Late Soviet Culture: From Perestroika to Novostroika PDF
Preview Late Soviet Culture: From Perestroika to Novostroika
LATE SOVIET CULTURE From Perestroika to Novostroika Post-Contemporary Interventions Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson ],_ATE SOVIET ( UL T UR E From Perestroika to Novostroika Edited by Thomas Lahusen with Gene Kuperman Duke University Press 1993 Durham and London © 1993 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Designed by Cherie Westmoreland Typeset in Futura and Sabon by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Late Soviet culture : from perestroika to novostroika / edited by Thomas Lahusen. p. cm. - (Post-contemporary interventions) Includes index. ISBN 0-82.2.3-12.90-5 (alk. paper). - ISBN 0-82.2.3-132.4-3 (pbk.) 1. Soviet Union-Intellectual life. I. Lahusen, Thomas. DK2.66,4,L38 1993 947.08-dc2.o 92.-2.8051 CIP The text of this book originally was published without the present introduction or index and without the essays by Clark, Goscilo, Holquist, Lahusen, Leibin, Raleigh, or Turovskaya as Volume 90, No. 2. of the South Atlantic Quarterly. Contents Editor's Introduction 1 Mikhail Kuraev Perestroika: The Restructuring of the Past or the Invention of the Future? 13 Boris Kagarlitsky A Step to the Left, a Step to the Right 2.1 Sidney Monas Perestroika in Reverse Perspective: The Reforms of the 1860s 35 Paul Debreczeny "Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo": Pushkin's Elevation to Sainthood in Soviet Culture 4 7 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya The Obstacle: The Human Being, or the Twentieth Century in the Mirror of Dystopia 69 Maya Turovskaya The Tastes of Soviet Moviegoers during the 1930s 95 Evgeny Dobrenko The Literature of the Zhdanov Era: Mentality, Mythology, Lexicon 109 Thomas Lahusen The Mystery of the River Adun: Reconstruction of a Story 139 vi Contents Michael Holquist Dialogism and Aesthetics 155 Valery Leibin Freudianism, or the "Trotskiite Contraband": Soviet Psychoanalysis in the 192.os and 1930s 177 Valery Podoroga The Eunuch of the Soul: Positions of Reading and the World of Platonov 187 Helena Goscilo Domostroika or Perestroika ? The Construction of Womanhood in Soviet Culture under Glasnost 233 Mikhail Epstein After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature 2.57 Katerina Clark Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture 2.89 Donald Raleigh Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg: Some Reflections on the August Revolution, Provincial Russia, and Novostroika 307 Index 32.3 Contributors 335 Editor's Introduction It appears today that positions, theories, and ideas become ======= obsolete almost at the moment of their utterance. Whether the cold war has been won or lost, what seems increasingly certain is the breakdown of both the past and the future in favor of an advancing present, where, simultaneously, euphoria and melancholy seem capable of neutralizing all powers of explanation. Moreover, today it seems fair to say that it is not only the Berlin Wall that has crumbled, but also the ideologies that made its construction possible. These introductory lines, written together with Gene Kuperman in the fall of 1990 for a Soviet issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly (Perestroika: Perspectives on Modernization, spring 1991, volume 90, number 2.) still appear pertinent today, with the difference, perhaps, that the "new world (dis)order" is increasingly haunted by old phan toms as well as by portions of the past which our century started from, and that the decrease of euphoria and melancholy has not been able to stir up a certain numbness of the mind. The present collection of essays is a considerably enlarged version of the South Atlantic Quar terly issue. Seven new contributions have almost doubled the volume of the journal version and have naturally changed its profile. First of all, new themes have appeared: the history of aesthetics, of cinema, psychoanalysis, and literature seen from a "gendered" perspective. The completed version has also gained balance in regard to a certain ten dency which seemed to prevail in the "Perestroika" issue, namely, an inclination toward "catastrophic" thinking. Indeed, some of the essays presented here have undoubtedly a flavor of fin de siecle; but what is expressed is not so much "apocalypse now" as the end of a history that is already behind us: gone is the Crystal Palace, gone Utopia, gone Dystopia. Thus the effort to reperiodize Rus sian culture-which we encounter, for example, in Mikhail Epstein's essay-appears no less urgent than the need for what Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya think of as the "unflinching analysis" of the "landscape after the battle." And now gone also is the Soviet Union. 2 Late Soviet Culture All the articles were written before the formal disintegration of the USSR; one of them was conceived during the events of August 1991; only the editor had the privilege of rewriting his introduction several times. The reader will judge which one of the essays was the most-or the least-prophetic. As to the very purpose of this book, I hope that the variety of themes, of point of views, and of climates will contribute to an understanding, beneath the inflation of facts, of the debates in the late 1980s and early 1990s around what still and already may be called "late Soviet culture." The debate is opened by two contributions focusing, above all, on the future. While for Boris Kagarlitsky, "A Step to the Left, a Step to the Right," the analysis of the political situation at the end of the 1980s is inseparable from maintaining the "ability to go against the current," for Mikhail Kuraev, "Perestroika: The Restructuring of the Past or the Invention of the Future?," democracy is on its way, the past needs no more restructuring, and the future needs no further invention. Kuraev sees the nation's future returning to an "organic development" that leads toward self-consciousness. Kagarlitsky, on the other hand, advo cates revolutionary reforms. He comes to the conclusion that "left" and "right" are terms that not only still have meaning, but also acquire new meaning within the context of market Stalinism. Persistence is the common denominator of the two following con tributions. Shifting historical perspective, Sidney Monas, "Perestroika in Reverse Perspective: The Reforms of the 1860s," explores analogues between the present time and the Great Reforms of the latter half of the nineteenth century, which modernized the Russian Empire, but also led to its final collapse. The words of Piotr Chaadaev (quoted by Monas), claiming that Russia "had no history" and "had contributed nothing but the occupation of space," sound strangely actual in these days of decay, affecting not only the Soviet Empire, but also a Soviet identity from which even "Russia" seems to be anxious to escape. Threatened identity calls for great figures, guides, pilots, or for martyrs. Paul Debreczeny, "'Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo': Push kin's Elevation to Sainthood in Soviet Culture," sees in the myth of Pushkin's death and the development of his "martyrdom" from 1837 to the present time an archetype for national suffering and the anx ious quest for national identity-a quest that may be ending with Russian history entering its "McDonald's period" on Pushkin Square. Debreczeny's anthropology of the death of "Aleksandr of Boldino" sheds new light on the development of collective mentalites in Russia a history that is living and that counts because it defines the present of its actors. Editor's Introduction 3 "The Obstacle: The Human Being, or the Twentieth Century in the Mirror of Dystopia" by Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya introduces a third series of essays that deal with the experiment of "total culture." The "obstacle" reminds us of Kagarlitsky's "ability to go against the current," but this time another point of view prevails: not the one of the "masses" but the vantage point of the "chosen one," that is to say, the one who did not choose to live in one of the Brave New Worlds of our century. Zamiatin's We, Platonov's Chevengur, Nabo kov's Invitation to a Beheading, Orwell's Animal Farm and, of course, his 1984, but also Grossman's Life and Fate and Shalamov's Kolyma Tales all reveal the same "obstacle," resisting depersonalization, homo geneity, sterility, and transparency. This is the "I," the ultimate "point of hardness," encoded in human nature. The following three contributions deal specifically with the cul ture of the Stalin period: the "forgotten" literature of the post-World War II era, Soviet film in the 1930s and 1940s, and the reconstruction of a lost referent through the "careful reading" of a Stalinist literary blockbuster. In the autistic and dislocated culture of late Stalinism, de scribed in detail and with passion by Evgeny Dobrenko ("The Litera ture of the Zhdanov Era: Mentality, Mythology, Lexicon"), the realm of the "false order of things over past and future" in twentieth-century dystopia has become a "second reality," has entered a "fundamental lexicon" of timeless values, and, according to Lysenko's formula, no longer gives birth to "people," but to "organisms." One could ven ture the following conclusion: people die, organisms only decay. This would explain why Dobrenko 's "lexicon" survived-and is still surviv ing-the "death" of socialist realism. In any case, Dobrenko's analysis demonstrates the urgency of reading the "unreadable." In such conditions, the urge felt by Maya Turovskaya to search for figures reflecting the preferences of moviegoers during the Stalin period is all the more understandable; a task she compares to the "mining of radium": "a yield in grams, a labor of years." Obviously, "people" started to become scarce in the 1930s. The recovered fig ures then serve to reconstitute the very fabric of Soviet film history, the "natural-heterogeneous structure" of its development, disrupted and homogenized-by state policy since the 1930s. The effects of this disruption are felt until the present day. Strange flowers have been growing in the homogenized garden of Stalin's culture: Turovskaya's report tells us how the "generation of victors" was brought up on the products of Nazi cinema, anonymously recycled by the Soviet film industry between 1947 and 1949, because of a dramatic shortage of "mass culture."
The list of books you might like
