The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature

392 Pages·1997·20.24 MB·English

by  Evgeny Dobrenko

The Making of the State Reader

The Making of the
State Reader
SOCIAL AND AESTHETIC
CONTEXTS OF THE RECEPTION
OF SOVIET LITERATURE
EVGENY DOBRENKO
Translated by Jesse M. Savage
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
1997
nford University Press
nford, California
997 by the Board of Trustees of the
md Stanford Junior University
ited in the United States of America
data are at the end of the book
In memory ofStepan Petrovich Il'ev

Prefiace
This book examines the social and aesthetic prerequisites for the reception of
Socialist Realism, that is, a new horizon of reading. Such a horizon is the
product of interaction between literature and a reader; it is fixed not only in
the system of reader reactions, preferences, and appraisals, but also in Social-
ist Realist texts themselves, being to a large extent the product of reader in-
tentions. The fact that under Soviet conditions this process of interaction
flowed in a strictly defined channel that was fully determined by the au-
thorities' strategy in relation to literature and reading, obliges us to resort to
analysis of both this strategy itself and the situation of reading in its most
varied manifestations. The new perspective on reading that was shaped in
Soviet culture cannot be reasoned only from the position of literature (here
we already see the results), nor only from the reader's position (here we only
see the premises). We can only find it at the intersection of the paths of these
two elements in the shadow of the Third Member—Authority. When we
speak of a new perspective of reading, of its birth and exhaustion, we have in
mind the specific character of the Soviet reading situation. This situation
surmounted older forms of interaction between literature and the reader but
at the same time differed from the forms of relationship between "mass lit-
erature" and the "mass reader" that were adjacent and parallel to it: the "mass
reader" and the masses' taste were a necessary but far from sufficient condi-
tion for the birth of a phenomenon like Socialist Realism. There is a sort of
"sediment" that conveys the specific character of Socialist Realist culture.
This "sediment" has many dimensions (social, aesthetic, institutional, etc.)
which are of primary interest to us in this book.
Literary works do not simply belong "territorially" to the sphere of cul-
ture; rather, every work of literature reflects a certain cultural atmosphere
Vlll PREFACE
and is in principle possible as a phenomenon insofar as it is saturated with a
consciousness of the time and social milieu to which author and recipient
belong. The reader—most of all—gives life to a literary work in a new time.
He re-creates an artistic text, which ceases to be equal to the time of its cre-
ation and to itself.
But what is the meaning of this self-sufficiency of a text, which without a
reader is only a "system of signs"? It goes without saying that the very possi-
bility of countless interpretations is conditioned by the countless systems of
signs within a work and by their constantly occurring reaccentuations.
Hence the stratification of literary criticism—sociological, symbolic, psy-
choanalytic, stylistic, linguistic. However, beyond the limits of this stratifi-
cation exists not only the possibility but the necessity of revealing the val-
ues that condition this process of re-creation of a text. These values are like
the axiological shadows of critical dominants. The recipient, as well as the au-
thor and the artistic text, can and should be the object of a criticism that is
likewise, of necessity, sociological, symbolic, psychoanalytic, stylistic, and
linguistic—the criticism of reader reaction.
This book does not in the least aspire to be any sort of history of read-
ing in Soviet times. Nor is it a history of the formation of the Soviet reader.
It is the history of the shaping of the reader of Soviet artistic literature. To use
Hans Giinther s famous definition, it is a history of the "State appropriation
of the reader" (ogosudarstvlenie chitatelia). Like a text, a reader does not live
in a historical vacuum. The social space of the reader, what is here called the
situation of reading, was in fact extremely constrained in Soviet times. This
resulted from the very character of Soviet times: it was an era of immense
transformations, a period of colossal sociocultural dynamics, an epoch of
immensely strong pressures and reactions that determined both the character
of social ties and the character of the new cultural forms. The institution of
literature cannot be given a meaning apart from the institution of reading.
This is of course true of any era, but it is particularly true of the Soviet era.
The whole history of the formation of the institution of literature, of the
transformations of this institution in the revolutionary and Soviet eras, bears
witness to the fact that literature was called upon to perform (and did per-
form) substantive political and ideological functions in the authorities' over-
all system of activities aimed at "remaking," "reforging," and ultimately cre-
ating a new man. At least, this was the design of this institution.
PREFACE IX
The degree to which these goals could be achieved is another matter. The
institution of literature must be linked with the institution of reading: Only
in this way will the chain of cultural links be complete, enabling us to see
how people from the various social strata, in a dynamic unknown in pre-
Soviet history, not only consumed the products of a new culture but in fact
created that culture. The sociology of reading alone is scarcely capable of un-
covering the variety, dynamism, and multilayered structure of the process of
reading, and in a broader context, the process of the "consumption" of art.
The reader is a composite figure. Soviet society in the Stalin era was not only a
State-hierarchy system—although of course, awareness of this kind of sys-
tematization is extraordinarily important in analyzing Soviet culture—but
also a mosaic that was always divided into definite cultural strata, each of
which "consumed" "its own" culture (including very high culture). And this
culture "of its own" (including literature) performed a host of familiar func-
tions—escapist, socializing, compensatory, informative, recreational, pres-
tige-enhancing, aesthetic, emotional, and, ultimately, the specifically Soviet
functions connected with propaganda and mobilization. If we superimpose
on this spectrum the varying characteristics of individual readers—educa-
tional level, opportunities and aspirations, influences ranging from chance
acquaintances to family traditions—the resulting picture is extraordinarily
variegated. At the same time, there is a certain cultural space in which these
factors intersect—the space defined here as the "situation of reading." In this
book I concentrate on the basic lines offeree that were at work in the Soviet
reading space.
Into this variegated picture, into the awe-inspiring and terrifying social
turbulence that engendered the Revolution and its aftermath, stepped forth
a defined system in which the collective interaction and self-identification
of society operated, a system that was terrible in its efficiency. In this situa-
tion, the problem of the reader opens up a multitude of methodological con-
texts. Should one approach the problem from the standpoint of the aesthet-
ics of reception? From the viewpoint of cognitive theory, hermeneutics, or
phenomenology? From a structuralist position? Or should one think of it in
terms of empirical sociological categories (the sociology of readers' taste and
of their reception of literature)? Or in terms of a psychological or commu-
nications theory? Semiotics or social informatics? This book is not dedicated
to substantiating (or refuting) any purely theoretical principles for one par-
PREFACE
ticular methodology or another. My fundamental theoretical premise is only
a conviction of the complementarity of these methodologies. We must resort
to them only to the extent that they help us see our subject more three-di-
mensionally, but only in combination do they expand this dimensionality.
Is it any coincidence that the articles that laid the foundations for func-
tional study of literature in the 1920 s—lurii Tynianov's "On Literary Evolu-
tion" and A. Beletskii s "On One of the Urgent Tasks of the Science of Lit-
erary History (Study of Reader History)"—started out by trying to define
the status of literary history as such? Beletskii wrote about the necessity of
disengaging literary history from "service" to bibliography, aesthetics, psy-
chology, and sociopolitical journalism after "more than a century of contin-
uing ordeals." Tynianov wrote that literary history remained among the cul-
tural disciplines that were in the position of a colonial state. In the 19205,
the way out of this impasse was perceived as being functional study of the
phenomena of literary history. This kind of research could not take place in
the Soviet period, obviously, because of the specific functions of literature in
Soviet life. Delving into these functions would have meant stepping out into
extraliterary space, a space delineated by real sociological categories. This
path was blocked in the Soviet climate, since this space was not organized
only by laws of all-encompassing aesthetic doctrine or by politico-ideological
engineering. But it was similarly blocked in extra-Soviet cultural space: Re-
volving in a narrow range of ideological orbits, Western Sovietology, just like
Soviet aesthetics, operated with a set of ideological patterns in which all the
functions of literature in Soviet times were neatly laid out and accounted
for. Both approaches to Soviet cultural history—that of Western Sovietol-
ogy and that of Soviet aesthetics—lay in an extrahistorical space. Using Ty-
nianov's image, one might say that the history of Soviet literature in the over-
whelming majority of cases was in the position of a colonial state in Soviet
ideological doctrine (in the Soviet Union) and in Sovietology (in the West).
The way out of this crisis can be seen in the historicization of the material, in
amplifying and extending it—ultimately, in the expansion of history.
ED.