-acter of literary wor-k in the age of Soviet industrialization and the writers' location in the hierarchy (8/17/34). An engineer showed thie prevailing sense of equtiv- alent position and responsibility in a letter: "We are deimlandinig andcl strict. We accept every book froml you just as they accept a muachine from uIs-only when certain that it will bear the maximumii loacl" (Pravda 9/04/34).

Yet the phrase "engineers of Imitmiain souls" was disingenuiolus in another respect: altlhouuli the word "elngilneers" aligned tlle arts with the construction industry, tlhe worcl sotuls (dushi) implied a spiritUal funictioin. And, even if writers were "the engin-eers of lhtman souils' in this limuited sense, Stalin and h-is colleagues were their- architects. The effect was to expand not the writer's authority but tlhat of the leacder, the Party and the state. This shift was explicit in the attribtution ot tlhe term: "Ouir Party and comrade STALIN chose socialist realismll as tlle path for Soviet literature and art," Pravda's ecitors hac explained two weeks before the congr-ess opened (Pravda 7/28/34). Signiificanitly, Gor'k ii was the only writer on the "Honorary Presiditumii of thle Uniioni," whiclh

31. David-Joravsky, Ruxs-siantt PsVc/iology.A Critical History (New Yotk: Basil lBlackwell, 1989), 3929-30; Lorein R. (G'3rahami (Sc(ience in Russlai and the Soviet UnJion: A Short History [Cambridge: H-larvard University Pr-ess, 1993], 1I62) makes a similar poilt about Stalill's view of engineers.

32. Cited in Bailes, Techlnology andi Society, 1 17-18. '33. Hiroaki Kuromiliya, "Stalinist terror in the Donbas: A Note," in Slalbmist Terror:

Ne?w Perspectiveis, 217; he cites LI. Brodskii, "Icleino-politicheskoe vospitan ic tekh- nicheskikh spetsialistov clor-evolititsioinnoi shkoly v gody per-voi piatiletki," Trndy Len- inr,ttadskogo politekrnicheskogo inslstitta i`o. Kalinina, n 6o. 26 (Leningrad, 1966): 73. On the Shakhty Affair- milor-e gener-ally, see Bailes, Teclrlbology andi Society.

34. Jo-avsky, Russian Psychology, 336. 35. In mid-1935 these wer-e replaced by "Cadres clecidle all" (PravJda 516135).




was otherwise composed exclusively of party and comiinterin officials, including Stalin.

With this change in conceptualizationi, metalphors of consumption anci war t.hat had domianated the arts a-nd lent sonie dignity to the ar-tists in the 1920s faded. The multi-faceted battle against capitalism, withi room for many sorts of allies, was now displaced by a more limited struggle for construction, cadres, miastery and tasks. New miletaphors of growth, building ancd of the artist.'s "path" (putt) to ftill collaboration with the stat.e arose."" The woircs "task" (zadacha) and "assignment" (zadanie) nlow prevailed, although mil itaiy metaphors of "front" and "struggle" lingered on with new meaninigs. The front became one- sided; barricades becanie const.ruction sites for artist-craftsmen andi warrinig sides metamorphosed into builders and wreckers, a view con- genial to some militants. The new public role for artists was ilarrower aind mor-e clearly identified in the press withi specific directives fro(m above.

These changes had beguin in the cultural revolutioni. "If we look to the developiment. of literature in the past year, then-L a simlple question arises-is ouI literature growiig, can we speak about regular- achieve- milentis in t.his area?" wrote a critic who viewed the profession ats a growing structure (Pravda 1/29/29). Metaphors of art as construction occur in art.icles that filled over half the space given t.o the airts in the first four milonths of 1930 and 1933. Efforts t.o see the arts this way lecd to statements such as mnusic critic Braludo's about a Ukrainian quartet: "The comimiilon growth of Soviet imlusical construction is unthlinkable without the brotherly interaction of the creative and perforiming power of the union replublics" (Pravda 1/10/29). Journalists also made litera- tui-e a quantifiable procluct: "He wrote twenty volumiles anid more than 150,000 lines of fighting verses, " wrote A. Efreminii about Demil'iani Bed- nyi (Pravclca 4/13/33). So commentators oni literature echoedl the passion for riecords in other fields, firomii mining to aviation. '7

The end of the self-judging funictioni of professional criticisimi in the arts came gradually, however, without the startlinig trials that ter- minated the engin-eers' indepenidence. Two types of authors had coIll- mienited on the arts in the piess dui-inig the 1920s, those who wi-ote occasionally oni cultural issues and those whio did so regularly on one art form or another. OccasioInal critics wrote the larger mo)re imipor- tant articles, such as editorials; reguilars ieviewed individual works. Authors of general commentaries, often non-specialists, shaped the larger environment for the arts; reviewers and critics hiacd a narrower function closer to the old professionalismi. The authority of non-pr-ofes- sional comimientators to discuss thie arts was inherent in the limlitless executive power of the Soviet system: Lenin, Trotsky, Bukhiarin and

36. Abram Te'rtz (Anidirei Sinyavskii) p)Oints oLit the impmotaince ot' the finial oh)- jective (m) puilPose (tsel') and the path (ulnt') in "Clito trakoe sotsial isticleskii reailizl," Fantasticheskii mnir Abrwaa 7Tertsa. (New York: Inter-Language Literailry Associates, 1 967), 409-14.

37. Oni the pjassion fior records in aviation in eairly 1 934, see Bailes, Technology and Society, 384.



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other leaders commented freely on these subjects hardly distinguishing their personal tastes and judgments from official pronouncements. This kind of intervention began with the Soviet era and was common nearly to the end of it, but the Stalin era was its golden age.

When the editorial "we" replaced regular critical voices in the press, literature and the arts were no longer represented as occupations in which respected professionals determined quality and set trends. The new, frequently anonymous commentators who had supplanted regular critics during the late 1920s and early 1930s often affected a bul- lying tone and wrote as if they had a monopoly on truth, which, in their eyes, they did. "We judge the suicide of Maiakovskii like any withdrawal from a revolutionary post," rebuked one (Pravda 4/15/30). "But we have the right to demand more from [I.P.] Utkin," snapped another after praising a poet's first book (Pravda 2/06/27).

The Pravda of the 1920s had been but one authoritative word among many, however, whereas from the mid-1930s the newspaper was com- monly thought to echo Stalin's voice.38 "We have often and justly spoken about the fact that our artistic literature, especially drama, has fallen behind life and does not satisfy the growing needs and demands of the toiling mass," wrote the editorialist welcoming the writers' congress (Pravda 8117134). Who could challenge such a pronouncement? Yet this form of address was soon commonplace in Soviet public discourse.

Journalists also undercut literature as an autonomous occupation by depicting obsequious non-Russian writers at the congress.i9 Pravda gave non-Russians 20 percent of the articles and 12 percent of the space, and Izvestiia also featured them prominently:"' in both newspapers they validated a new pan-Soviet art, with Russian art at its center.41 Pravda showed them as artists who incorporated their national identities in themselves rather than in their works or literary resonance with any audience. The illiterate national folk poet of Dagestan, Su- leiman Stal'skii, was one example. Pravda featured him early in the congress in both a large article and a picture beside Gor'kii, who wel- comed him with the words, "I am simply happy that I see a real singer of the people" (Pravda 8120134). Pravda's reporter described Stal'skii as "one of the great talents of the country" (Pravda 8120134). The poet himself explained: "The best fruits of my creativity I give to the Soviet

38. Angus Roxburgh, Pravda: Inside the Soviet News Machine (New York: CG. Braziller, 1987), 29; he cites A. Gayev, "Kak delaetsyia "Pravda," Ost-Probleme, no. 37 (1953): 1567f.

39. Participants writing in languages other than Russian constituted 48% of the Soviet delegates but many of the long speeches were by Russians. Figures on partici- pation are in Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s"ezd, prilozhenie, v.

40. This was much less than their proportion at the congress by nationality (65%) but probably equivalent to their importance as calculated by length of speeches (see Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s"ezd, prilozheniia, 5). Izvestiia gave less front-page space than Pravda to the congress, featuring instead military and political news, but its coverage was also extensive.

41. Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society, trans. Karen Forster and Oswald Forster (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 138-45.




country. Fromi this congress I bring im-y people hands full of literar-y fruits, those frLuits tlhat are grown by the great gardcene-s of life-Stalin and his Party" (Pravda 8/20/34). Other wr-iters were shown to be equally expansive. "Trhe leader of our great Party and the wor-king class Comll- rade Stalin teaches us," said Turkmenian weiter Tash-Nazarov (Pravda 8/23/34). "Our task is one: to fulfill the brilliant instructions of the leader- of tlhe party," explained tlhe poet-functionary and hlead of the writers' tinion of Belorussia, M.N. Klimnkovich (Pravda 8/24/34). Pravda's portrayal of such figures served to diminish all the arts.

The newspapers K'rest'ianskaia g-azeta and Trud paid little attention to the non-Russian writers but cast proletarian andc kolkhoz authors ill similar roles. The peasant paper in its special issue on the congress reduced the literary community to Gor'kii and Dem'ian Bednyi; the political-literary officials Zhdanov, Bukharin and Radek; and kolkhoz writers of tracts with titles such as The Sound of Tractors, How VVe Became Prosperous and The Harvest is in Our Hands (Krest'ianskaia gazeta 8/17/34). On tlhe openingc day of the con-g-ress Trtud juxtaposed a friollt-page pic- t-Ure of Gor'kii and Stalin to photos ot a dozen "wovrker autlhors" (Trutd 8/17/34). "Thlese are only examiiples trom the thousainds of talenite(d representatives of the proletariat, who are creating a new SoCialiSt CuIl- tuLre," read the text. Inside were features on bolslhevik stalwarts D. Bednyi, A. Novikov-Pr-iboi, A. Serafiniovich and V. Maiakovskii, al- thouglh the newspaper's suLbsequent coverage of the speeches at thle congress was nearly as broad as Pravda's.

The final elemlenit that completed the definition of socialist r-ealismll in its historical context was the representation of a new audielnce. When the print m-iarket collapsed after 1917, the bolsheviks first envis- aged a milass public with the state as intermediary between author and reader. They had imagined art then as a velhicle for education or, alternatively, as an instrumienlt of class war. They deceived themllselves about the nature of popular taste anid chided writers for igni1orinig it (Pravda 312/24). They spon sored thou sand(Is of studies ot readers and vieweris fromii 1917 into the late 1920s, but thle tlhrust of these investi- gations quickly shifted fromi questionis about wlhat people wantecd to read to tl-ie testing and later chronicling of acceptable respolses to favored texts.42 This end was probably inievitable, since thlie leaders were never willing to accept the legitimiiacy of conisttimieri demand andc always insisted on- their riglht to a miionopoly inl the culttur-al as well as the nmaterial and political spheres.

The quest for a comimNloIn reader endecd officially iil the first five- year plan, when Pravda ancl tlhe rest ot the central press demlo-)nstrably began- to court tlhe officials, caddres andl enthusiasts wiho comprised the

-12. jefflrey Br-ooks, "StUdies of tl-he Reader in the 9920s," Russian li.story, 2-'3 (.1982): 187-9202; icdem. ''lhe Breakdown ill the PrIOd)Ctioll anl DiStrilUtion Of 11rilln ted Mateliial I1 7 -27,' in Bolshev7ik (ithir: axe)intnd Or1der i'n, th/. Russian Revolutlion, edts. Abbott G^leason et al. (Bloomington: In(diana University Press, I 985), 151-74; see also the resolultion at the XII Party Congress in Konrnrumi.stich.eskail Par/n11"a Sovet,skgo Son.Z(I 7V T(Solill tsiiakhi i r(S/hI iiilak/, k1I/-(er(t.s ii i /l).1 u.nov TsK (Moscow: .ld-v() 1)0l it lit- ry, 1984), 108.



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active element of the Soviet body politic.43 Prominent within this new group, at least on the local level, were representatives of the upwardly mobile communist former workers (vydvizhentsy) of whom there were more than three quarters of a million in the professions and skilled white collar jobs in 1933.44 These people had also flourished in the Party, which had over a million members and candidate members in 1927, of whom less than three percent had any higher education.45 The contemporary term for this audience in the press was "the active Soviet public" (sovetskaia obshchestvennost'), the bearer of official public opin- ion.463 As an addressee for the arts, it was no less richly imagined than the proletarian and peasant readers of the earlier period.

The phrase first appeared in the 1920s.47 The 1958 Academy of Science dictionary defined obshchestvennost' as "the advanced part, the advanced portion of society."48 Katerina Clark notes that with the ad- vent of the 1930s the little man was abandoned as the cornerstone of Soviet society: "Citizens were encouraged to look not alongside, to their 'brothers,"' she remarks, "but upward to the 'fathers."'49 James van Geldern points to "the strengthening of the center" and particularly the image of Moscow in the "mass culture" of the 1930s.5" This new authority was embodied in the image of the "active Soviet public"; yet the image did not in any sense approximate "a new class" or an actual social grouping. Rather it was a fanciful construction that served, almost as in a dream in the freudian sense, to express a wishful image of the body politic.5' Sovetskaia obshchestvennost' included a range of

43. O.n these new cadres, see: Sovetskaia intelligentsiia (Istoriia formirovaniiia i rosta 1917-65) (Moscow: Mysl', 1968), 141; Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri TsK KPSS, Istoriia komunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza 4, book 1 (Moscow: Izd-vo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1970), 480-81; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921-34 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 87-110, 171-73, 241; Moshe Lewin, T'he Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 241-57.

44. Sovetskaia intelligentsiia (Istoriia formirovaniiia i rosta 1917-65), 141; Fitzpatrick, Education, 87-110, 171-73, 241.

45. Istoriia kommunisticheskoi partii, 4, book 1, 480-81. 46. There is perhaps no adequate translation for this term but since obshchestven-

nost' was often linked with activism this seems most appropriate. Edith W. Clothes, Samuel D. Kassow and James L. West discuss the prerevolutionary usage of the term in their introduction to Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 3-9;Joseph Bradley and Gregory L. Freeze also comment on this theme in the same volume 146-47, 228-32.

47. Brooks, "Pravda and the Language of Power." 48. Slovar' russkogo iazyka, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Russkii yazyk, 1958), 2:576. 49. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 136. 50. James van Geldern, "Cultural and Social Geography in the Mass Culture of

the 1930s," in New Directions in Soviet History, ed., Stephen White (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 64.

51. On this notion of the dream as a discourse expressing a wish, which Freud developed in The Interpretation of Dreams, see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Lan- guage of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973, 1993), 235-36. Jacques Lacan also writes suggestively on this in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 256-61.




figur-es, fromi stakhanovites and minior officials to governmeient leaders, who were united in the creative imuaginiing of the politically active conuinitnity itself, nmediated by newspaper staffs.

Isaac Babel' invoked the dreamn-like qutality of this pulliC in his

famous and tortured speech at the conagress about how hie r-espectedl the reader so much he had stopped wr-iting. The beginnilng of the passage is fam-ious; the enic less so hut m--ore revealing.

I feel suich bouni-dless i-espect foi- the r-eacder that I anm miuite from it and fall silent. Well, I keep quiet. (Laughter.) Buit if' you imiiagiine your- self in sotmie auiditoi-itum of readers, witlh aboLlt 50() clistr-ict party secretaries, who kinow tell timiies mnoie than all writers, wlvo) know bee- keepinig anid agi-ictulturi-e and hiow to build metallu trgical giants, Whv0 have travelecl over the whle country, wlVI) ai-e also eniginieer-s of souils, then youi will feel thalt youi cannilolt get by with conversatiolln chatter, higlh schlool nonsense. There, the clisctussioni oLught to be se-ioUs (Pravda 8/25/34).

Babel' did not have to imagine this audien-ce; those who claimed to em-body it were present at the congress, 1both among the tho1usanld7 guests on the first day and later in still greater numnbers. Pramvda por- trayed local chiefs and activists from airound the country, wTho sat nleair the writer-s at the opening session, together- with the Moscow elite and a few dozen symipatlhetic foreign-ers. The editor-s described the pro- ceeclings: "Besicle the masters of the Soviet artistic word, beside 'the engineers of souls' in the hall sit hunitldreds of readers, the best of readers. These are the outstanding people of the nation, the slhock- wo-ker heroes" (Pravda 8/18/34).

The newspapers produced micore imiiages of these r-ea(ler-s (clI-illu g the coutrse of the congress and Pravda depicted onie gatherin-g in whichl the writers faced 25,000 r-eaders who were all representatives of Mos- cow institutions (Pravda 8/27/34). Commlllentators frequenitly idenltifiedl this new public with the mlasses buit the mneaning of this tr-anstferenlce was probably never in doubt. Sever-al weeks before the conigr-ess an1X editorialist wrote, "The imiasses demuand artistic litei-attur-e of higll (jual- ity imbued with the heroic strtiggle of the iinte-nationial proletariat, with zeal for the victory of socialismn, i-eflecting the gr-eat wisdomn of the Comnmulltnist Party" (Pravda 7/28/34).

Most ordinary people, disenfranclhised, effectively enserfed on collective farms or suibject to powerfuil indLustrial autlhorities, couild hardly be expected to demand anything of the kind. The leaders ofteni attrib- uted their own wishes to the mlasses, as they had even before tlhey, took power.

Millionis of readers anid viewers want the higlhest images ofa rt, thley avidly wait f'or their life ancl str-Luggle, for the great ideas and cleeds of oLur centLury to be shown in artistic works of great force andcl passion, in woorks that will enter the history of socialist culture, filling anic organizinig the thol-its ailicl feelings, niot only of coftel)pofaries but of fuituire generation-s" (Pravda 8/17/34).



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A.I. Stetskii, chief of the Central Committee's department of culture and propaganda (of leninism) and a member of the presidium of the writers' union, spoke to delegates in the name of this public:

Comrades. Many representatives of our new readers have spoken here. They came from all corners of our Soviet country. They went to this tribune and said: we love you Soviet writers, we respect you, but we are waiting for you to give us new songs, new works in which flow new feelings and thoughts. We want you to create works which will inspire, which will call forward, which will reflect all our dazzling, colorful, many-faceted heroic life and work (Pravda 911134).

These imagined readers served to situate literature and the new notion of socialist realism in the evolving ideological system. Babel' slyly al- luded to this when he explained his silence before the 500 district party secretaries. Writers and artists sat before this imagined public like pupils at school. "The time when the writer sat for an exam for critics alone has passed," wrote Moscow writer V.G. Lidin (pseudonym for Gomberg), "now he sits for an exam before the whole country, before an enormous reader" (Pravda 8/24/34). The congress reverber- ated with demands for writers to learn, for "constant deep study," in the words of the Ukrainian writer I.U. Kirilenko, a member of the secretariat of the union (Pravda 7/26/34). And Stalin was the teacher of teachers, and all school metaphors pointed to "the Communist Party and its leader, the great man, the giant of bolshevism, the friend and teacher of Soviet writers Comrade Stalin," in the words of Kirilenko (Pravda 7126134). The moment that Stalin and the Party became school masters, writer-pupils lost their stature vis-ai-vis their audience.

When Pravda showed writers and artists addressing this public of selected activists, officials, party cadres and the leaders themselves, including Stalin, they reified a restrictive body politic shaped by nearly twenty years of "Soviet Power." This imagined group included not only leading officials but also "the outstanding new people" whom journalists had been describing for several years. There was a corporatist aspect to this construction of the audience in the sense that the em- phasis was on the inclusion of certain groups and, by implication, the exclusion of others-the ordinary collectivized peasants, factory workers and many other people who comprised Soviet society.

The heroes of the press under these circumstances were identified with the new audience. On the eve of the congress, the influential columnist D. Zaslavskii concluded an article about the Ossetians with the demand that writers look at "the new socialist economy of the country, its culture, literature and new people" (Pravda 8116134). The following day M. Kol'tsov, another leading journalist, wrote in Pravda, "never were there in our country such people, such listeners, such brother readers" (Pravda 8117134). To write about these characters was to glorify not only the heroes themselves, but also "the active Soviet public" and a very restrictive idea of the nation itself.




Pravda. presented writuers at the congress stai-iding weakly l)efore the overweening authority of this new ptublic. Thle Rtissiain novelist L.N. Seifuillina declared:

This is the fir-st wr-iter-s' cong-ess in the wol- ci. Is it thei-efore stil pl isinig that we, the fir-st delegates to this coing-ess, find oui-selves in coIlftisioIl about what to say froimi this tribune? Shoutld wve teach how to write or speak abouit oLri- devotion to Soviet power? Soviet power cannot doubt this devotion because, being write-s of the Soviet country, we cannot be lhostile to this count-y (Pravda 8126134).

Iu.N. Libecdinskii, another Ruissian writer-, cited Gor'kii ancd allu-decd to a timte when raclicals of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers intimicidated mioderates. "He said that the Party, in creating ouir oiga- nizatiorn, took away our right to coimmi-aindl each other anld left uis the riohlt to teaclh each other" (Pravda 8/26/34). Such statemiients were dout- bly revealing. The writers were suipposed to be "new" or "outstanding" people thiemuselves in the sense thlat the press uised these term-ls-antd some undoubtedly were. But maniy were not, and they fared poorly in this con-jutnction of au thior, subject an ci audience.

Pravda and the central press in 1934 presentecd writers and artists with an imnaginied public tlhat ranged fromii enitlhuisiastic activists anid Babel"s local party secretaries to Stalin himlself. This invented audience differed fromn the ordinar-y people quteriecl in the early andcc imiid- 1920s, despite claimns that it eimbodied "tlhe masses." Here inlsteacd was an imiiage that was disturbingly close to the actuial auitlhiority thlat selnt artists anid writers to industrial projects andcl collective fairns to stuLdy and perform-l, and others, largely peasants an-d political opponients, to die in prisons an-id camnps.

BLut despite its power-, this iim-iaginied world of the arts was not with- otut (lissent. The authority of the central press to redefinle gr-eat wor-ks of Russiain anid world literatuire was challenged by writers who cotlli- terpoised iman-y-faceted descriptions of cutltuiral figuires of the past. Lu- minaries of the Silver Age hadl looked t.o Gogol', Puishkini, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Chekhov ancd Tuirgeniev for- spiritual andcl aesthetic guidlanice, and soimie intellectuials' enchanitmient with them grew uniider Soviet power.F)5 The mleaninig of this heritage chaniged, hlowever, as the stalill- ist governmiient appropriated its treasutres; aind to conltest it was an act of defiance. Yet what else could explain the passion of Bakhtit for- Dostoevskii anid Rabelais, or of Pasterniak tr-anislatinig Hamiilet at hlis dacha at Peredelkino in 1939 antd findinlg something of "incomparable preciousness." } A less familiar exaiiple froimi Pravda itself was critic, childreni's writer an-d translator- Kornei Clhutkovskii's essays iii the 19'30s

52. See B oi-is GasparmOV et al., (iCltural adAIYtologws o/ 1?usslatiA lIoderismo: F+om i//th Goldelti Age to the Silzver Age (Ber-keley: Uni ivelsity of Cal ifor-ni ia Press, 1 992).

53. Thlle phrase is Pasterniak's from a. 29 April 1 939 letter to liis parenct.s al)omt Hamlet (qioted 11. Pasternak, Boris Palist ek Mlawhl afio i [Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel', 1989], 540).



990 Slavic Review

on Puishkin, Shakespeare, Nekrasov, Shevchenko, anic( other Ruissian and foreign writers."t

Initellectuals who wrote about classics in Stalini's timne, sonletimiies even in Pravda, helped to create a counter-canon by seeing writers as imoral witnesses to life, just as somne scien-tists occasionially uised scieni- tific anniversaries to defend science as a profession.55 Such wi-iters often couinterpoised a huimian-e sensibility simnilar to Isaac Babel"s fain- ciful "internationale of good people" to official idealisin. 5" A dissidenit counterimage emerged of the artist as witn-ess, victimn andc preserver of miemory. This differed fromi prerevolution-ary in-tellectuials' views of writers as cuiltLural heroes not so miuch in the content of tlle commllen- taries as in their context. The classical writers, particularly the leading nineteenth century Russian writers, enmerge fromn suich accouniits as vital, independent personalities with strong imoral feelings about the issues of their clay. "It is a truith uniiiversally acknowledged," writes Gregory Freiclin in his mioving biography of Osip Mandel'stamii, "thlat the famous poets of modcern Russia, Mandel'staii amiiong themii, have a personal following that borders on a cult." 57 The souirces of tllis ilod- ern counter-cult of the writer go back to the early revolutionary era.5" By the 1930s, however, writers anid artists were confronted with comlI- pelling, politically charged official imnages of their presumnied subject imatter, of thelmselves as creators and of the audience to whomii their work was addressed, thus shaping a dialog-Le out of which a contrary veneration of the artist emnerged.59

The world in which this happen-ed was not a simnple onie. Socialist realistm was only one catch phrase in a complex and often conitradic- tory public discourse. Its mieaning depended on other signifieis tllat appeared beside it. The critical in-terpretative context for socialist realismn as it was developed in the press was not a single-iinded totalitarian project, a series of political inter-ventions, a body of aesthetic

54. Koi-vnei Chllukovskii, "Iz ciinevnika," Zttamitila 11 (November 1992): 168. See hiis essay iin Pravda oni Nekrasov (3/5/39).

55. See, for example, IuB. Rumer's defense of quantum mechan-ics on1 Menide- leev's 100th birthday, in which he cites Bohl-, Heisenberg and other-s (Pravda 9/10/34); and the article by IaK. Syrkin, a chemist prominenit after WWII, oni Mendeleev in 1.937 (Pravda 2/2/37).

56. The words comiie fr-omii his story "Gedali- and are spoken iby the sain1tly character of that namiie.

57. Gr-egor-y Fr-eicdiin, A (Cat ?Of Maity Colors: Osijp Mandelstatin, an)d His A/lIthoblo)g-s of Self:Presentatioz (Berkeley: Ui iver-sity of tCaliforn ia Press, 1 987), 1'2.

58. Fr- a discussion of some of these issuLes, see Svetatlia Boymi, Deatlh, iv1 QiiotatiOn. Alarks: The C ralturl A'Iyth of the M'Iodro'. Poet (Cambridge: Harvard University 1l'ress, 1 991 ); on the cult of one wr-iter- in the 1920s ainic early 1930s, see Barbara Walker, ''Maximiliain Voloshini's Hou,se of the Poet: Intelligentsia Social Organizationll anld CUliIe in Eallrly

20th-Century Russia" (Ph.D. cliss., Uniiver-sity of Michigan, 1994). 59. How lastinig anid cliver-se these literary cuilts became is apl)parent fiom the

responise to A vrani Tertz'S (Adrei d Siuyvavsky)) Strolls wzvill. Pttshktii. (tranis. Ca tharine I lcii- miier- Nepominyashchy aiand Slava I. Yastreniski [New Haven: Yale LJUniversity IPr-ess, 1993]) aIs Nepoimniyashchy sh1ows in lher introdIlCtion and In the sp)ecial issLIe of tRussial SIudiPS in. Literatulre (Winiter 1991-1992) on this subject.




principles and practices, or past traditions of' Russian literatuire and criticismii. Socialist realismi as articulated in the context of' 1934 con- cer-necd not only the subject, author and public for all tlle arts, but also, and perhaps nmore imiportantly, the representatioini of the whole Soviet project in an age of calamiities. Yet even if one were to find a secret. orcder fr-om Stalin or Zhdanov or Go.r'kii explaininig that socialist realist novels would have to include a positive hero, heroic acts, optimism, ref'erences to Stalin anti so forth, the mneaning of these constructs depended on the larger public discourse which was beyond the power of' any one of the leaders to articulat.e or fully shape. There was no master plan to create the positive heroes, def'erential intellectuals, "active So- viet public" or any of the other vital aspects of the discourse Onl which the slogan of socialist realismn depended at the miomient of its inception.

To read revolutionary novels of the 1920s, such as F. Gladkov's Cement (1925) and S. Serafimovich's 7he Iron Flood (1924) as "socialist realist," or even to iclentify the aims of the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s with socialist realismn is to confuse the radical values of' the early revolutionary years witlh those of the 1-930s. Over tinme, aspects of' socialist realism muay have become associated with aesthetic conveinltions or perhaps even specialized discourses of the sort which Bakhtin, writing in the year of Stalin's death, termnied a "secondary speech genre." (j) But the literary practices linked with the catch phrase at the outset represented a negotiation between writers and cultural authorities with reference to the authoritative public discourse as a whole. The balance in these negotiations tilted over time, particularly after Stalin's demise, toward professional cultural authority. Such changes accordled with the revitalization and increasing autonomy of literatut-e and the arts, the strengthening of civil society and the gradual disintegration of the communist system.

That socialist realism ever b:ecame a literary tradition defined in its own right by writers or professionial critics with internalized aesthetic standards is questionable. Yet if a body of literature is not of a literary tradition, what is it? Socialist realism of the 1930s was part of a larger system of authoritative discourse developed through an inter- active exchange between leaders and their supporters. This interaction defined each of the elemeents of the literary work-author, sulbject matter and aucdience. Fromi this perspective, socialist realism in the 1930s was neither part of a literary tradition nor simply the tool of a dictatorship, as it h-as sometimes been seen. Instead, it was a powerful mech- anism by which the leaders and supporters of the stalinist systeim en- larged the domnain of their moral and intellectual claims. The discourse and the literature it begot were shaped by an imperative to view the Soviet world other than through the catastrophes of that brutal era.

6(). M.M. BAkltin, S)eech (GenrIe.s and Other Late Essays, tranis. Vei-nX W. McG'ee, edts. Ca-yl Emer-son ancd Michael HolnList (AnLstin: University of trexas Pr-ess, 1986), 6(- 102.



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