(Pitt Russian East European) Evgeny Dobrenko, Galin Tihanov - A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism - The Soviet Age and Beyond (2011, University of Pittsburgh Press)

A History of Russian Literary
Theory and Criticism

PITT SERIES IN RUSSIAN AND EAST
EUROPEAN STUDIES
Jonathan Harris, Editor

 A HISTORY
OF RUSSIAN
LITERARY
THEORY AND
CRITICISM
THE SOVIET AGE AND BEYOND
EDITED BY
EVGENY DOBRENKO and
GALIN TIHANOV
University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2011, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A history of Russian literary theory and criticism : the soviet age and beyond / edited by Evgeny
Dobrenko and Galin Tihanov.
p. cm. — (Pitt series in Russian and East European studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8229-4411-9 (cloth : acid-free paper)
1. Criticism—Russia (Federation)—History—20th century. 2. Russian literature—History
and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Criticism—Soviet Union—History. I. Dobrenko, E. A. (Evgenii
Aleksandrovich) II. Tikhanov, Galin.
PG2949.H57 2011
801'.950947—dc23 2011020879
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Note on Transliteration viii
Introduction: Toward a History of Soviet and Post-Soviet Literary Theory and
Criticism ix
Evgeny Dobrenko and Galin Tihanov
1. Literary Criticism during the Revolution and the Civil War, 1917–1921 1
Stefano Garzonio and Maria Zalambani
2. Literary Criticism and Cultural Policy during the New Economic Policy,
1921–1927 17
Natalia Kornienko
3. Literary Criticism and the Transformations of the Literary Field during the
Cultural Revolution, 1928–1932 43
Evgeny Dobrenko
4. Literary Theory in the 1920s: Four Options and a Practicum 64
Caryl Emerson
5. Soviet Literary Criticism and the Formulation of the Aesthetics of Socialist
Realism, 1932–1940 90
Hans Günther
6. Soviet Literary Theory in the 1930s: Battles over Genre and the Boundaries of
Modernity 109
Katerina Clark and Galin Tihanov
7. Russian Émigré Literary Criticism and Theory between the World Wars 144
Galin Tihanov
8. Literary Criticism and the Institution of Literature in the Era of War and Late
Stalinism, 1941–1953 163
Evgeny Dobrenko
v
vi  CONTENTS
9. Literary Criticism during the Thaw 184

Evgeny Dobrenko and Ilya Kalinin
10. Literary Criticism of the Long 1970s and the Fate of Soviet Liberalism 207
Mark Lipovetsky and Mikhail Berg
11. Discoveries and Advances in Literary Theory, 1960s–1980s: Neoformalism, the
Linguistic Model, and Beyond 230
William Mills Todd III
12. Literary Criticism and the End of the Soviet System, 1985–1991 250
Birgit Menzel and Boris Dubin
13. The Alter Ego: Émigré Literary Criticism from World War II to the End of the
Soviet Union 269
Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy
14. Post-Soviet Literary Criticism 287
Ilya Kukulin and Mark Lipovetsky
15. Post-Soviet Literary Studies: The Rebirth of Academism 306
Nancy Condee and Eugeniia Kupsan
Appendix: Translated Titles of Russian Periodicals 323
Notes 329
Contributors 391
Index 395
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Among the many people who have contributed to the success of this project, we
are especially grateful to the translators of the chapters written in Russian; thanks
are also due to the University of Manchester and Sheffield University for translation
grants. The editors are also grateful to the Leverhulme Trust and the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (Evgeny Dobrenko) and to the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Galin Tihanov) for
enabling them to work on this book without interruption for longer periods of time.
At the University of Pittsburgh Press, we are grateful above all to Peter Kracht,
for his support, patience, and trust in the project and to Alex Wolfe for his expert
copyediting and unstinting help.
Finally, we wish to extend our heartfelt thanks to all contributors for their un-
failing good will and responsiveness to our comments and suggestions. Each of them
has brought to this volume valuable knowledge and genuine passion for the project,
thus making the whole enterprise both feasible and enjoyable.
We are also grateful to Josephine von Zitzewitz and Sabrina Vashisht at New
College, University of Oxford, for kindly compiling the index and to the Research
Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures (RICC) at the University of Manchester for the
funding that enabled them to undertake this task.
vii
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
We have used the Library of Congress system of transliteration of Russian

words, without diacritics. In the main text, names of authors already known in the
West appear in their Anglophone forms, while the names of authors whose work has
not yet gained currency in the West appear in transliteration (for example, Alexan-
der Herzen but Aleksandr Trepnikov; Kornei Chukovsky but Nikolai Chukovskii;
Evgeny Evtushenko but Evgenii Primialov; Petr has been rendered everywhere as
Pyotr; Semen as Semyon). If a name is part of a title or other bibliographical infor-
mation, it always appears according to the Library of Congress rules of translitera-
tion; thus we have Trotsky everywhere, but as part of a Russian title or a Russian
bibliographical entry the same name appears as Trotskii.
viii
INTRODUCTION
TOWARD A HISTORY OF SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET
LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM
EVGENY DOBRENKO and GALIN TIHANOV
“We must perceive a past age as relatively unified if we are to write literary
history; we must perceive it as highly diverse if what we write is to represent it plau-
sibly”—this is how David Perkins formulates the dilemma of the literary historian.1
That “plausible history,” however, has lost its previous appeal in recent years. Today,
any book whose title begins with the word history is a risky undertaking, to say the
least. A history in our days is written with didactic, commercial, or, in most cases,
both didactic and commercial goals in mind. It might seem that with the end of the
era of grand narratives scholarly interest in such projects has been exhausted. And
yet, the de facto absence of a history of Soviet literary theory and criticism, which
would tell about their specificity as social and political institutions and about their
place in the literature-centric culture of the Soviet Union, justifies the present risk.
In order to grasp the difficulty of the subject, it is sufficient to compare the dif-
ferent dimensions of the concept of literary criticism in various Western cultures. In the
Anglo-American tradition, for example, literary criticism includes academic studies
of literary works as well as the theory and methods of criticism, while journalism is
only rarely included. The German Literaturkritik, on the other hand, includes both
academic and journalistic criticism. However, Literaturkritik as a form of academic
literary criticism became distinct from Tageskritik or Buchkritik, that is, criticism in
the print media, in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century.2 As we can see, in
the German tradition literary criticism is a much broader concept than in the Rus-
sian tradition, where it is mostly associated with journalism (publicistic writing),
while literaturovedenie (the history and theory of literature) belongs to a different field
of activity, namely academic scholarship. This differentiation results from the spe-
cific way in which the institutions of the public sphere and the academic field formed
and evolved in Russia. They emerged comparatively late, and those that emerged
under Soviet rule exhibited the specifics of institutions under the absolute control of
the government.
This book understands literary criticism mainly as a sociocultural institution
that became the main component of the public sphere as it emerged in Russia during
the nineteenth century. Due to the particular status of literature, literary criticism
became a platform for the formation of public discourse in Russia and a sphere (often
the only one) of political activity. In the words of Peter Hohendahl:
ix
x  INTRODUCTION
In the age of Enlightenment the concept of criticism cannot be separated from

the institution of the public sphere. Every judgment is designed to be directed
toward a public; communication with the reader is an integral part of the system.
Through its relationship with the reading public, critical reflection loses its
private character. Criticism opens itself to debate, it attempts to convince, it
invites contradiction. It becomes part of the public exchange of opinions. Seen
historically, the modern concept of literary criticism is closely tied to the rise of
the liberal, bourgeois public sphere in the early eighteenth century. Literature
served the emancipation movement of the middle class as an instrument to gain
self-esteem and to articulate its human demands against the absolutist state and a
hierarchical society. Literary discussion, which had previously served as a form
of legitimation of court society in the aristocratic salons, became an arena to pave
the way for political discussion in the middle classes.3
Terry Eagleton seconds the notion that “modern European criticism was born of a
struggle against the absolutist state.”4
This historical perspective demonstrates clearly that criticism as an institution is
closely entwined with cultural democratization, political liberalization, and social
secularization, that is, with the main tendencies of modernity. Criticism is both a
product and an instrument of these tendencies, at the same time making it possible to
articulate ideological positions and aesthetic platforms. This was the direction Rus-
sian criticism had taken before the Revolution of 1917, and this historical context
clearly grounds the subsequent uniqueness of the phenomenon of literary criticism in
the Soviet era. Criticism during those nearly seventy-five years was based on entirely
different, and previously nonexistent, political and aesthetic premises and fulfilled
entirely different functions.
The function and nature of literary criticism, in itself a product of the European
Enlightenment, were thus radically different in the West and in the Soviet Union.
Even after taking into account the process of the “erosion of the classical bourgeois
public sphere” and its impact on the institution of criticism, which has been thor-
oughly analyzed by Eagleton and Hohendahl, the institution of criticism as it had
emerged during the Enlightenment had nothing in common with a social setup that
did not allow for any meaningful public sphere whatsoever, a political culture that
fostered social atomization, and a political regime that systematically swallowed up
all enclaves of autonomy and prevented them from evolving.5 Having analyzed “So-
viet public culture” (first and foremost the Soviet press), Jeffrey Brooks asked himself
how it could happen that a highly educated people that had reached such heights
in science and culture became so stupefied by propaganda. Unable to believe that
all this can be attributed to “lies” and “censorship,” Brooks concludes that the “full
answer lies in the function of the press in creating a stylized, ritualistic, and inten-
tionally consistent public culture that became its own reality and supplanted other
forms of public reflection and explanation.”6 Most importantly, Brooks talks about
the suppression (not the “erosion” or “degradation” described by Jürgen Habermas,
but the complete suppression) of the “public sphere.”
INTRODUCTION  xi
For Marxist theorists, criticism is habitually part of the aesthetic field of ide-
ology, albeit autonomous. However, as Eagleton has shown, “the aesthetic region”
actually “assumes an unusual degree of dominance within the whole ideological for-
mation.” When the “literary aesthetic” begins to interact with the political, ethical,
and religious sphere, it becomes “larger than itself, colors them and adds an aesthetic
dimension to their internal debates, demands and traditions.” But for the aesthetic
itself, too, the medium of ideology remains particularly effective: “it is graphic, im-
mediate and economical, working at instinctual and economical depths yet playing
too on the very surfaces of perception, entwining itself with the stuff of spontaneous
experience and the roots of language and gesture.” Because of this, the aesthetic “is
able to naturalize itself, to proffer itself as ideologically innocent, in ways less eas-
ily available to ideology’s political and juridical regions.” Thus, Eagleton concludes,
the “‘history of literary criticism’ . . . is an aspect of the history of a set of specific
ideological formations, each of which is so internally articulated as to privilege cer-
tain critical practices as a peculiarly overdetermined instance of its other levels. The
science of the history of criticism is the science of the historical determinants of this
overdetermination of the literary-aesthetic.”7
At the same time, as Hohendahl perceptively observed, “literary criticism that
remains true to its public mission cannot be separated from the idea of a critique of
ideology and social criticism.”8 Criticism is thus simultaneously one of the spheres of
ideology and the main instrument for the critique of ideology. All this means that
criticism cannot be approached as a “corporate” institution that is strictly internal to
literature. Consequently, the authors of this book are united in their understanding
of literary theory and criticism as meta-descriptions of literature and highly complex
sociocultural institutions with links to politics, ideology, art, and science.
As a result of the specific configurations of power and the harsh suppression of
opposition, already by the mid-nineteenth century literature-centrism became one
of the defining features of Russian culture. The specific traits of literary criticism
in Russia are a direct consequence of this special status of literature. The peculiar-
ity of the Soviet situation consisted in the special status of the political. On the one
hand, it was all concentrated in the higher echelons of power, with the result that all
social fields were practically “de-energized,” deprived of power; on the other hand,
precisely because of this concentration, the political was looking for new ways of
realizing itself, manifesting itself in spheres in which its role was traditionally rather
small: everything was depoliticized and politicized at the same time; everything, from
aesthetics to economics, turned from a source of power into a conductor of power.
By instrumentalizing all social and cultural practices, the political turned them
into an outlet, and criticism became one of many tools of political impact. Many
literary-critical events of the Soviet period—the defeat of Proletkult in 1920, the
resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1925, the rise of the
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), the restructuring of literary and
art organizations in 1932, the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers, the ideologi-
cal decrees of 1946, the campaigns of the post-Stalin era (during the Thaw and the
periods of Stagnation and perestroika)—were merely an expression of struggle in the
xii  INTRODUCTION
higher echelons of power. This instrumentalization of literary criticism was another

specific feature of Soviet culture, alongside literature-centrism.
At the same time, literary criticism was also a form of “positively flowing”
(Foucault) power discourse that took on the guise of hundreds of literary critics and
readers pretending to voluntarily accept the ideological requirements of the system,
thus participating in the mass illusion that people were voicing individual opinion
and taste and thus seemingly expressing and realizing their own creativity.
In this context, the dynamics of the interrelationship between literary criticism
and literary theory and scholarship (literaturovedenie) deserve closer attention. The
relationship between current criticism and literary scholarship was a much-debated
topic already in the early 1920s, when it was as fruitful as it was dramatic. On the
one hand, we can cite the involvement of theorists and historians of literature in day-
to-day criticism (the statements of Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, and Yuri
Tynianov on issues in contemporary literature); on the other hand, we can point to
the encroachment of functionaries and critics upon the sphere of literary scholarship
proper (the defeat of the sociological school by the RAPP critics).
Literary scholarship went from seeking synergy with literary criticism in the
work of the Russian formalists toward a complete renunciation of any links to
criticism in structuralism. In his article “Metody i podkhody” (Methods and Ap-
proaches, 1922), Boris Eikhenbaum wrote: “Criticism by members of the intelligen-
tsia and scholarship by members of the intelligentsia are increasingly being regarded
as dilettantism.”9 The formalists saw their task in replacing fake academicism with a
living academicism, creating a literary history from within the literary process itself,
that is, a history that was closely related to the literature of the day. This was what
Eikhenbaum had in mind when he wrote that “literary history is fruitful when it is
oriented towards contemporary literature.”10 The formalists were working to abol-
ish the watersheds between theory, history, and criticism because “they were afraid
that scholarship would become detached from the living literary process once and
for all, that scholarship, keeping aloof, would cut itself off from the nourishing sap
and dry out, while criticism in its turn would be tarnished by the everyday and lose
all perspective of the horizon. And artistic creativity, having freed itself from the
awareness that there are laws of art, genre specificities that evolved over centuries,
and particular lines of genre behavior, would lose touch with tradition, go to seed
and perish in complete dilettantism.”11 As the Soviet experience would demonstrate,
these fears were entirely justified. The moment when literary theory was eventually
“swallowed up” by the discourse of literary criticism came in 1929–1935 and culmi-
nated in the defeat of the group around the journal Literaturnyi kritik led by György
Lukács and Mikhail Lifshits. Literary theory was not to manifest itself as an autono-
mous discourse again until the 1960s, when the Moscow-Tartu School emerged, un-
less one counts the host of textbooks by Gennadii Pospelov, Leonid Timofeev, and
their colleagues that were, most of the time, full of meager theoretical exercises in
Marxist orthodoxy.
For all the pressures of the dominant creed, literary scholarship in the Soviet
Union often formed in opposition to the regnant ideological tenets that had tainted
INTRODUCTION  xiii
all of contemporary public culture. And serious scholars in effect declared public
culture a profane and ideologized nonculture, unworthy of interest. This attitude
was apparent with the formalists already; in the work of the Soviet structuralists,
it became programmatic. In their attempt to “draw an invisible demarcation line
between science and scientific ideology,” as Mikhail Ryklin perceptively remarked,
“the supporters of the semiotic project in the Soviet Union . . . sacrificed whole areas
of knowledge to ideology (for example, almost everything associated with contem-
porary culture). For them, semiotics was a means of turning that which had not yet
been seized (or seized only incompletely) by ideology into an object of depoliticized,
‘pure’ knowledge.”12
This obsession with “pure knowledge” was merely a symptom. Its nature was
profoundly social, discernible most clearly in the revolutionary era during which for-
malism emerged and in the post-Stalinist time when the deep crisis of the entire sys-
tem revealed itself in no uncertain terms. As Elizabeth Bruss perceptively observed,
theory and criticism grow in historical situations where the traditional legitimacy
of the social practice of engaging with literature, and the intellectual uses of this
engagement, is called into question.13 The very acknowledgement of such circum-
stances in the Soviet Union was a sign of dangerous dissident thinking. Therefore it
is not surprising that original approaches to literature—in the Soviet Union pursued
foremost by the formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the structuralists—were margin-
alized, while their adepts’ research was interpreted as opposition to official dogma.

As we have seen, the history of literary criticism cannot be understood with-
out considering criticism as a social institution with its own dynamics and its own,
innate discursive regime. Therefore it is not astonishing that no history of Soviet
literary criticism had been written until the beginning of the twenty-first century.
All histories of Russian literary criticism ended with the Silver Age, that is, the
prerevolutionary period. This situation can be explained with the impossibility of
doing justice to the history of Russian literary theory and criticism of the Soviet
period while remaining beholden to the ideological framework that had emerged
during the Stalin years. Within that framework, all criticism of the early twentieth
century was declared “decadent,” and all émigré criticism labeled “sympathy with
the Whites” (belogvardeishchina). The initial period of Soviet criticism itself was also
represented in negative tones because all criticism was produced by literary groups,
all of which, including Proletkult and the Serapion Brothers, the Left Front of the
Arts (LEF) and Pereval, Kuznitsa (The Smithy) and RAPP, the formalists, and the
sociologists, were subsequently officially condemned and suppressed. Similarly, the
best journal for literary criticism during the 1930s, Literaturnyi kritik, was condemned
and closed down in 1940 by a special resolution of the Communist Party Central
Committee. In the postwar years, an anticosmopolitan campaign raged in literary
theory and criticism, which became a taboo subject immediately after Stalin’s death.
In the period following the Thaw, it was just as impossible to condense the history
of Soviet criticism into an ideologically acceptable narrative; the polemic between
xiv  INTRODUCTION
Novyi mir and Oktiabr’, between anti-Stalinists and Stalinists could not be articulated
during the era of re-Stalinization. While the falsified history of Soviet literature was
based on the practice of replacing the name of one writer in the limelight by that of
another, in the case of criticism there simply were no suitable replacements: the entire
history of Soviet literary criticism was a history of history erased.
One can thus say that the reason why the history of Soviet literary criticism and
scholarship could not have been written during the Soviet era is not just the absence
of a positive conception under which to subsume the historical material and pres-
ent it in some coherent and ideologically acceptable way, but also the simple absence
of material for such a narrative—because that which constitutes literary theory and
criticism was either treated as a string of errors or situated outside of history alto-
gether, in a realm of seemingly timeless truth. The latter concerns the official Soviet
theory of literature: as late as the early 1980s, its “last wisdom” was still drawn from
Lenin’s essays on Alexander Herzen and Tolstoy, the “theory of reflection,” Andrei
Zhdanov’s speech at the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers and his state-
ment about the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, the latest works of Mikhail Khrap-
chenko, and so on. After the inception of the endlessly dragging “Marxist” epoch in
the USSR, all other (read, Western) literary theory was presented as a chain of errors
and a path of degeneration.
Attempts at writing the history of particular segments of literary theory and
criticism during the Soviet era can be divided into two distinct domains. First, there
was the official history (in many respects also deliberately misrepresenting or falsify-
ing the history of literary criticism, and of literary studies more widely): suffice it to
name the books of Aleksandr Ovcharenko, Stepan Sheshukov, Aleksei Metchenko,
Pyotr Vykhodtsev, Vasilii Novikov, Vitalii Ozerov, and so on. On the other hand,
there were those who aimed to expand the scope toward an interpretation of the real
variety of literary criticism during the Soviet years.14 The second direction received
a strong impulse during perestroika and in the post-Soviet years. During this time,
researchers became interested in periods other than the 1920s, and studies on dif-
ferent aspects of the history of criticism under Stalin and Khrushchev appeared.15
Moreover, interest in intellectual and institutional history and historical and theo-
retical research rose steeply, and new studies on the history of Soviet art criticism
appeared.16
It was not until the early twenty-first century that histories of Russian liter-
ary theory and criticism of the Soviet period began to appear in Russia. In 2002 the
publishing house Vysshaia shkola published Istoriia russkoi literaturnoi kritiki (History
of Russian Literary Criticism), edited by Valerii Prozorov, which finally ventured
beyond the borders of the early twentieth century and looked at criticism up to the
1990s. In 2004 Tomsk University Press brought out Aleksandr Kazarkin’s Russkaia
literaturnaia kritika XX veka (Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism), while
in 2008 the Moscow Akademiia publishing house released Mikhail Golubkov’s
Istoriia russkoi literaturnoi kritiki XX veka (1920-e–1990-e gody) (History of Russian Liter-
ary Criticism of the Twentieth Century [1920s–1990s]). All three books are univer-
INTRODUCTION  xv
sity textbooks for students of philology, with the corresponding signature stamps of
the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Education.
Prozorov’s textbook devotes around a hundred pages to the entire Soviet era,
most of which is taken up by necessarily brief portraits of critics and writers with cur-
sory overviews of their work.17 This portrait-based discussion is even more strongly
present in Kazarkin’s book, which consists of thirty-eight individual portraits (out
of which less than half are critics, the majority being writers and philosophers). At
the same time the Soviet era itself takes up less than a third of the book and is treated
only until the 1970s. The largest part is devoted to pre-symbolist, symbolist, acmeist,
and religious and philosophical criticism, with a smaller part dealing with the writ-
ers and critics of the Russian emigration. Although Kazarkin tried to unite under a
single cover the literary criticism of the diaspora and emigration, as well as journal-
istic and scholarly criticism (there are portraits of Shklovsky, Tynianov, and Eikhen-
baum), this unification tends to be somewhat mechanical; each of the nine sections,
into which the individual portraits are divided, is preceded by just one or two pages
of introduction. Golubkov, on the other hand, did try to produce a coherent history
of Soviet criticism. However, his book throws light solely upon journal criticism
and mentions neither émigré criticism nor literary theory. Alas, the author’s attempt
at conceptualizing the material on the basis of his homespun “ideological monism”
remains unsuccessful. (The book is also riddled with a large number of inaccuracies.)
The problem all three books have in common (and they are the only attempts at
putting together a history of Soviet criticism so far) is their genre: as textbooks, they
are intended for a student audience, which defines not only their structure but also
the style of presentation—simplified, academically neutral, and devoid of even the
slightest ambition to advance original arguments and judgments.
By contrast, the present edited volume was conceived as a piece of collective
scholarship. What unites the authors is their wish to combine objectivity within an
extended historical narrative with conceptual rigor and sharpness. The need for such
a book—neither a textbook nor a series of personal critical sketches and portraits—is
evident: research into individual phenomena of the history of Soviet criticism and
literary scholarship led to the emergence of full-fledged subdisciplines (Bakhtin
studies being the most prominent example), which, however, are yet to articulate a
wider and more global account of the evolution of Russian literary theory and criti-
cism during the twentieth century. The emergence and development of these subdis-
ciplines usually followed the same trajectory: after the first works had appeared in
the West (for example, Robert Maguire’s work on Krasnaia Nov’, Morris Friedberg’s
on censorship, Edward Brown’s on RAPP, Herman Ermolaev’s on literary theories
of the 1920s, Victor Erlich’s on formalism, and so on), the subject matter was then
very carefully elaborated in the USSR during the post-Stalin years.
Thus both in Russia and the West, the absence of a comprehensive and method-
ologically sophisticated history of these important discourses remains palpable, de-
spite these detailed studies of particular phenomena of literary theory and criticism
of the Soviet period.18 Our purpose has therefore been to offer an analysis of all the
xvi  INTRODUCTION
key stages and methods of literary criticism and theory since 1917. We have endeav-
ored to integrate cultural and political history to the extent to which this makes the
narrative more accessible, and we also include two chapters surveying developments
in émigré literary criticism and theory of the first (until World War II) and the sec-
ond and third (after World War II and from the mid-1970s to 1991) waves of emigra-
tion, as well as chapters looking beyond the Soviet age and discussing post-Soviet
theory and criticism.
A History of Russian Literary
Theory and Criticism
 LITERARY CRITICISM DURING THE
1
REVOLUTION AND THE CIVIL WAR,
1917–1921
STEFANO GARZONIO and MARIA ZALAMBANI
The Intelligentsia, the Revolution, and the Civil War
The landscape of Russian criticism in the early post-October years is excep-

tionally variegated. Present throughout this period were almost all the artistic and
literary trends, schools, and orientations of the previous era. They would come to
be determined by their relationship to the October Revolution and the political ide-
ology of the forces that initiated it, and the consequences for later literary debates
would be substantial. This would prove the case not only for Marxist criticism, but
for the literary views held by the revolutionary minded, left-wing intelligentsia as
well as the rich critical tradition of the late populist movement (narodnichestvo). The
civil war period was marked not only by a deepening social and cultural schism,
but also by a sharp curtailing in publication possibilities. A short-term equilibrium
between opposing positions and trends (as manifest in the dialogue between those
writers who remained in Russia and the literary diaspora, concentrated in this pe-
riod mostly in Berlin1) was notable in the early twenties. Even though this equilib-
rium was almost entirely destroyed by the cultural policies of the Soviet regime, a
history of Russian literary criticism before the mid-twenties that ignores the legacy
of the diaspora is unthinkable.
1
2  STEFANO GARZONIO AND MARIA ZAL AMBANI
The literary criticism of the period of war communism and the civil war is also
characterized by an extraordinary dynamism behind both the intelligentsia’s ambig-
uous position vis-à-vis the revolution and the new regime itself in its relation to the
various artistic and literary currents—from late realism to the avant-garde move-
ments. To this it should be added that the conditions of wartime, the shifting fronts,
uprisings, revolts, and chaos that reigned throughout the country had a pronounced
effect on the functioning of the institutions of literature, journalism, and criticism
themselves, limiting access to printed material, curtailing the possibilities for free
and open dialogue between different currents and critics, which up to the present
day has strongly impeded an attempt at presenting a complete and reliable picture
of the literary and critical scene during these years. Only relatively recently has seri-
ous academic research been devoted either to provincial cultural life or to particular
traditions, for example, the active literary life in the south of Russia in 1918–1920.2
Writing by the older generation (such as the journalism of Ivan Bunin) appeared in
the pages of Odesskie listki, Odesskie novosti, Iuzhnoe slovo, and Moriak, alongside the
first publications by members of the younger generation, such as the writers Valentin
Kataev and Ilya Il’f and the literary scholars Mikhail Alekseev, Pyotr Bitsilli, Kon-
stantin Mochul’skii, among others.
Some writers and critics had returned home from banishment following the
1913 amnesty, and some only after the February Revolution. The most prominent
representatives of postrevolutionary émigré criticism—Fyodor Stepun, Mochul’skii,
Mikhail Osorgin, or Marc Slonim—took an active part in the literary critical de-
bates at home at least until the mid-twenties.3 Although the central question for the
Russian literary milieu was its relation to the October Revolution, it should be re-
membered that the choice was by no means free and that under the conditions of war
communism and civil war there was as little regard for the freedom of the press in
the territory controlled by the White Army as in Soviet Russia. By the same token,
the majority of periodicals that had defined Russian cultural life since the turn of
the century curtailed their activities under the conditions of war communism and
the civil war, either by regime decree or for economic reasons. Following the Oc-
tober 26, 1917 resolution on the press, the following newspapers were closed: Novoe
vremia, Obshchee delo, Den’, Birzhevye vedomosti, and Rech’. At the end of the year Volia
naroda, where Zinaida Gippius, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Piast, Mikhail Prishvin,
and others had published, was shut down. Gradually the “thick” journals were shut
down as well, among them the narodnik journals Russkoe bogatstvo, Vestnik Evropy, and
even Pyotr Struve’s Russkaia mysl’, which later appeared in emigration.
The issue of freedom of expression was central to the literary debates. Writers
and critics such as Ivan Bunin, Gippius, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Fyodor Sologub,
and Evgenii Lundberg came out strongly against the Bolsheviks. Vasilii Rozanov’s
Apokalipsis nashego vremeni (The Apocalypse of Our Time) appealed to all critical ori-
entations for a forceful response. Several months before the October Revolution,
Andrei Belyi had issued the pamphlet Revoliutsiia i kul’tura (Revolution and Culture,
1917), in which he construed the revolution as a spiritual revolution, underscoring the
musicality of the revolutionary wave and anticipating an entire array of apocalyptic
LITERARY CRITICISM DURING THE REVOLUTION AND CIVIL WAR, 1917–1921  3
religious writing, such as Alexander Blok’s long poem, Dvenadtsat’ (The Twelve).
During this time, the poet was active as a theater critic (he would serve in the reper-
tory section of the theatrical division of the People’s Commissariat for Education
[Narkompros]), but in his later works he wrote solely on creative and poetic themes.
In his April 1921 sketch “Bez bozhestva, bez vdokhnoven’ia” (“Without a deity,
without an inspiration”; the title is a quote from Pushkin), Blok offered a critique of
acmeism and the formalist leanings of the representatives of the new Tsekh poetov
(Guild of Poets); and in his lecture on the tragic collapse of reality and the manifest
crisis of creativity, “O naznachenii poezii” (On the Calling of Poetry; given in the
Dom Literatorov on 13 February 1921), he proposed a return to Pushkin.
Representatives of Russian symbolism published a number of works during this
period that, although written several years previously, fit in well in the new cultural
and political context, for example, Viacheslav Ivanov’s Rodnoe i vselenskoe (Native and
Universal), a collection of essays from 1914–1916. In 1920, Valery Bryusov, another
representative of the older generation, joined the Bolshevik Party, working for sev-
eral state organizations while remaining active as a literary critic and theorist. His
essays and reviews were published regularly in the journals Khudozhestvennoe slovo
and Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, filled with interesting and original disquisitions on contem-
porary poetry.4 To a certain extent, Bryusov served as an advocate for symbolism
and futurism, while strongly criticizing the creative principles of the imaginists. Of
the younger poets engaged in criticism, probably the most prominent was Vladislav
Khodasevich, who was an active participant in the literary life of the revolution-
ary years and wrote for Gorky’s newspaper Novaia zhizn’. His critical output ceased
temporarily in 1922 (when he left Russia for good) with the publication of his Stat’i o
russkoi poezii (Articles on Russian Poetry), containing essays on Derzhavin and Push-
kin, among others.
Socialist Revolutionary Criticism
As noted, many critics of the older generation continued to appear in the liter-
ary press in the first years of the Soviet regime. They included representatives of
the right-wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), such as Arkadii Gornfel’d, a
disciple of Nikolai Mikhailovsky and friend of Vladimir Korolenko, who went on
to publish his essays in the collections Puti tvorchestva (Paths of Creativity, 1922) and
Boevye otkliki na mirnye temy (Militant Responses to Peaceful Themes, 1924), where
he expressed a particular interest in the psychology of creativity. Vasilii L’vov-
Rogachevskii, a prominent Menshevik activist, left politics and became actively en-
gaged as a literary critic. Among his more notable works of the revolutionary period
are Noveishaia russkaia literatura (The Most Recent Russian Literature, 1919), his Blok
study Poet-prorok (The Poet-Prophet, 1921), and Imazhinizm i ego obrazonostsy (Imag-
inism and Its Standard-Bearers, 1921).
Particularly prominent at the time was the method of impressionistic criticism
that paid special attention to a writer’s individual psychological features. Probably
its best practitioner was Iulii Aikhenval’d, a critic who earned wide renown before
the revolution for his “writers’ silhouettes,” which were founded upon his under-
standing of the history of literature as the product of individual creative activity;
he regarded the October Revolution with hostility, and in his later works remained
faithful to a subjective and intuitive approach to the literary work. In 1922 he pub-
lished the collections Pokhvala prazdnosti (In Praise of Idleness) and Poety i poetessy
(Poets and Poetesses). At the end of his life, Aikhenval’d wrote about the recently ex-
ecuted Nikolai Gumilyov and shortly afterward was expelled from Russia, joining
the many other exiled literary figures who thereafter tried to launch the cultural life
of the Russian diaspora. One of the most prominent among this group was undoubt-
edly Pyotr Pil’skii, who had organized the First All-Russian School of Journalism in
Petrograd in March 1918. Persecuted for his hostility to the new regime, he would
flee to southern Russia and then abroad.
Many of the older critics of the generation of liberals changed course and ac-
cepted the revolution, such as Vladimir Botsianovskii, who after the revolution
would explore, among other things, Russian revolutionary satire. The writer Kor
nei Chukovsky, another prerevolutionary critic, would gradually withdraw from
criticism. Despite publishing books like Futuristy (The Futurists, 1922), Oskar Uail’d
(Oscar Wilde, 1922), and Kniga ob Aleksandre Bloke (A Book on Alexander Blok, 1922),
Chukovsky would give himself over to creative literary work completely, never re-
turning to professional criticism. Among the numerous adherents of impressionism
in criticism a prominent place was occupied by Nikolai Abramovich, the author of
the well-known prerevolutionary study Istoriia russkoi poezii (A History of Russian
Poetry; under the pseudonym N. Kadmin); he advanced an ecstatic apperception of
both the revolutionary events and the literary process, most notably in his late work,
Sovremennaia lirika: Kliuev, Kusikov, Ivnev, Shershenevich (Contemporary Lyric Poetry:
Klyuev, Kusikov, Ivnev, Shershenevich, 1921).
The volumes Skify (Scythians), which appeared in December 1917 and in 1918,
and included poems, prose, and essays, offered a new perspective on the revolution
and Russian literature’s role. Particularly significant were Ivanov-Razumnik’s es-
says “Skify (vmesto predisloviia)” (Scythians [In Lieu of a Foreword]) in the 1917
collection and “Poety i revoliutsiia” (Poets and the Revolution) in its 1918 follow-up.
Ivanov-Razumnik played a leading role in the history of criticism in the revolution-
ary and civil war years. Emerging from neonarodnichestvo, he was one of the leading
leftist figures on the literary scene, contributing to the SR newspaper Delo naroda, to
Znamia truda, and the two Skify collections. In 1917 he came out against reformism
and the spirit of compromise, expressing his dissatisfaction with the results of the
February Revolution. Ivanov-Razumnik’s “Scythian” ideology welcomed the Bol-
shevik victory and sought to take up a common cause with it. In the years 1919–1924
he was active in the Petrograd Free Philosophical Association (Vol’fila). Over time
Ivanov-Razumnik’s stance toward the Soviet regime became more critical, and he
ceased appearing in print after 1924. Thereafter, until 1933, he was able to work as
a literary and textual scholar (preparing, among other things, the apparatus for an
edition of Blok’s works).
Ivanov-Razumnik was a follower of Alexander Herzen. Defining his critical
method as “philosophical-ethical,” he described it even before the revolution thus:

“The goal of criticism is neither psychological nor aesthetic analysis . . . but the dis-
closure of all that is contained in the ‘living spirit’ of every work, and the definition
of the ‘philosophy’ of both the author and his oeuvre.”5 His position was nourished
by a philosophy of historical individualism, for which he employed the term “imma-
nent subjectivism.” The prerevolutionary Ivanov-Razumnik had already advanced
an original interpretation of the oeuvres of an entire array of leading literary fig-
ures of his generation; during the revolutionary period he surrounded himself with
many of the writers who appeared in his publications: Andrei Belyi, Sergei Esenin,
Nikolai Klyuev, Aleksei Remizov, and Sergei Krichkov all aligned themselves with
the Scythian theories of history in the pages of Skify. Blok was also close to Ivanov-
Razumnik’s thought.
Scythianism could be traced back to Vladimir Solovyov’s theory of pan-Mon-
golism; it used a pseudo-ethnographic palette to paint the revolution as the cathar-
sis that would cleanse Russia of the pernicious influence of the West.6 Accordingly,
the enormous social and historical upheaval of the revolutionary years had endowed
Russia and Russian culture with the possibility of forging a unique path toward
a new primitive civilization on an Asiatic scale. This sense for innovation perme-
ated much of Ivanov-Razumnik’s work (on Belyi, Blok, futurism, and so forth). He
would call for, in his essay “‘Misteriia’ ili ‘Buff’?” (“Mystery” or “Bouffe”?, 19187),
a new literature that would unite two innovative poetic trends—two truths—the
urban and the rural, the machine and the soil, seeing in Esenin and Klyuev’s poetry
a counterweight to futurism.
The revolution and civil war years were notable for the rise of acmeism, spear-
headed by the second Tsekh poetov (1916–1917), Gumilyov’s 1918 return from the
front, and the founding of the third Tsekh poetov. Many Tsekh members devoted
themselves to literary criticism, among them Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Kuzmin,
Georgii Adamovich, Georgii Ivanov, Innokentii Oksenov, Vladimir Piast, Mikhail
Zenkevich, Vsevolod Rozhdestvenskii, and Nikolai Chukovskii.
It was around this time that Mandelstam published his essay and manifesto “Utro
akmeizma” (Morning of Acmeism; Voronezh, 1919, written in 1912 or 1914), which
at the time was repudiated by Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetskii.8 While
working for Narkompros, where he headed the subdivision for aesthetic education
in the division for school reform, Mandelstam published the essay “Gosudarstvo i
ritm” (State and Rhythm), devoted to the aesthetic significance and role of rhythm
in art.9 Shortly thereafter he published two seminal works: “Slovo i kul’tura” (Word
and Culture) and “O prirode slova” (On the Nature of the Word). In the former the
poet noted that “classical poetry is the poetry of revolution,” and he anticipated the
appearance of “the synthetic poet” who can “sing of ideas, scientific systems, theories
of state.” In the latter he summed up the different facets of Russian poetry and the
Russian poetic lexicon and, while taking part in the conversation on the literature of
the revolutionary era, noted that “a vital poetry of word-objects has arrived to take
the place of symbolism, futurism, and imag(in)ism, and its maker is not Mozart the
dreamer-idealist, but Salieri the master, the stern and severe craftsman, proffering
a hand to the master of objects and materialist values, the builder and shaper of the
material world.”10
Other members of the group occupied themselves with defining the acmeist po-
sition within contemporary poetry. Nikolai Otsup emphasized the contrast between
symbolism and acmeism in his lecture “Perelom v sovremennoi poezii” (The Turn-
ing Point in Contemporary Poetry, May 1920). In late 1917 Mikhail Zenkevich, hav-
ing left Petersburg for Saratov, published several essays on proletarian poetry in the
local Khudozhestvennye izvestiia, in which he analyzed the oeuvre of the “revolution-
ary socialist” poets. The poet Innokentii Oksenov, in his role as critic, defended the
aesthetic critical position and quickly got into a dispute with Marxist critics. He later
wrote essays on Blok’s Dvenadtsat’, Konstantin Fedin, Nikolai Tikhonov, and oth-
ers, and published the collection Sovremennaia russkaia kritika (Contemporary Russian
Criticism, 1925; with a foreword by Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii).
In 1923 Mikhail Kuzmin published the collection Uslovnosti: Stat’i ob isskustve
(Conventions: Essays on Art). It contained essays and articles from 1908–1921 and re-
flected on an entire era of Russian cultural life. In October 1918 Kuzmin had begun
working on the daily newspaper Zhizn’ isskustva, where he led the theater section
and wrote reviews and articles on music and literature. There Kuzmin published his
essay on the poet Anna Radlova, whose work became the subject of sharp polemi-
cal pieces (for example, by Kuzmin, Marietta Shaginyan, and Georgii Adamovich).
During this period Kuzmin tried to organize his own group, the emotionalists. He
elaborated his theory (“art is emotional and oracular”) in a number of essays and
lectures. In 1924 he published “Emotsional’nost’ kak osnovnoi element iskusstva”
(Emotionality as a Basic Element of Art).11 The aesthetic conception of emotional-
ism led the poet to define expressionism as the most vital and promising of the new
trends in art.12 To sum up the new movement, he wrote: “Expressionism is a protest
. . . against the impasse in the exact sciences, against the fetish of rationalism, against
the mechanization of life in the name of man.”13
The introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the role of the cen-
sor and the economy made the commercial failure of late acmeism unavoidable: the
acmeist era drew to a close with the posthumous publication of Gumilyov’s “Pis’ma
o russkoi poezii” (Letters on Russian Poetry), edited, with alterations and textual
errors, by Georgii Ivanov.
Imaginism, which announced itself with great fanfare in early 1919, was spear-
headed by a colorful group of literary figures. Riurik Ivnev (1891–1981), who later
would serve as Anatoly Lunacharsky’s personal secretary (having organized a series
of meetings on the theme “Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia”), devoted a 1921 essay, “Che-
tyre vystrela v Esenina, Kusikova, Mariengofa, Shershenevicha” (Four Shots at Es-
enin, Kusikov, Mariengof, and Shershenevich), to imaginism. The critical legacy of
Sergei Esenin is not extensive, and apparently not all of it has been preserved. His
most notable critical writing includes “Otchee slovo” (The Word of the Father), an
essay in which Esenin analyzed the mystical philosophy of Andrei Belyi, the study
“Kliuchi Marii” (The Keys of Mary), and the essay “Byt i iskusstvo” (Everyday Life
and Art), part of his projected book, Slovesnaia ornamentika (Verbal Ornamentation).
The principles of imaginism were diligently expounded by Vadim Shershenevich in
his criticism (for instance, his essay “Slovogranil’nia” [The Word-Grinder, 1920]).
The impressionist poet Ippolit Sokolov also discussed the ideology of imaginism in
his 1921 pamphlet Imazhinistika.
Futurist Criticism
The new regime, in its determination to foster radical change in the arts, wanted
to enlist the cubo-futurists’ passion for a new revolutionary poetics.14 The revolution
was a watershed for futurist poetics. If the attention of the cubo-futurists had been
substantially focused on linguistic and artistic aspects earlier, a new task suggested
itself after October: the transformation of “poetic material” into a “product” and
“tool” in the artistic process, understood most broadly as a process of creative social
activity. For the futurists the word was oriented toward construction of reality: from
text construction to “life building.” This transition was clear-cut in their manifes-
toes—the prerevolutionary ones (“Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu” [A Slap
in the Face of Public Taste, 1912], “Sadok sudei” [A Trap for Judges, 1913], “Kaplia
degtia” [A Drop of Tar, 1915], “Truba Marsian” [The Martian Trumpet, 1916]) con-
centrated their attention on formal experimentation, while the postrevolutionary
(“Dekret No. 1 o demokratizatsii iskusstv” [Decree No. 1 on the Democratization of
the Arts, 1918] or “Manifest letuchei federatsii futuristov” [Manifesto of the Flying
Federation of Futurists, 1918]), heralded the births of a new, free, egalitarian art and
of artists who would call themselves the proletariat, fighters in a revolution of the
soul and masters of the art of the future.15 Thus during this period the aesthetic man-
ifesto with its poetics and discourse had become one of the leading critical genres.
For the young Soviet state, futurism was a source of original aesthetic ideas and
new poetics. This was why Anatoly Lunacharsky, as head of Narkompros, practiced
a policy of appeasement with the futurists, despite Lenin’s sharply negative attitude
toward them. When they launched Gazeta futuristov (whose sole issue appeared on
15 March 1918), Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burliuk, and Vasilii Kamenskii ini-
tially dissociated themselves from Lunacharsky, who had been conciliatory in mat-
ters pertaining to cultural heritage. Lunacharsky was not inclined to break with the
bourgeois intelligentsia, as the cubo-futurists had done when they repudiated the
past in their 1912 manifesto “Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu,” famously
calling for Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and so forth to be thrown overboard from
the “Ship of Modernity.” In their newspaper the futurists called futurism “prole-
tarian art.” In an anonymous article, “Proletarskoe isskustvo” (Proletarian Art), the
author expressed puzzlement that the futurists were not considered “Art’s true prole-
tariat” and indignation that their revolutionary contributions to culture were being
ignored.16 By late 1918, however, the common goal of building socialism had united
artists of the left and the state: the contributors to the newspaper Iskusstvo kommuny,
an organ of Otdel izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv Narodnogo Komissariata Prosvesh
cheniia (Department of Fine Arts of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment;

IZO), included Mayakovsky, Nikolai Punin, Osip Brik, Natan Altman, and Viktor
Shklovsky. It was in the pages of Iskusstvo kommuny that the cubo-futurists made the
transition to the pars construens of their program: “life building” (zhiznestroenie) in
favor of rapprochement with the Soviet regime. Mayakovsky’s evolution is symp-
tomatic in this regard. Mayakovsky had announced his aesthetic agenda in the essays
“Dva Chekhova” (The Two Chekhovs) and “Kaplia degtia” (A Drop of Tar), where
he had chosen to privilege lexical innovation over content as the goal of the poet: “It
is not the idea that gives birth to the word, but the word to the idea.”17 It was obvious
that the new movement’s experimental agenda was concerned primarily with lin-
guistic material and only secondarily with reshaping society. Over time, however,
Mayakovsky’s basic aesthetic program was transformed: the word became a tool for
“life building.” Accordingly, any sort of formal research that provided a foundation
for cubo-futurist criticism—from Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s
1913 “Slovo kak takovoe” (The Word as Such) to Khlebnikov’s 1919 “Nasha osnova”
(Our Foundation), where the author questioned zaumnyi (transrational) language—
was to be taken as the raw material that the revolutionary project should use to re-
build society.
This model of a collectivist, socialist art made by class-conscious artists was af-
firmed in Iskusstvo kommuny by Osip Brik, who shared Mayakovsky’s belief in the
utopia of “life building,” arguing for the necessity of “rapid organization of institu-
tions of material culture, where artists could prepare for the task of making new
objects for proletarian use, where they could design prototypes of such objects, these
future works of art.”18 As Brik summed up the foundations of his aesthetic project:
“‘Proletarian art’ is neither ‘art for the proletariat’ nor ‘art of the proletariat,’ but ‘art
of the artists-proletarians.’ It is only they who will create this art of the future.”19
Obviously, this was a program completely driven by the intelligentsia rather than the
proletariat. And this was the source of the conflict between the futurists and Prolet-
kult. The theory of collective art, where the most important role was to be nonethe-
less played by the intelligentsia, was formulated by Boris Kushner: while concepts
would be suggested by the masses, they would be executed by the artist or a collec-
tive made up of worker-artists.20 The futurists, in other words, supported collective
art but were unwilling to yield to the proletariat the privilege of being the sole cre-
ators of a future art, which was what the Proletkult sought.21
Futurist criticism was concerned not so much with the interpretation of a text
or the evaluation of its artistic qualities but rather with the realization of a political,
aesthetic agenda that had two goals: the search for the new verbal material necessary
for a future “utilitarian” collectivist art and the affirmation of futurism’s unique sta-
tus as the sole new art that was developing alongside the new society. But the futurist
program turned out to be untenable, as it came into conflict with the demands of a
new regime that was struggling to break with the past and take up the creative ideas
of the left-wing movements, while in the end hesitating to entrust the intelligentsia
(the futurists, at any rate) with the building of the new society, justifiably apprehen-
sive of their independence and unpredictability.
Proletkult Criticism
A most important role in the new ideological battles was played by Proletkult
(1917–1932; abbreviated from proletarskaia kul’tura), a movement that developed in the
period between the February and October Revolutions, intent upon creating an in-
dependent proletarian culture. Its most active participants were Alexander Bogda-
nov, Lunacharsky, Fedor Kalinin, Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii, Valerian Pletnev, and
Platon Kerzhentsev. In the years after the revolution, Proletkult became a laboratory
for the worker-intelligentsia of the future and the new proletarian poetry; the works
of Aleksei Gastev, Pavel Bessal’ko, Mikhail Gerasimov, and Vladimir Kirillov were
among the most representative.
Proletkult immediately clashed with the cubo-futurists in the pages of Iskusstvo
kommuny. Although each had pretensions to the role of legitimate and natural orga-
nizer of a proletarian culture, their agendas were substantially different: while the
futurists, as we have seen, entrusted the task of realizing a new cultural project to the
revolutionary intelligentsia, the Proletkult put their all into creating a new genera-
tion of poet-workers. The Proletkult, Mikhail Gerasimov said, “is the oasis where
our class will crystallize. We must throw coal and oil on the fire if we want our
hearth to blaze—peasant straw and intelligentsia kindling will produce only smoke,
nothing more.”22
Sociopolitical “autonomy” (samostiinost’) (the Proletkult demanded the creation
of a cultural front independent of the party) and the long-standing conflict between
Lenin and Proletkult leader Bogdanov inevitably led to confrontation between Pro-
letkult and the regime. Proletkult flourished for several years (1917–1920), and un-
der its direction a grassroots movement of workers’ cultural centers was established
throughout the country, along with the publication of an array of periodicals, such
as Proletarskaia kul’tura, Griadushchee, Gorn, and Gudki; the organization was effec-
tively dismantled by Lenin in October 1920 when he placed it under the authority
of Narkompros, marking the start of a long period of decline that culminated in the
dissolution of all cultural organizations in 1932.
It was in February 1920 that a schism occurred in Proletkult: the poets Vasilii
Aleksandrovskii, Sergei Obradovich, Semyon Rodov, Mikhail Gerasimov, Vladi-
mir Kirillov, and others formed the group Kuznitsa (The Smithy), which, without
repudiating the ideals of Proletkult, affirmed their preference for the professionaliza-
tion of the writer’s trade and the value of craftsmanship, seeing itself as the forge of
proletarian art where a high level of artistic craftsmanship ought to be developed.
In Proletkult there was practically no interest in “mastering the craftsmanship of
the classics.” Pavel Bessal’ko, one of Proletkult’s ideologues, in his essay “O forme i
soderzhanii” (On Form and Content), published in the journal Griadushchee in June
1918, wrote: “It seems odd that the ‘big brothers’ of literature tell ‘writers of the peo-
ple’ to learn to write by copying stereotypes from Chekhov, Leskov, or Korolenko.
Listen, ‘big brother,’ worker-writers should create, not study. They must express
themselves, their originality, and their class essence.”23 Kuznitsa was launched with
an editorial manifesto that proclaimed, “In the craft of poetry we should get our
hands on the most technically advanced devices and methods in order to forge our
thoughts and feelings into an original proletarian poetry.”24 Kuznitsa thus launched
a sharp polemic against Proletkult on the issues of “studying” and “cultural heri-
tage.” The August–September 1920 issue of Kuznitsa’s eponymous journal led with
an essay by Aleksandrovskii, “O putiakh proletarskogo tvorchestva” (On the Paths
of Proletarian Creativity), a sarcastic rejoinder to Proletkult’s “virgin birth” of pro-
letarian culture. By insisting on learning “technical prowess” from the writers of the
past, Kuznitsa made the first advance away from the radicalism and overambitious
aesthetic idealism of the Proletkult.
Kuznitsa proved to be one of the last organizations in the spirit of Alexander
Bogdanov’s ideals. Although it survived until 1930, it played a rather negligible role
in the literary life of the 1920s and was later marginalized by the new proletarian
organizations, such as Oktiabr’ (October) and the Russian Association of Proletarian
Writers (RAPP), which were supported by the party.
The ideological foundations of the notion of a proletarian culture were laid by
the left wing of the revolutionary movement, which included Bogdanov, Gorky, and
Lunacharsky, who had split with the Leninists in 1909. Philosophical differences be-
tween Lenin and Bogdanov were the immediate cause of the schism.25 Following the
split the party’s left wing formed the group Vpered (Forward). It was in their epony-
mous journal where Bogdanov developed his ideas of a proletarian socialist culture
as a necessary tool for building socialism; in this he was close in spirit to Gorky and
Lunacharsky’s vision: the cultural imperative of reeducating the proletariat so that it
might develop a collective consciousness that could take in all the facets of life, not
only sociopolitical activity.
What had been a long-standing philosophical disagreement between Bogdanov
and Lenin was transformed, after the October Revolution, into a political polemic.
Bogdanov attempted to create a cultural front, one effectively independent of the
regime and free from political interference by the party, hoping that the administra-
tion of culture might be placed in the hands of a worker-intelligentsia, completely
free to shape the thoughts and feelings of the masses. Lenin argued that for the mo-
ment the task of culture was to use the cultural heritage of the past to overcome il-
literacy: the cultural revolution would have to follow the political one, not the other
way around. For the Proletkult, however, the issue lay both in defining a new critical
approach and returning literary criticism to the bosom of “proletarian art criticism,”
which was regarded by its practitioners as part of empirio-criticism, a cornerstone of
Bogdanov’s philosophy.26
In Proletkult, as in futurism, the critic renounced aesthetic categories (above
all the category of beauty), concentrating instead on what was useful and necessary
for expanding the consciousness and the culture of the worker. This attitude was in
accord with the poetry of the movement, exemplified by the productionist verse of
Aleksei Gastev. Proletkult polemicized against those authors “who cannot help with
the development of the ideas of a proletarian culture,” but also with the state, for
refusing to recognize the independence of Proletkult as a “third front,” alongside the
political and the economic.27 Thus was institutionalized a new criterion for evaluat-
ing creative activity, in which art was judged by its “social organizational role.”28
Proletarian culture required the formation of a worker-intelligentsia that would
raise the consciousness of the masses.29 Criticism, then, would serve more or less as its
instrument to the extent that it was “the regulator of the life of art in both the aspect
of its creation and its perception: it interprets art for the masses at large, showing them
what they can take and how they can use art in the construction of their life, internal
and external.”30
From Marxist to Party-based Criticism
The process of tailoring the Marxist tradition toward existing political needs
began immediately after the revolution, when the adepts of the various aesthetic
movements became aware of the political weight of Marxism in the struggle for cul-
tural power. In the first postrevolutionary decade, Marxist theory in Soviet Russia
had not yet ossified; there was no Marxist canon in aesthetics to speak of.
The father of Marxist criticism in Russia was the philosopher and publicist
Georgii Plekhanov. Almost all Marxist critics turned toward his legacy, right up to
the early thirties, when Lenin took Plekhanov’s place; and thereafter Soviet criti-
cism’s genealogy of Marxist literary theory would be traced from “Leninist posi-
tions.” The main source for the shift would be found in Lenin’s essays “Partiinaia
organizatsiia i partiinaia literatura” (Party Organization and Party Literature, 1905),
in which the concept of partiinost’ was first elaborated; “Pamiati Gertsena” (In Mem-
ory of Herzen), a study of the genesis of the Russian revolutionary liberation move-
ment; and “Lev Tolstoi kak zerkalo russkoi revoliutsii” (Leo Tolstoy as Mirror of the
Russian Revolution), in which the role of class determinism in the artistic work was
discussed. Yet according to his contemporaries, Lenin hardly made any pronounce-
ments on culture and did not consider questions of literary criticism.31 Culture, as
we have already seen, was supposed to serve the main goal—the administration of
the state and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Thus culture was
to be understood in narrowly pragmatic terms: as a support in the “struggle against
illiteracy,” in order to “organize the activities of proletarian elements,” and as a tool
of “propaganda and agitation.”32
A more important role in the cultural life during this period was played by Ana-
toly Lunacharsky, not only as a party functionary but also as a critic. Appointed head
of the Narkompros after the October Revolution, he had a significant impact on the
formation of Soviet culture. Lenin entrusted him with control over the cultural life
of the country, despite his unorthodox political biography. As a critic Lunacharsky
remained faithful to the teachings of Plekhanov, but in contrast to Plekhanov, he
stressed the aesthetic aspect (“esteticheskii moment”) and proposed a materialist the-
ory of the beautiful. Later, he shared Bogdanov’s point of view regarding the need
to create a proletarian cultural front independent of the state, but he did not exclude
the participation of the intelligentsia of bourgeois origin in the creation of such a
culture.33 However, his position changed between 1918 and 1921. In his 1918 pam-
phlet Kul’turnye zadachi rabochego klassa (The Cultural Tasks of the Working Class),
Lunacharsky defined the difference between socialist (classless) and proletarian

(class-based, built on the struggle at the heart of the structure of capitalism) cultures,
anticipating the ideas that he outlined a year later (1919) in his essay “Proletkul’t i
sovetskaia kul’turnaia rabota” (The Proletkult and Soviet Cultural Work), in which
he, without refuting the core beliefs of the Proletkult, rebuked its “autonomous”
(samostiinye) tendencies.34
Once he became leader of the Narkompros, Lunacharsky disavowed many of
the Proletkult’s “heretical” positions, trying to reconcile his status as high-ranking
state functionary with his beliefs as an enlightened member of the intelligentsia.
Now responsible for reorganizing culture and education in an entire country, he de-
fined the new culture as a process resting upon cultivating the power of the prole-
tariat and the peasantry (involving this class also corresponded to the new demands
of the Soviet state but was alien to the early rigid proletarian ethos of Proletkult).35
Here almost all of the elements of the future Soviet cultural doctrine came together.
It was not an accident, therefore, that in later years Lunacharsky would participate
both in the drafting of the Central Committee resolution “O politike partii v oblasti
khudozhestvennoi literatury” (On Party Politics in the Area of Belles Lettres, 1925),
an important milestone in early Soviet culture, and, eight years after this, in the for-
mulation of the theory of sotsrealizm.36
The most important event in Marxist criticism of the first postrevolutionary
years was undoubtedly the appearance of Leon Trotsky’s Literatura i revoliutsiia (Lit-
erature and Revolution, 1923), a collection of literary and critical essays written in
the early twenties. In this multifaceted survey Trotsky outlined practically all the
literary movements of the period, from those writers who kept their distance from
the revolution to the fellow-travelers and the futurists. Particularly insightful were
his assessments of proletarian culture. In Trotsky’s opinion, the notion of a proletar-
ian culture was a mistaken one: “not only does proletarian culture not exist, it can
never exist, and there is truly no reason to regret this: the proletariat seized power
in order to do away with class culture once and for all, and lead the way to a [uni-
versal] human culture.”37 Thus the proletarian intelligentsia would face in the near
future the task of achieving universal literacy in the population and critically mas-
tering already existing culture.38 This would explain the benevolence with which
Trotsky regarded those whom he was the first to call “fellow-travelers”—the writers
sympathetic to the revolution, believed by him to be useful in the era of transition.
Trotsky was less accommodating in his views on futurist criticism, regarding it as a
manifestation of bohemianism, a petit-bourgeois movement, separated from the true
revolutionary spirit, incapable of grasping the proletarian worldview, and, worst of
all, treating socialist and proletarian art as an end product rather than a transitional
phenomenon en route to the art of the future. Trotsky’s views on the culture of this
transitional period were undoubtedly closer to Lenin’s position than to the platform
of Proletkult. For both leaders of the Russian Revolution, the political issues were
far more important than the cultural ones: for both there was no greater task than
building socialism.
As we have seen, the picture of Marxist criticism in the years 1918–1921 is var-
iegated and dynamic, there not yet being a “correct line”; there remained a place in
the mosaic of the literary controversies of the period for erstwhile heretics such as
Bogdanov, Gorky, and Lunacharsky, as well as the future heretic, Trotsky.
The Problem of Cultural Legacy
The center of attention of Marxist criticism had always been the relationship
between superstructure (art, literature) and revolutionary praxis. Thus the central
line in early Soviet criticism in the years 1917–1921 consisted of two strains—the pars
destruens that attacked the past and defined the cultural legacy and the pars construens,
the positive program to build the culture and literature of the future.
The issue of cultural legacy, already the subject of heated discussions before the
revolution, acquired a new significance in the early postrevolutionary years. The
question was how hard the socialist state should strive for the creation of a new and
completely original cultural foundation that represented a decisive break with the
past, and to what degree such a project was even possible. As the radical negativist
utopianism of the Proletkult and the Left Front of the Arts (LEF) programs quickly
became obvious to the regime at an early date, the state had to switch to reverse
gears, seeking a balance of change and continuity. Lenin called for an aesthetically
“restorative” program: a return to the experience of the past and an emphasis on
the problems of building the future. His valorization of bourgeois knowledge and
culture would become the foundation of a new model that would increasingly refer
back to the classical heritage; Proletkult, with its radicalism, effectively removed it-
self from the cultural and political scene.
Similarly, the futurist call for a break with the past was denounced as ultra-
leftist. This call took on greater force in the pages of Iskusstvo kommuny and in Maya-
kovsky’s poetry, for example, in his poem “Radovat’sia rano” (Too Early to Rejoice),
which elicited a sharp rebuke from Lunacharsky in his essay “Lozhka protivoiadiia”
(A Spoonful of Antidote), an attack on the “destructive tendencies in our relation-
ship to the past.”39 The radicalism postulated by the futurists, too, became politically
dangerous; as a result of their denial of the cultural traditions of the past, the futur-
ists were subjected to sharp criticism from the state, and in April 1919 their main
tribune—the newspaper Iskusstvo kommuny—was closed.
Unlike the unambiguous radicalism of the futurists, the position of Proletkult
vis-à-vis the legacy of the classics was somewhat contradictory. Proletkult journals
would publish diametrically opposed pronouncements on this issue: Fedor Kalinin,
in his essay “O professionalizme rabochikh v iskusstve” (On the Professionalism
of Workers in Art), advised that professionalism was necessary for technical mas-
tery (“even in the simplest trade one must know how to use the tools”)40; his fellow
movement leader Valerian Pletnev, in “O professionalizme” (On Professionalism),
advanced the opposite view: professionalism disengages one from one’s work and
dulls attentiveness, so necessary to the worker-poets.41
The Proletkult never fully accepted the old cultural regime; however, Bogda-
nov took a position toward the classics much closer to Lenin’s view: in his opinion
the proletariat was to be the inheritor of all the culture of the past and should use this
heritage in the creation of its own uniquely proletarian culture.42 Lebedev-Polianskii
wrote about this at length in the journal Proletarskaia kul’tura.43 Nonetheless, with the
danger of political heresy that emanated from the Proletkult, its pretensions to po-
litical independence alone made the party regard all of its slogans suspiciously.
It was the party line (heralded as “the Leninist approach to legacy”) that tri-
umphed: it demanded that rather than being repudiated, the achievements of bour-
geois culture were to be reworked and used in their entirety in the construction of
socialism. Thus the groundwork was laid for a return to the classics, which began
to take place in the mid-twenties under the auspices of RAPP;44 the final canoniza-
tion of the masters of nineteenth-century realism was an accomplishment of Stalinist
culture. The avant-garde experiments that accompanied the abrupt societal shifts of
the period just after the revolution were no longer needed now that the foundations
of the old system had been undermined. Now the authoritative word of the classics
could contribute to the development and consolidation of the new regime; the time
was ripe for such reinforcement.
The Institution of Criticism and Its Role

in the System of Censorship
In the first years after October 1917, aesthetic experimentation was still encour-
aged, but the process of transforming Marxist theory into dogma and canonizing
the new was already under way. Censorship played an important role, defining the
field of all that was legitimate and permissible in one form of creative activity or an-
other. We mean here censorship in its broadest sense—not only within the punitive
and repressive institutions, but also in more constructive areas, such as the creation
of new scientific and cultural discourses. In this sphere literary and literary-critical
institutions, owing to the force of their ideological charge, played a most important
role. It became incumbent upon critics to devote themselves to the process of identi-
fying and rejecting politically undesirable forms of literature while establishing new
conventions of socialist culture. It should be kept in mind that literature and literary
criticism occupied a central place within both the cultural systems of tsarist and So-
viet Russia. They functioned within a strictly literature-centric system, playing the
role of both cultural and political-ideological institutions as well.45
In the early postrevolutionary years, we witness the gradual but decisive trans-
formation of criticism from a forum for social opinion to a regulator of the literary
process and institution of control over cultural production and demand. Changes in
this sphere began to take place immediately after the revolution, when new institu-
tions for the administration of cultural life were created. The state organ with over-
sight on culture and education, Narkompros, was founded in November 1917, and in
April 1920 the Division for Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) was founded by the
Communist Party Central Committee as the main party department dealing with
issues of ideology and culture.46
Alongside this, the gradual state monopoly over the press, initiated with the first
of the Soviet-era censorship decrees (in October 1917), which abolished the bourgeois
press, was gathering strength. In the early postrevolutionary years Russia was able
to get by without preventive censorship, relying exclusively on punitive measures.
In December 1917 the extraordinary revolutionary tribunals were given license to
shut down publications or even deprive the possibly “guilty” of their freedom.47 In-
adequate supplies of paper, problems with printing equipment, and the difficulties
of distributing printed material in a country at war created serious obstacles to the
normal functioning of literary institutions. On the other hand, the nationalization
of publishing houses, the requisition of printing equipment, and the control of paper
distribution during the period of war communism allowed the state to monitor the
printed word without having to resort to preventive censorship.
The 1919 founding of Gosizdat by Narkompros was the most important step
in the consolidation of censorship. Gosizdat was to fulfill not only the functions of
a state press but serve as the central organ of the publishing industry, responsible for
planning, regulating, and distributing printed material. It became, in effect, an in-
strument of preventive censorship.48
Following the decree on the press, which shut down the independent journals,
the face of Russian journalism changed dramatically: slowly but surely independent
criticism was being squeezed out. The Sovnarkom decree “O raspredelenii bumagi”
(On the Distribution of Paper), coupled with the paper crisis, led to a reduction in
the number of publications (with the exception of popular literature and the publica-
tions of the Communist Party Central Committee). Following this the All-Russian
Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) resolution “O raspredelenii periodicheskoi
pechati” (On the Distribution of Periodical Publications) required that circulation
statistics for all periodicals be registered with Gosizdat.49 Within a few years the en-
tire system of “thick” and “thin” journals was destroyed. While journal literature
continued to appear, it was primarily restricted to party, state, and Proletkult publi-
cations—less and less independent journalism was published.
This policy elicited protests from the intelligentsia opposed to censorship. The
publication of the “Dekret o pechati” (Decree on the Press) was met with Gorky’s
well-known defense of freedom of expression in Nesvoevremennye mysli (Untimely
Thoughts), where he wrote: “The deprivation of the freedom of the press is physical
violence and is unworthy of democracy.”50 The Union of Soviet Writers published a
special one-time Gazeta-protest: V zashchitu svobody pechati (News-Protest: In Defense
of Press Freedom), with essays by Zinaida Gippius, Evgeny Zamyatin, Vladimir Ko-
rolenko, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and others. In her essay “Krasnaia stena” (The Red
Wall), Gippius concluded: “White rule means white brutality against the word. And
red rule means red brutality.”51
Nevertheless, the journal literature after the revolution was rich and diverse,
notwithstanding the fact that the prerevolutionary press (Vestnik Evropy, Russkoe bo-
gatstvo, Russkaia mysl’) was liquidated in the autumn of 1918. The SR journal Znamia
continued to be published (1919–1922), as did a number of literary-critical journals
unaffiliated with any party (such as Vestnik literatury [1919–1922], Letopis, Doma Litera-
torov [1921–1922], Knizhnyi ugol [1917–1922], and others). The futurist and Proletkult
press, where literary criticism played an important role, took shape at the same time.
From 1918 onward, the first Soviet journals began to appear: Krasnyi ogonek (1918),
Plamia (1918–1920), Tvorchestvo (1918–1922), and the first “thick” (but not specifically
literary) journal, Vestnik zhizni (1918–1919).52
By 1920 new institutional mechanisms had begun to make themselves known,
among the most active of which was the aforementioned Gosizdat, starting with the
publication of the journal Kniga i revoliutsiia, whose editorial board announced its in-
tentions with these words: “For the people, for the masses—everything. For those
‘exceptional individuals’ [iskliuchitel’nye edinitsy]—nothing.”53 The journal was meant
to supplant the independent periodicals like Vestnik literatury and Letopis’ Doma lit-
eratorov that shed light on and evaluated the current literary process and the literary
scene.
Control over the periodicals was further reinforced in 1920 and 1921, which
contributed to the changing reception of “thick” literary journals: “The literary
community and its readership ‘fragmented’ into a jumble of smaller groups, be-
came much reduced, while channels of communication between writer and reader
contracted and deformed, and the publication of many periodicals became more ir-
regular.”54 The year 1920 proved to be decisive, as it was the year when the balance
of power between independent and party criticism shifted; thus a path was opened
for the foundation of new “thick” literary journals. In 1921, despite a severe paper
shortage, two new journals appeared. The regime, in the hope of creating a new field
of literature, looked back to one of the most seminal and deeply rooted institutions
in the Russian literary marketplace, the “thick” journal, and in effect reanimated
this literary institution. Following Kniga i revoliutsiia in June 1921, Krasnaia nov’, the
review journal for literature and the sciences, was founded by Aleksandr Voronskii
with the support of Lenin and Gorky. Next came Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, the journal
of criticism, best known for its usually extensive and well-informed review articles
and bibliographical essays, whose editor in chief was Viacheslav Polonskii and whose
contributors included members of the party elite: Lunacharsky, Nikolai Meshcheria-
kov, Ivan Skortsov-Stepanov, and Mikhail Pokrovskii.
This was the backdrop against which the selection of aesthetic, ideological, and
institutional mechanisms took place; such mechanisms would later prove useful
when the critic became the final arbiter of the literary process and regulator of social
controls over literary production and consumption. The introduction of NEP set in
motion the process of the consolidation of a new system of cultural institutions. This
consolidation of control, which began during the civil war, took place behind the
façade of liberalism and the return of private enterprise to the literary marketplace.
From 1921 on, literary criticism was channeled into the “thick” journals, and began
to play a prescriptive, censorious role. In 1922 the machinery of censorship took on
the institutional form of the Chief Directorate of Literature (Glavlit), which was to
perform the functions of censorship for decades to come.
 LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL
2
POLICY DURING THE NEW ECONOMIC
POLICY, 1921–1927
NATALIA KORNIENKO
Literary Policy, Ideology, and “Kremlin Criticism”
In no other period in the history of Russian literature did the political moment
play such a decisive role for the fate of literature as during the years of the New Eco-
nomic Policy (NEP). Literary criticism, too, reached an unprecedented level of im-
portance during this very “current moment.” In fact this was the formative period of
the very institution of Soviet criticism. The “new course” of the Soviet state (in 1921
a series of Lenin’s articles and speeches on the issue of NEP were published under this
headline) only applied to economic questions. The main ideological parameters of
communist culture, which had been approved by the Ninth Party Congress in 1919,
were never disputed during NEP.
While on the “economic front” NEP only began in 1921, on the cultural front it
was already partly over by 1922. The short “breather” granted to literary life at the
end of 1920, when the party had made Proletkult redundant and was busy devising
new tactics for cultural policy, had been the last soaring moment of Silver Age liter-
ary criticism on the pages of Soviet print media. In Petrograd itself this genre was
mostly found in the journals Vestnik literatury, Dom iskusstv, Letopis’ Doma literatorov,
and Literaturnye zapiski, which, as we saw in chapter one, would be closed down by
the end of 1922. In the same year, the question of philosophical criticism was settled,
17
18  NATALIA KORNIENKO
together with that of Petersburg “aesthetic” criticism, and just as radically. Almost
all camps within Soviet literary criticism participated in the defamation of pre-1917
Russian philosophy during these years, thereby adhering to one of the central so-
cial contracts concluded by the party during the first period of NEP, which on the
grassroots level was implemented by the journal Bezbozhnik and other small journals.
“The new art will be godless art,” this is how Leon Trotsky formulated the heart
of the issue.1 From 1922 onward, the critics invested all their energy into overcom-
ing symbolism in contemporary literature, the form and content of which were still
marked by that school’s philosophical preoccupations. The devotion to this task
united the proletarian critics, the critics of Pereval, the Left Front of the Arts (LEF),
and the formalists.
After the expulsion from the country of many Russian intellectuals working
in the humanities in the autumn of 1922, the party’s main strategic task on the liter-
ary front was the conquest of the nonproletarian groups of writers—“those who are
wavering and without political allegiance, for whose souls a war is raging between
the emigration and us.”2 This strategy was first defined by Lenin. However, the most
important figure nominated by the party in connection with literary life and the hu-
manities in summer 1922 was Trotsky, whose name during these years was associated
with the victory in the civil war.
In 1922, the government needed not only commissars, but also administrators
and organizers of the literary process. Trotsky reckoned that these tasks should be
entrusted to the literary critics. This is the reason why in the summer of 1922 that
criticism, rather than literature itself, was the most important literary matter for the
people’s commisssar: “We absolutely must devote more attention to literary criticism
and poetry.”3 The worry about the lack of specialist critics who could be entrusted
with providing—and were able to —a qualified evaluation of literary works was
reflected in many party documents from 1921–1922. Some items in the resolution
“O belogvardeiskoi literature” (On White Guard Literature) from 22 May 1922 of
the Central Committee’s Politburo today provoke disbelief, for example, “oblige the
Politburo members to devote two–three hours per week to looking through a num-
ber of non-communist publications and books and checking how they are executed,
demanding written reviews and trying to achieve that all non-communist publica-
tions are sent to Moscow without delay.”4 In a letter dated 19 May to Felix Dzerzhin-
sky, the head of the Cheka, Lenin demanded “to collect systematic evidence on the
political record, work, and literary activities of professors and writers,” to entrust
this task “to a capable, educated, and conscientious person within the GPU.”5 A note
by Trotsky from 30 June to the Politburo instructed literary critics how to compile
the dossier required on each writer (biographical details, literary and political con-
nections). At the same time he asked the State Publishing House (Gosizdat) about
the state of current literature: “Are there any records on what the worker likes to
read, in particular which poets, novelists, and so on? Have there been any question-
naires on this topic? In particular, is there information on how the futurists are being
received? What do the workers think of Mayakovsky? If you have any such data,
would you please tell me.”6 Upon being told by the trade section of Gosizdat that no
LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL POLICY DURING THE NEP, 1921–1927  19
such records existed, a large-scale program to research the Russian mass reader was
launched.
The members of the Politburo, Central Committee, government, and Comin-
tern wrote prefaces to and reviews of newly published books, answered literary
questionnaires, took part in literary debates, held regular meetings with writers and
the creative intelligentsia, and so on. “Kremlin criticism” played the role of the high-
est referee. To give an example, this is how the ban on the fellow-traveler Boris Pil-
nyak’s book Smertel’noe manit (The Fatal Beckons) came to be lifted: Trotsky wrote
a letter to the Central Committee members Stalin and Lev Kamenev, stressing that
in the context of “our entire policy” such a decision constituted a “grave mistake”
and that Pilnyak deserved criticism for his “ambivalence” (dvoistvennost’) but no ban.
Trotsky’s letter was followed by the Politburo’s decision to “oblige” Aleksei Rykov,
Mikhail Kalinin, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Kamenev to read Ivan-da-Mar’ia (Ivan
and Maria), and all Politburo members to read the novella Metel’ (The Snowstorm).
After that, apparently, the members of the Politburo had turned into readers and
critics, since on 17 August the Politburo suggested to the Main Political Administra-
tion (Glavnoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie, GPU) that they lift the ban.7
The first conclusions of the turbulent organizational work during the summer
of 1922 were drawn in Trotsky’s article series “Vneoktiabr’skaia literatura” (The
Non-October Literature), published in Pravda from September 1922 onward. The ar-
ticles were devoted to two groups of the literary intelligentsia—the “non-October
intelligentsia” (vneoktiabr’skaia intelligentsiia), that is, the Russian emigration and in-
ner emigrants, and the “literary fellow-travelers of the revolution” (literaturnye poput
chiki revoliutsii). According to Trotsky, only the first order could not participate in
“cultural education” (kul’turnicheskaia rabota). Given the strategy on peasant writers
during NEP, the party needed to work with the fellow-travelers, using them for po-
litical purposes. The fellow-travelers of the revolution were those groups of writers
that had no organizational or ideological links to the party: “They don’t understand
the revolution in its entirety and its communist goal is alien to them. They are all to
a greater or lesser degree inclined to overlook the worker, focussing their hopes on
the peasant. They are no artists of the proletarian revolution, but they are its fellow-
travelers in art.”8 The term fellow-traveler found entry into the language of literary
criticism and party resolutions, becoming one of the most important concepts of the
literary struggle of the 1920s.
Just as pragmatic as the decisions with regard to individual writers were those
concerning the publication of journals that called themselves “nonparty,” that is,
those inspired by the ideology of Smena vekh (Changing Landmarks), Rossiia (in 1922
Novaia Rossiia; from 1924–1925 Rossiia; in 1926 Novaia Rossiia), and Russkii sovremennik
(1924). The critics fulminated against these journals, but for some time these journals
were fulfilling the task of forcing out the former Petersburg publications: Russkii
sovremennik did not touch upon political and social questions at all, while Rossiia, and
later Novaia Rossiia, with its propagation of Smena vekh ideas fulfilled a task it had
been given by Agitprop, namely the fundamental struggle “against the counterrevo-
lutionary moods in the highest echelons of the Russian intelligentsia.”9
The particular attention paid to the fellow-traveler wing of contemporary lit-

erature was no aesthetic deviation on the part of the party or a literary whim of
Trotsky’s. At the same time, the idea of a world revolution remained on the agenda.
The appearance on the literary battlefield of the radical critics of Na postu (On Guard)
and LEF in the summer of 1923 fitted into a political context shaped by new expecta-
tions of an imminent proletarian revolution in Europe, which would paralyze the
“dangerous sides of NEP.”10 In March 1923 the First Moscow Conference of Pro-
letarian Writers took place, during which the ideological and creative platform for
the October group was founded, which demanded the strengthening of the com-
munist line in proletarian literature and the All-Union Association of Proletarian
Writers (VAPP). In June the first issue of the journal Na postu appeared, which owed
its scandalous success to a radical approach to the problem of the Russian classics and
fellow-travelers. Just like the members of October and Na postu, the members of LEF
had their origin in the current moment when party tactics were adapted to the “fast
pace of world events.” However, at the end of the year it was clear that the German
revolution had failed, and in the winter of 1923–1924 signs of an inner-party crisis
emerged.
As a result of these changes, a return to the debate on proletarian culture began
during the fall of 1923. On the pages of Pravda Trotsky reminded people of the Le-
ninist attitude to proletarian culture and advised the workers to learn how to build
power plants, to master the “alphabet of preproletarian culture,” to agitate on the
pages of factory wall newspapers, to prepare the base for the new literature of the
future, but no more than that.11
After the publication of Trotsky’s book Literatura i revoliutsiia (Literature and
Revolution) in November 1923, the warring critical factions entered the final phase
in the process during which they defined their positions with regard to the party’s
attitude toward proletarian culture and the fellow-travelers. The first reviews of
Trotsky’s book that appeared on the pages of the central newspapers and journals
were rapturous in tone: “Only Heine wrote like that.”12 “A brilliant book and a bril-
liant contribution to our proletarian literature,”13 stated Anatoly Lunacharsky, every
inch the loyal subject, in his wordy article “Lev Davydovich Trotskii o literature”
(Lev Davydovich Trotsky on Literature), which was based on the juxtaposition of
quotations from his own writings with the main theses of Trotsky’s book. Even Bo-
ris Eikhenbaum awarded Trotsky’s book a high ranking in contemporary criticism.14
Toward the end of 1923 an inner-party competition began to dominate the de-
bate on proletarian literature and the fellow-travelers: the struggle for Lenin’s inheri-
tance, the party leadership, and the command of future strategy had commenced.
On the literary-critical front, this struggle carried on throughout 1924. The outcome
of the party’s internal struggle was not entirely obvious, which is why the Central
Committee kept all those on the literary-critical front under close control. Evidence
to this effect was provided by the May 1924 conference on issues in literature, pre-
pared by the Central Committee’s press section. The first to speak was Aleksandr
Voronskii, who presented a paper entitled “O politike partii v khudozhestvennoi
literature” (On Party Politics in the Area of Belles Lettres). Afterward the floor was
given to his opponents from the proletarian camp, Ilarion Vardin and Leopold Aver-
bakh. They demanded that the Central Committee establish party dictatorship in
literature and hand the reins of leadership over all of literature to VAPP. With the
exception of the proletarian poets Aleksandr Bezymenskii and Demyan Bednyi, no
writers had been invited to the conference. The fellow-travelers had sent a petition,
asking to be protected from the criticism of Na postu, which pretended to represent
party opinion.
A more clear-cut line emerged in May 1924 with the resolution “O pechati” (On
Print Media), adopted at the Thirteenth Party Congress (23–31 May), which clearly
stated that in the field of literature the party’s measure would be the workers’ and
rural correspondents’ (rabkory i sel’kory), while “party-minded literary criticism” had
to become the main champion of this line.15 On 13 March 1925 a Russian Communist
Party (Bolsheviks) Central Committee special decree on criticism and bibliography
was adopted, which suggested that all periodicals should include permanent review
sections designed to serve clear ideological goals. The Central Committee resolu-
tion “O politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi literatury” (On Party Politics in
the Area of Belles Lettres, 18 June 1925) had formulated the main principles of the
relationship between party and literature as follows: the party takes it upon itself
to direct literature “as a whole” and rejects any single group’s pretensions toward a
monopoly. According to the resolution, criticism was “one of the main educational
instruments at the party’s disposal.”16 Criticism, directed by party decisions, would
need to educate both the writer and the reader. One can say that here the revolution-
ary democrats’ dream had come true of organizing the literary process in such a way
that criticism, instead of literature itself, would express the viewpoint of the “edu-
cated part of society,” “the best part of society,” and thereby “facilitate its further
distribution among the masses.”17
The decree, however, could not ease the confrontations within the field of lit-
erary criticism. The political schisms that took place on all literary fronts during
1925–1926 must be seen in the context of the intensified struggle against “left-wing
dangers inside the party.” In 1925–1927 Voronskii’s opponents gained a weighty po-
litical argument—the accusation of “literary Trotskyism,” which was widely used
by the proletarian critics in order to settle the score with Voronskii, his acolytes, and
his influence (voronshchina) in literature and criticism.
In 1925 and afterward the “new opposition,” having found its organizational
form under the leadership of Trotsky, became one of the most important issues in
the party and government. The question of the association between the triumph of
building socialism in Russia and the triumph of the world revolution disappeared
from the agenda and the course of industrialization and “building socialism in one
country” was announced (Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925). The main
ideological antagonist of the “second stage of NEP” (as Stalin called it) and of the
course toward industrialization turned out to be the Trotsky and Zinoviev opposi-
tion, in particular Trotsky’s slogan of the world (“permanent”) revolution, as well as
the new “bourgeois” dangers that were now being directly linked to the ideology
of Smena vekh: “The ideology of Smena vekh is the ideology of the new bourgeoi-
sie, which is growing and gradually merging with the rich peasants [kulaks] and the
serving [sluzhilaia] intelligentsia. The new bourgeoisie has announced its ideology,
which consists in the opinion that the Communist Party needs to regenerate.”18 This
statement, taken from Stalin’s paper at the Fourteenth Party Congress, can be read
as a distinctive summary of the literary and political ideas of the Smena vekh-inspired
journal Novaia Rossiia. In some sense the journal had carried out party tasks during
the first stage of NEP—the passionate articles of its editor Isaak Lezhnev on the party
program for building socialism in one country, which culminated in his reading of
the acronym NEP as “national economic policy,” also partly served the party.19 On
7 May 1926, however, the Politburo decided to close down the journal Novaia Ros-
siia and send Lezhnev into exile abroad; on 7 June a similar decision was taken with
regard to the publishing house Novaia Rossiia. Glavlit received instructions to ban
the appearance in print of all members of Smena vekh; the OGPU was instructed to
present a paper “on anti-Soviet groups in the country, especially among the intel-
ligentsia.”20 The role of the main exponent of the Smena vekh-inspired “ideology of
the new bourgeoisie” was assigned to Mikhail Bulgakov, one of the writers regularly
contributing to Novaia Rossiia, who in the fall of 1926 was dealt shattering blows
out of every single critical weapon. In light of the decisions adopted in May and
June, the date of the inception of the critical campain against the Bulgakov influence
(bulgakovshchina) on 5 October was very significant: this was the day of the premiere
of Dni Turbinykh (The Days of the Turbins) at the Moscow Art Academic Theater
(MKhAT), and Lunacharsky’s opinion on Bulgakov’s play appeared in the first col-
umn of the Leningrad Krasnaia gazeta. After this publication there could only be neg-
ative opinions. The premiere at the MKhAT had merely been a convenient pretext
for beginning to expose the Smena vekh-inspired “domestic counterrevolution.”21
In October 1926 a joint plenary session of the Central Committee and the
Central Control Commission of the party relieved Trotsky of the obligations of a
Politburo member on the grounds of “factional activity.” He also lost his leading po-
sitions in the field of literary politics, as proven by the many petitions of writers and
critics to the Central Committee, which by the end of 1925 were already addressed
to Nikolai Bukharin and Stalin, the main critics of the Trotskyite opposition. The
struggle inside the party, the outcome of which remained unclear until the end of
1927, added tension to the discussions in literary criticism, too. The confrontation
between Voronskii and Averbakh, the new leader of the Na postu critics, ended in
the summer of 1927 when the opponents of Voronskii could celebrate their victory:
Voronskii lost his post as editor in chief of Krasnaia nov’.
The association between Trotsky and Voronskii throws light upon the turbu-
lent current of literary and political discussions during the end of 1926 and the begin-
ning of 1927, about hooliganism, the “sexual question,” the demoralization of the
Komsomol members, and the “face” of Komsomol literature. On 19 September 1926
the article “Razvenchaite khuliganstvo” (Dethrone Hooliganism), written by the
well-known party publicist Lev Sosnovskii, appeared in Pravda and Komsolmol’skaia
Pravda and became the starting point for the struggle against the promoters of Sergei
Esenin and eseninshchina. The critical campaign against Esenin was more far-reaching
than the one against Bulgakov due to being extended into the broader context of life
at a grassroots level.
One of the deeper ironies of the NEP period was the fact that the mass reader,
who during these years had become one of the central metafigures in the critical
battle, turned out to be just as anarchic as before. It turned out that the real reader in
Soviet Russia was hardly interested in contemporary literature at all, preferring the
old Russian classics instead. And he was even more indifferent toward the struggles
in literary criticism. “We must give the reader some orientation, and fast,” the Pe-
reval-man Abram Lezhnev said in 1926.22 The opposing critical camps issued simi-
lar appeals. The efforts of the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros)
to promote the “new book” to the masses, various cultural initiatives (kul’tpokhody)
of the society Kniga—v massy (Books to the Masses), the trials of nonreaders—all
this had so far failed to bring about any significant changes in reading tastes. And
school education, reduced almost to its bare foundations during the NEP years, had
also not yet “stamped” the new readers. The information about the attitudes in the
circles of readers and writers that was available by 1927 was doubtlessly the reason
for the foundation of the weekly Chitatel’i pisatel’, the first issue of which appeared in
December 1927.
The Serapion Brothers as Critics in the First Period of NEP
The legacy of the Serapion Brothers in the field of literary criticism is not large,
but it occupies a special place in the literary and critical struggles of the first stage of
NEP. The group had its own theoreticians, the professional philologist Lev Lunts
and the critic Il’ia Gruzdev. Other members of the group who wrote critical ar-
ticles and reviews were Nikolai Nikitin, Veniamin Kaverin (also a professional phi-
lologist), and Konstantin Fedin, one of the editors of the Petrograd critical journal
Kniga i revoliutsiia, where the Serapion Brothers published their writings between
1920–1923. Mikhail Zoshchenko also wrote critical essays on the literature of the first
two decades of the twentieth century. As critics, the Serapion Brothers provoked a
stormy polemic about ideology and literature and instigated the debate on plot and
adventure literature in literary circles. Both campaigns had an air of political and
literary dissidence about them.
The Serapion Brothers made their appearance as a literary group in early 1922,
during the destruction campaign against the old literary Petersburg, when the party
critics employed carrot-and-stick tactics in an effort to tear the literary youth away
from the “old men”—the “White Guards.” The Bolsheviks, for whom the Peters-
burg literary scene forever remained the enemy, tried their favorite tactic of “divide
and rule” on the Serapion Brothers. It seems the Brothers could have remained silent
and refused to react to the abusive reviews of the Peterburgskii sbornik (Petersburg Col-
lection), in which the work of several of them (Zoshchenko, Mikhail Slonimskii,
Fedin, Nikolai Tikhonov, Vsevold Ivanov) had appeared alongside mature Peters-
burg poets and prose writers. But they chose to reply publicly—to Iakov Iakovlev,
the omnipotent head of the Central Committee’s press section (who had demanded
an explanation of how the young writers had found themselves in the “camp of the
white dogs”), but above all to the Communist poet Sergei Gorodetskii.23 “Otvet
Serapionovykh brat’ev Sergeiu Gorodetskomu” (The Serapion Brothers’ Reply to
Sergei Gorodetskii), published in the Petersburg newspaper Zhizn’ iskusstva on 28
March and in the first issue of Novaia Rossiia, essentially became the Serapion Broth-
ers’ first manifesto. They presented themselves as an “organic group” and rejected
their opponents’ wish that the “green plants” repudiate the “mold”—the “rest of Pe-
tersburg literature.” This was their first point. Second, in their collective letter the
“green plants,” rather shockingly, revealed their lack of political interest: “We reject
all tendentiousness.”24
The Serapion Brothers achieved almost immediate fame. Their works were
printed in Petrograd, Moscow, and Berlin. The Russian emigration was writ-
ing about them.25 Gorky supported the young writers from faraway Sorrento. In
April the almanac The Serapion Brothers appeared, enthusiastically greeted by Yuri
Tynianov, Evgeny Zamyatin, Pilnyak, Marietta Shaginyan, and many others.
In Moscow, the Serapion Brothers came to the attention of the influential Voron-
skii, who began to publish their work and mention their names in the presence of
representatives of the new young Soviet literature who were “hostile to both the
emigration and the last remaining ‘figures of dominant influence’ [vlastiteli dum] in
literature.”26 At an open meeting of the Serapion Brothers on the occasion of the
hundredth anniversary of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s death, held in the summer of 1922
(the peak time of the political struggle, featuring the trial of the right-wing Socialist
Revolutionaries [SRs] and arrests of members of the intelligentsia working in the
humanities), Kaverin read a paper entitled “Rech’ k stoletiiu so dnia smerti E. T. A.
Gofmana” (A Speech on the 100th Anniversary of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Death) in
which he spoke about the “great Western writer” who had shown that the “magic of
the unbelievable is living right next to us.”27 On 1 August the third and final issue of
the journal Literaturnye zapiski appeared, which contained the autobiographies of the
Serapion Brothers and Lev Lunts’s article “Pochemu my Serapionovy Brat’ia” (Why
We Are the Serapion Brothers). The way in which the Serapion Brothers treated the
question of ideology—or rather of two ideologies, one artistic and the other social
and political—appeared like a development of the main ideas of Zamyatin’s article
“Ia boius’” (I Fear, 1921), which the party critics had considered the political mani-
festo of the “non-October intelligentsia.” Lunts’s article focused on the issues of the
freedom of the artist, the secret nature of the writer’s work, and the autonomy of art:
“Art is real, as is life itself. And just as life itself, art has no goal and no meaning: it ex-
ists because it cannot not exist.”28 The leitmotif of the article was the rejection of all
canons and authorities: “We . . . do not want coercion and boredom, we do not want
everyone to write in the same way.”
The responses, or rather, the harsh reactions to this article were not long in
coming: between August and December several important figures (Il’ia Sadof’ev,
the leader of the Petersburg proletarian poets, the influential proletarian critic Pavel
Lebedev-Polianskii, Pyotr Kogan, and Trotsky) all attacked the Serapion Brothers.
In a new statement Lunts reiterated his former theses: “the official critics themselves
do not know what they want. What they want is not ideology in general, but a
strictly defined, party ideology!”29 Similarly, Il’ia Gruzdev, a major literary critic
close to the Serapion Brothers, positioned himself as an antipode to philosophical
and aesthetic criticism; he expanded the formalist thesis of criticism as a strict sci-
ence to absurd proportions, adding that criticism ought to be like zoology, that is,
it needed to enter a path of “classifying and studying living creatures according to
their main characteristic—the structure of their organism.”30 And not a word about
ideology or themes; the question of the “what” (content) falls away and the emphasis
is transferred to the “how.”
In turn, the Petrograd proletarian writers and critics pointed out the ideologi-
cal shortcomings of the brethren: “half-anarchist, half-kulak reception of the revo-
lution,” “anarcho-chaotic psychology.”31 From Moscow the futurist Nikolai Aseev
gave a dressing-down to the Serapion Brothers for their coquetry with “ideologi-
cal innocence,” as did the proletarian critic Semyon Rodov.32 The latter based his
judgment on Trotsky’s characterizations of the “holy foolish” Serapion Brothers.33
In a letter to Gorky (in the second half of October 1922) Mikhail Slonimskii called
the year 1922 with its overflowing political passions “the neurasthenic period of the
Serapion Brothers.”34 The heightened attention to the group’s debut had brought
fame to all its members and facilitated their entry into all-union literary life, but at
the same time it predetermined the outcome of all their attempts to found their own
literary and critical journal.
In his memoir Gor’kii sredi nas (Gorky among Us) Fedin called Viktor Shklovsky
“the first Serapion Brother—because of the passion he brought to our life and the
wit of the questions he added to our disputes.”35 And indeed Shklovsky had been
the first to ask the question about adventure novels and mass literature and to high-
light the importance of plot: “We despise Dumas; in England they regard him as a
classic. We regard Stevenson as a children’s writer, while he is really a classic who
has created new novelistic forms and even left some theoretical writings on plot and
style. Young Russian literature at present is going into the direction of developing
the story.”36 This last point concerned the central theme of the Serapion Brothers in
the field of literary theory—the plot as the nucleus of the creation and implementa-
tion of a new artistic vision.
Ironically, at the end of 1922 the plans to modernize the entire edifice of Rus-
sian culture, drawn up by the Bolsheviks and actively implemented by Narkompros,
coincided with the avant-garde literary ideas of the Serapion Brothers. On 14 Oc-
tober Pravda printed an address Bukharin had given at the Fifth All-Union Kom-
somol Congress, calling on writers to create antifascist adventure novels and give
the readers, who were devouring Western mass literature, our “red Pinkerton.” At a
meeting of the Serapion Brothers on 2 December Lunts introduced a new program
to his brethren. In the words of a report by Krasnaia gazeta, which had only recently
scolded the Serapion Brothers for aristocratism and aestheticism: “According to
Lunts, there is no Russian theater or Russian literature in the European sense, since
Russian literature has shunned, with few exceptions, all development of plot and
adventure patterns over the entire course of its existence, devoting instead all its at-
tention to language, psychologism, everyday life, and tendencies in society. Because

of this Russian literature is ‘provincial’ and ‘boring’ and by virtue of this undemo-
cratic, as it does not attract readers from the people.”37
The slogan “Na Zapad!” (Westward!) marks the main direction of the Serapion
Brothers’ search. This was a direction that, on the one hand, made reserves available
for innovative experiments in prose, above all in the area of plot, and on the other
hand broke with the civic “activist” (obshchestvennicheskaia), “lecturing” tradition that
stood behind the nineteenth-century Russian novel. Moreover, according to Lunts,
in Russian literature “there is no one” to learn from when it comes to adventure
novels.
The inspired hymn to the plot was accompanied by a subtle recoding of the
values of classical Russian literature: entertainment instead of instruction, play and
mystification instead of seriousness and “boredom,” a fascinating plot and intrigue
instead of heavy Russian psychologism, lyrical bareness, and the knitting together of
“weighty words,” masks, irony, and parody instead of the author.
For some time the Serapion Brothers’ ideas of revolutionizing the plot happened
to be close to the authorities’ own ideas, concerned as they were (for different rea-
sons) with overcoming the ideology of classical Russian literature and the formation
of an international culture. Gorky nurtured “high hopes” that the Serapion Broth-
ers would overcome the ideological complexes of the Russian classics in his article
“Gruppa ‘Serapionovy brat’ia’” (The Group “Serapion Brothers,” 1923). One can say
that the adventure novel was the new authorities’ first large-scale contract with both
literature and criticism. In 1923 the first Soviet adventure novel, Ilya Ehrenburg’s
Neobychainye pokhozhdeniia Khulio Khurenito i ego uchenikov (The Unusual Adventures
of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples), first published in Berlin in 1922, was published
by Gosizdat publishing house, accompanied by a preface by Bukharin, in which he
praised the novel for its “original nihilism.” In 1924 Shaginyan’s Mess-Mend, ili Ianki
v Petrograde (Mess-Mend, or Yankees in Petrograd) came out with a preface by Niko-
lai Meshcheriakov, the head of Gosizdat. A boom in adventure prose set in, and the
Serapion Brothers were part of it: Shklovsky and Ivanov’s Iprit (Mustard Gas), Ka-
verin’s Konets Khazy (The End of Khaza), Ivanov’s Chudesnye pokhozhdeniia portnogo
Fokina (The Wonderful Adventures of Fokin the Tailor). In February and May 1924
Kaverin and Gruzdev presented papers on contemporary prose at a meeting of the
Committee for the Study of Contemporary Literature at the Institute of the History
of the Arts. Their main thesis was that “plot-based prose takes the place of ornamen-
tation” (Kaverin): the “constructive elements” of ornamental prose (skaz), and the
traditional realist novel are so “worn out” that “even flawless material can no longer
be contained by them” (Gruzdev).38
The Serapion Brothers’ break with symbolic and symbolist concepts of the im-
age and with ornamental prose impressed the writers and critics from Lef and Na
postu.39 The Pereval critics, who provided an aesthetic platform for classical Russian
literature, maintained a reserved attitude. However, Andrei Belyi and Iakov Braun,
writing in Rossiia and Novaia Rossiia between 1924–1926, criticized the plot campaign
and its ideologues in the sharpest possible form.40 The Serapion Brothers themselves
after 1925 no longer participated in the critical battles over the revolution of the plot.
Lev Lunts, who had been the group’s main theoretical driving force, died in 1924,
and in the same year Shklovsky and Tynianov stated that the Serapion Brothers had
ceased to exist as a literary group, thus echoing Zamyatin’s opinion from 1922.41 In
his article “V poiskakh zhanra” (In Search for Genre, 1924) Boris Eikhenbaum drew
a few conclusions concerning the Serapion Brothers’ studies on plot and the adven-
ture novel. Pointing out that the writing of adventure, crime, and science fiction
novels had not yet reached its zenith, Eikhenbaum refuted a theory of the develop-
ment and renewal of Russian literature that a short time ago had sounded like an
axiom: “A short time ago it seemed that the issue was the creation of the adventure
novel, which so far had been almost absent in Russian literature. This idea was above
all inspired by the mass fascination with the cinema and adventure novels in transla-
tion. However, the crisis runs deeper.”42 Eikhenbaum thus tactfully warned about
the limitations of the experiments undertaken by the Serapion Brothers.
The Literary Criticism of Pereval
The key figures behind this direction in criticism were Aleksandr Voronskii and
Viacheslav Polonskii, the founder and editor of Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, a monthly journal
featuring extensive and well-informed review articles. The journal began to appear
in 1921, at the same time as Krasnaia nov’, which was edited by Voronskii. Almost all
Soviet writers who later became classics—from the representatives of “non-October
literature” and fellow-travelers to the Proletarians and LEF writers—went through
Krasnaia nov’ and Novyi mir, which from 1926 onward was also edited by Voronskii.
Voronskii printed articles by the futurists and LEF members Aseev, Mayakovsky,
and Mikhail Levidov in Krasnaia nov’. Polonskii gave a platform in Novyi mir and Pe-
chat’ i revoliutsiia to Aseev, who was perpetually arguing with him, the impetuous Na
postu man Grigorii Lelevich, the Kuznitsa-member Georgii Iakubovskii, and oth-
ers. Such aesthetic breadth rendered factional oppositions invisible. Also, during the
first Soviet decade, it was this critical front that stabilized and defended literature as
art.43 Boris Eikhenbaum wrote in 1924: “Voronskii began with very harsh and deci-
sive articles, but his tone gradually softened. Having been a prosecutor or investiga-
tor, Voronskii gradually turned a distinctive defender of the rights of contemporary
literature.”44 For his struggle against the critics from Na postu, “a group with police
functions,” the Russian emigration was also willing to forgive Voronskii many sins,
noting the “artistic and literary liberalism” of his positions and his weighty contribu-
tion to the preservation of literature in Soviet Russia.45 Polonskii, who during the
rout of the “Voronskii influence” (voronshchina) in 1927 in many respects picked up
the baton of struggle against the Na postu tendency and the “new” LEF, was to fol-
low a path close to that of Voronskii.
Organizationally, Voronskii and Polonskii did not form part of the group Pere-
val, which had emerged around the journal Krasnaia nov’ in 1923, but it is to these two
and their journals that we link the names of the critics who signed the declaration of
the Pereval group in 1926: Dmitrii Gorbov, Abram Lezhnev, Nikolai Zamoshkin,
Nikolai Smirnov, Vladimir Dynnik, and Solomon Pakentreiger. These critics fo-
cused on different themes within contemporary literature and had different aesthetic
preferences. They employed different critical and stylistic approaches, had entered
criticism by different paths, and found different places within the field. What united
them into a group were the heated literary struggles of 1923–1924, in the context of
which they took Voronskii’s side and propagated the slogan he had proposed in the
article “Na perevale” (On the Mountain Pass) in the summer of 1923: “Forward to
the classics, to Gogol, to Tolstoy, and to Shchedrin.”46 With regard to the content
of literature Voronskii propagated art’s task as cognition of life, the creation of a
contemporary hero, the overcoming of the focus on everyday life, and the liberation
from “regionalism” (oblastnichestvo). Formal strategies were “realism” and “neoreal-
ism, a distinctive combination of romanticism, symbolism, and realism” (Izbrannye
stat’i o literature, 338). Polonskii later suggested a similar formula, that of “romantic
realism.”47
“Organicity” and “living life” (zhivaia zhizn’) were the only basic concepts of
Voronskii that found entry into the distinctive metatext of the literary critical lan-
guage of Pereval. In 1924 several lesser-known writers joined the group; they re-
ferred to their “own organic belonging to the revolution” and identified the problem
of “the need for an organic combination of the social contract with one’s own creative
individuality” (all quotes are from the declaration of the group from 1926, which also
stressed the need to fight the “irresponsible criticism” of Na postu and LEF).48
The program of the Pereval critics that foresaw “learning from the classics” was
based on a perception they shared with some of the party critics (especially Trotsky
and his Literatura i revoliutsiia), namely that the early twentieth century was a period
of sharp decline in Russian literature during which individualistic schools and ten-
dencies had gained the upper hand. Because of that they regarded the revolution
as a blessing for Russian literature. Lezhnev, for example, amplifying Voronskii’s
conception, stated that the “break in gradualness” (razryv postepennosti) in the devel-
opment of Russian literature had cut off the mistaken path on which Russian litera-
ture had embarked at the turn of the century.49 This path had been mistaken because
literature had broken the covenants of the “heroic period of Russian literature” of
the nineteenth century and interrupted the tradition of the most outstanding phe-
nomenon of classical Russian literature—realism. According to Lezhnev, Russian
literature of the early twentieth century had been secondary to Western literature in
formal aspects, and its main schools—symbolism in particular—were nothing but
a copy of Western literary phenomena: “It had begun to ‘Europeanize,’ and who
knows what levels of Europeanization it would have attained, had the 1917 revolu-
tion not cut short this ‘natural’ process.”50 We can sum up the trajectory of early-
twentieth-century Russian literature in the Pereval critics’ favorite term: thanks to
the Revolution of 1917, Russian literature had returned to its own organic path of
development.
The Pereval critics regarded the literary criticism of the Serapion Brothers, Za-
myatin, and the formalists as belonging entirely to the paradigm of that early-twen-
tieth-century literature that had left the grand themes behind. Voronskii accused
LITER ARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL POLICY DURING THE NEP, 1921–1927  29
Zamyatin of “word worship, excess enthusiasm for mastery and form”; the Serapion
Brothers and the formalists of “never talking about content” (Izbrannye stat’i o litera-
ture, 356); and the emotionalists (although he did not mention Kuzmin) of having the
mistaken idea that art is organized by emotions (426). Furthermore, while the Pere-
val critics had the critics of Na postu and LEF at their “left” flank, the “right” flank
(derived from the “right-wing dangers” of the 1922 party resolution) was made up of
the Russian emigration, the Smena vekh journal Rossiia, and Russkii sovremennik—the
journal of Petrograd literature and culture. The latter two became the target of a
number of ironic invectives by the Pereval critics.
The criticism of the journal Rossiia (Lezhnev, Zamyatin, Belyi, Mandelstam,
Kuzmin, Braun, and others) was “not criticism but critical foxtrot,” while the crit-
ics of the Russkii sovremennik, under the leadership of the “honorary bishop of the
formalist school, Boris Eikhenbaum,” were accused of arguing against Marxist criti-
cism without knowing the most elementary things about it.51 The literary products
that are published in these journals are “unoriginal” and “not contemporary,” “help-
lessly dead.”52 Lezhnev scolded Shklovsky for his book Treti’a fabrika (The Third
Factory, 1926), calling him “a posing Hamlet from OPOIAZ, ready to turn into
a selfless Don Quixote in an instant and sacrifice his life for the better quality of
literary fiber.”53 While Lezhnev and Polonskii engaged in the struggle against the
internal “right flank,” the Pereval critics mustered strong forces against the Russian
emigration, too: Voronskii, Gorbov, and Smirnov.
The Pereval critics worked the slogan “forward to the classics” into a carefully
formulated paradigm of the new time, although it was not only Voronskii’s ideo-
logical opponents who repeatedly pointed out the obvious eclecticism of his literary-
critical constructions. Voronskii tried to pour new content into the classical aesthetic
forms, which had their own philosophy of life and art. Thus Vissarion Belinsky’s
aesthetics of philosophical realism (Voronskii appealed to him more than to anyone
else) was born out of his Hegelianism and immersion into Hegel’s theory of dialecti-
cal cognition, which regarded art as one of the ways of knowing the absolute, the
World Spirit (Weltgeist).54 But more than anything else Voronskii the critic was afraid
of idealism, the struggle against which he so actively advanced. The slogan about
“learning” from the Russian classics had a similar feel to it—the contemporary
writer must not glean “anything mystical” from the world of Tolstoy and Pushkin
(Izbrannye stat’i o literature, 360). While the Pereval critics tolerated the subjectivity
and intuition of the artist, they argued that the critic had a high educational mis-
sion: he must “translate ‘intuition’ into the language of logic” (353), since the writer
is incapable of artistic analysis and “blind intuition” could be wrong and lead him to
who knows where.
Immersing themselves in the sphere of artistic cognition, the Pereval critics
touched upon the question of artistic intuition and the unconscious. Freud was called
to become a fellow-traveler in the struggle for a new everyday life, that is, a new un-
derstanding of family, kin, love, ethics, aesthetics, and man in total, and to turn into
a weapon of attack against the “mystical” soul of man.55 Questions of psychoanalysis
and Soviet culture were widely discussed on the pages of Krasnaia nov’ and Pechat’
i revoliutsiia. Voronskii’s long article “Freidizm i iskusstvo” (Freudianism and Art,

1925) was devoted to Freud’s theory of dreams. Voronskii thought that the study of
the inner life of the individual was a definite merit of Freud’s teachings. In the pal-
pable enthusiasm for psychoanalysis in contemporary Soviet literature the critic saw
a natural reaction to rational and utilitarian concepts of art, while he explained the
infection with “idealistic” Freudianism among the proletarian critics from the Com-
munist Academy with a weak knowledge of Marxism and Russian and European
nineteenth-century literature.
The Pereval critics’ answer to the question of who the Soviet writer should fol-
low in his attempt to understand man and the present—psychoanalysis or the psy-
chologism of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—was “the classics.” Yet the extent to which
Pereval was engaged in polemics against the concepts of the Russian Association of
Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and LEF fuelled some of their shifts in emphasis; as soon
as the latter launched a radical attack of the Pereval concept of art as figurative cogni-
tion of life, the Pereval critics emphasized again the unconscious and the intuitive. In
1927 Voronskii already advised contemporary writers to study realism not only with
Tolstoy, but also with the “intuitionist” Proust, in whose work excursions beyond
the borders of normal vision were controlled by the writer’s cultural awareness, and
even recognized as a teacher Andrei Belyi—against whose mysticism and its influ-
ence on the fellow-traveling youth he had fought so hard at the beginning of the
decade.56
The Avant-Garde in Literary Criticism
The radical left-wing of literary criticism, represented by the journals Lef

(1923–1925) and Novyi Lef (1927–1928), united representatives of various groups, aes-
thetic preferences, and tendencies of the revolutionary time and civil war epoch who
had remained faithful to their aesthetic and ideological platforms. The journal Lef
was the scene for a meeting, unique in its own sense, between the gloomy indus-
trial and Proletkult writers, who followed the futurists in their rejection of tradi-
tional culture, the constructivists, and the formalists, who were struggling against
the generally accepted concept of “tradition.” Each of these groups made a weighty
contribution to Lef ’s new language for the interpretation of contemporary literature,
and Lef provided the platform where the different tendencies influenced and mutu-
ally enriched each other.
The main critics of Lef were Mayakovsky (the journal’s editor in chief), Nikolai
Chuzhak, Shklovsky, Aseev, Brik, Boris Arvatov, Pyotr Neznamov, Sergei Tretya-
kov, and Viktor Pertsov. Each of them elaborated, insisted upon, and defended a dis-
tinct aspect of the problem of “cultural innovation.”57 The group was not large, but
its contribution to the cultural process of the 1920s was significant.
The “culture-building” activities of the Lef critics extended to many different
areas. In 1923–1924 they actively participated in the society Oktiabr’ mysli (Octo-
ber of Thought), which had been founded at the Socialist Academy; they were the
first to study Lenin’s language (devoting to it a special issue of Lef in 1924); and they
were the main players in the affirmation of the aesthetic principles of the new Soviet
cinema and the ultimate destruction of the remnants of prerevolutionary cinema to-
ward the end of the first Soviet decade. The Lef critics were not distorting the facts
when, in 1927, they gave themselves credit for having been the first (even before the
party) to fight against the peasant-imitating writers (muzhikovstvuiushchie), the Esenin
influence (eseninshchina), and decadence in theater (Bulgakov’s Dni Turbinykh) and
in literature. They rejected the accusations of group mentality (kruzhkovshchina) that
were heaped on them, instead regarding Lef as a laboratory for the development of
completely new foundations for a culture that the Soviet state presented to the West
as the main achievement of the epoch of the proletarian revolution.
The Lef critics’ program for a new aesthetics consisted of drawing up the founda-
tions of the theories of the “art of life building,” “production art,” “social mandate,”
and the “literature of fact.” In a country in which the proletariat was victorious,
the former method of “bourgeois aesthetics”—“art as a method of understanding
life”—could not remain valid. This method of “passive contemplation” was to be re-
placed by a fundamentally different “method of life building” (zhiznestroenie). There
could be no compromise between art as cognition (Pereval’s platform) and art as life
building: “This is the clear and precise watershed of different ‘aesthetics.’”58 Nikolai
Chuzhak, the main theorist of art as life building, reckoned that any form of art that
“accompanied” real life externally, from a bystander’s position, “even in the most
avant-garde manner,” was by default defective and insufficient: “Art as an accompa-
niment, even the most revolutionary one, is nothing before the task of actively merging with
the process of production” (emphasis in the original).59 Chuzhak declared agitational art
defective, harshly criticized Mayakovsky’s poetry, and called upon him to pay back
“the production art promissory notes that have been handed out.”
The Lef critics believed that under the contradictory and arbitrary conditions of
“fat NEP” the preservation of the conquests of the revolution required a very signifi-
cant mustering of strength; art had to take upon itself the function of preparing man
for work, practice, and invention—the revolutionary transformation of everyday
life. They asked the question whether the Russian classics would further the aims of
life building. The answer was an uncompromising “no.”
A key figure in the development of the Lef project of “production aesthetics”
was Boris Arvatov, a long-standing Proletkult member and professional sociologist
of art. In many respects he followed Alexander Bogdanov’s Tektologiia and reckoned
that as a consequence of the industrial revolution at the turn of the twentieth century
(collectivization of production, growth of contemporary cities, and the formation
of trusts for newspapers, journals, and book publishing) there would be a growing
movement in favor of utilitarian literature. Arvatov saw no principal distinction be-
tween the West, where newspaper trusts had their own “manufacture and factory
specialists who think up agitation novels and agitation poetry,” and the Soviet Union
with its “nationalized industry and partly nationalized literature.”60 Under the new
conditions of production and civilization and on the threshold of world revolution,
the proletariat, in order to secure the victory in this revolution, would naturally re-
ject not only the capitalist order, but also all its superstructures (nadstroiki) with their
“organizational methods,” throwing all previous answers to the question what is art
into the “garbage bin of history.”61
An aspect of Lef criticism that turned out to be in great demand was the method-
ological concept of “artistic restoration,” which Arvatov had deduced from Marx’s
analysis of the history of the French Revolution: “Marx looks at the restorative form
of the aesthetic illusion . . . as one of several possible instances of restorative deception in
general” (emphasis in the original).62 The Lef critics turned the attacks on artistic
restoration into a powerful weapon in the literary struggle. Arvatov suggested a con-
crete method for analyzing the phenomenon of artistic restoration in contemporary
art. Taking the main propositions of the so-called Society for the Study of Poetic
Language (better known as Opoyaz), Arvatov added a sociological foundation to the
theoretical propositions of the formalists. This marriage gave birth to the method of
the formal sociological analysis of the poetic techniques of contemporary literature,
which he suggested in the article “Kontr-revoliutsiia formy (O Valerii Briusove)”
(The Counter-Revolution of Form [On Valery Bryusov]). Having compiled and
analyzed the lexicon of archaisms, epithets, and mythological images in Bryusov’s
poetry, Arvatov came to a conclusion that became important for the productionists
with regard to Bryusov’s “archaism of technique” as well as the meaning of this kind
of poetic restoration: “Bryusov, with all his might, drags our consciousness back-
wards, into the past; he remakes the revolution in the manner of the Greek and other
styles—he adapts it to the tastes of the most conservative strata in contemporary
life.”63
For the Lef critics the dividing line in contemporary criticism lay between them
and those whom they regarded as the main defenders of the restoration of realism in
literature—Lunacharsky (who in 1923 put forward the slogan “back to Ostrovsky,”
to “the ethical theater of the everyday”64) and the “Voronskii-Polonskii-Lezhnev
critics.”65 In 1923 the Lef critics reacted sharply to Trotsky’s statement and to what
was, in their view, a certain ambiguity in the party’s position on art, claiming that
the party’s support for the “path of restoration” and the NEP and fellow-travelers’
front had been fatal, above all for the young generation of writers. Trotsky, who
devoted several articles to Lef and the futurists, essentially rehabilitated the futur-
ists in the eyes of society and wrote entirely benevolently about those Lef members
who were also futurists. Remarking that Lef ’s approach to very complex questions
of legacy was “unfortunately” tainted “with the colors of utopian sectarianism,” he
recognized the contribution the Lef theorists and critics had made to the conception
of future socialist art: “The great style of the future will be formative rather than
decorative. In this point the Futurists are right.”66
The Lef critics with their instinct for the political state of affairs did not seek an
argument with the omnipotent Trotsky but focused their critical pens on the state-
ments of Lunacharsky and Voronskii, forming against the latter a “defensive and
offensive union” with the Na postu critics (Andrei Platonov’s definition, 1924). Their
criticism of the “backward” slogans of Lunacharsky and Voronskii remained consis-

tent throughout—in 1923,“We give the craving for ‘backward’ an organized rebuff”;
in 1927, “any slogan that begins with the word “backward,” back to Ostrovsky, back
to Mozart, . . . is by definition reactionary.”67
The Lef critics continually expanded the front in their struggle against “the litera-
ture of passive enjoyment” (passivno-naslazhdencheskaia literatura).68 From the decon-
struction of the Russian classics they proceeded to a critique of the fellow-travelers
with their “cult of ancestors,” the peasant-imitating (muzhikovstvuiushchaia) prose
of Pilnyak, Leonid Leonov, Vsevold Ivanov, Lidiia Seifullina, the neobourgeois
restorers Aleksei Tolstoy, Ilya Ehrenburg, Boris Lavrenev, Konstantin Fedin, and
Mikhail Bulgakov. From 1926 onward, when the Na postu critics churned out new
slogans for proletarian literature—the realistic depiction of the contemporary hero
and apprenticeship with Tolstoy—the Lef critics wrote negative (and witty) reviews
of the most important novels of proletarian prose written under the sign of appren-
ticeship with the classics.
The radical program of the “literature of fact,” which had taken definite form
by 1927, completed the Lef critics’ project of new literature and marked a new stage in
their struggle against traditional aesthetics in contemporary literature: “Belle-lettres
are opium for the people,” stated Nikolai Chuzhak; and Sergei Tretyakov made it
known that, “We have no reason to wait for Tolstoys, because we have our own
epos. Our epos is the newspaper. . . . What the Bible was to the medieval Christian—
a pointer for all contingencies of life; what the moralizing novel was to the Russian
liberal intelligentsia, that is the newspaper for the Soviet activist of our times.”69 The
Lef critics suggested new forms and genres (the biography of a concrete individual, a
court report, minutes of a meeting, notebook entries) that broke with the tradition of
writing as inventing and were alien to any notion of subjectivism or intimism. The
theory of “fact” was the most consistently radical refutation of the traditional aes-
thetics of the image (obraz). Himself rejecting this traditional aesthetics, Shklovsky,
whose position was not identical with that of the unswerving theorists of the litera-
ture of fact, welcomed the montage of “facts” inspired by the cinema as a renewal
of the construction principle of the novel.70 This nuance did not negate the general
pathos of the project suggested by the aesthetics and criticism of Lef—that the fu-
ture “literature” of the new state was to be essentially journalistic. The Lef critics
were under no illusion that the writers would support their project, and they were
right. Chuzhak admitted in 1927 that the majority of writers would side not with
Lef but with Voronskii, “with whom one can at least sometimes celebrate pancakes
and praise Christ.”71 This was an open hint that even the party statement (he was
referring to Bukharin’s “Zlye zametki” [Angry Comments], discussing mostly the
poetry of Esenin) had not succeeded in destroying literary conservatism. The Lef
critics had no reason to place their hopes in the reader either. While the Pereval crit-
ics saw their mission in the reeducation and correct orientation of the mass reader,
the Lef critics wanted to fight him, having rejected the idea that he could be peace-
fully reeducated.
The Literary Criticism of Na postu
The various crises that affected the proletarian movement in literature began
with the collapse of Proletkult in 1920. The first organized group had been Kuznitsa,
whose members had declared their break away from Proletkult and the foundation
of VAPP. The other proletarian groups (Oktiabr’ [October], Molodaia gvardiia [The
Young Guard], and Rabochaia vesna [Workers’ Spring]) emerged only after the dec-
laration of NEP in 1922. In 1923 they formed the Moscow Association of Proletar-
ian Writers (MAPP). Unlike the writers of Kuznitsa (the group briefly ran a journal
of the same name), the members of Oktiabr’ and Molodaia gvardiia (both of which
also ran eponymous journals) prioritized ideological and political questions and in-
troduced themselves as “fighters on the ideological-literary front” and “recruits of
Communism.”72 The critics who had joined Oktiabr’ and Molodaia gvardiia made
up the backbone of that phenomenon of the first Soviet decade that was to become
known under the name napostovstvo (onguardism), after the name of the proletarian
critical journal Na postu.
No group was more involved in organizational activities than the Na postu
critics. They were perpetually calling executive meetings, plenary sessions, coun-
cils, conferences, and congresses. They passed resolutions and new programs, chose
themes they wanted to develop, drew up lists of enemies, fellow-travelers and ren-
egades, wrote agreements and theses, and so on—and all this was published in their
journals and almost immediately appeared in the form of individual brochures and
was sent to the grassroots writers’ organizations for implementation. By 1926 the Na
postu critics had thirteen regional literary and art journals under their control, as
well as the Moscow-based Molodaia gvardiia, Oktiabr’, Na postu, and the Leningrad-
based Zvezda. The Central Committee’s press section actively supported the Na postu
critics’ ideology, as did institutions that had become “nurseries” of journalistic party
criticism, such as Glavlit, the Communist Academy (its director, the prominent his-
torian Mikhail Pokrovskii, regularly wrote for Molodaia gvardiia), the Socialist Acad-
emy, and the Sverdlov Communist University. The Na postu critics did not shun the
time and effort it took to form connections not only with the Central Committee
and the Komsomol, but also with the grassroots organizations of the Komsomol, the
Soviet Party schools (sovpartshkoly), and the press sections of regional party commit-
tees. Having taken power first in MAPP and then in VAPP, they had at their disposal
a powerful apparatus for creating a new literature and keeping it under control.
It was only logical that the theme of party-mindedness in literature should be-
come the main preoccupation of the first stage of Na postu criticism (1922–1925).
The Na postu critics did not merely guard the principle of party-mindedness in new
Soviet literature, but essentially formulated its main ideological, organizational,
and aesthetic points. Pyotr Kogan’s evaluation of napostovstvo from 1926 remains
valid: “this movement was not the enterprise of a handful of ardent young critics. It
emerged naturally; in fact it would be weird if there was no napostovstvo. . . . Its es-
sence is that it refused to think of literature as the business of a certain guild of writ-
ers, that it effectuated a radical turn in the classification of writers, dividing them
into groups not according to aesthetics, but according to class. . . . But it has never
been declared so clearly that literature is merely an element of politics.”73
The quintessence of the Na postu critics’ ideology is found in the six issues of
the journal Na postu, which appeared between June 1923 and May 1925. Their choice
of key targets for criticism was marked by political perceptiveness. Here are only a
few examples. Boris Pilnyak, one of the ideologues of the new Russian prose and
author of the first novel about the Russian Revolution (Golyi god [The Naked Year],
1921), influenced by symbolism, was accused of “concealed forms of counterrevolu-
tion in the form of nationalism, which goes back to the beards and strong faith of
the pre-Petrine times, and mysticism, which turns the revolution into some kind of
devil’s work, a revolt of unbridled elements.”74 Similarly, the Na postu critics refused
to believe that Aleksei Tolstoy, who had returned from emigration, was genuinely
repenting; they counted him into the camp of the “non-October intelligentsia” and
inner emigration: “Aleksei Tolstoy, the aristocratic stylist of the old times, who has
a count title not only in his passport, but also in his inkwell.”75 The party line natu-
rally manifested itself in their assessment of Anna Akhmatova: “We all know that A.
Akhmatova is a mystic, a monastic, reactionary in her ideology, and, consequently,
. . . hostile to us . . . [suffering from] the poison of bourgeois degradation . . . [along
with an] unhealthy love for Orthodox and religious prejudices.”76
The Na postu critics’ line in relation to the fellow-travelers and Voronskii was
clear right from the start, with almost no semitones, which cannot be said for their
attitude towards LEF. Several critical addresses in the first issue of Na postu were de-
voted to the question of LEF. However, after the conclusion of an agreement be-
tween MAPP and LEF in November 1923, all criticism of the allies in the literary
struggle disappeared from the pages of the journal. And afterwards, critical attacks
aimed at individual LEF members notwithstanding (the “reactionary muddle-head”
Shklovsky in particular was targeted by the Na postu critics for his book Treti’a
fabrika), LEF remained among Na postu’s strategic partners. The alliance between
LEF and Na postu was a mutually beneficial undertaking. Both fought against the
tenacious “counterrevolutionary” forms of classical literature and their presence in
contemporary literature. For the Na postu critics the LEF members were important
not only as ideological allies, but also as teachers for young proletarian writers and
critics. The LEF members were interested in the wide-ranging organizational con-
nections of the Na postu critics but also in their young Komsomol audience, which
was most receptive to their own programs and theories.
The most pressing issue for the Na postu critics during the first period of NEP
was the question of how to treat the Kuznitsa group. Kuznitsa had its own platform
in art, which was distinct from that of Na postu and was developed by the group’s
own critics, the former Proletkult poets Vladimir Kirillov, Grigorii Sannikov,
Georgii Iakubovskii, and others. The Kuznitsa members reckoned that the condi-
tions under which proletarian literature would flourish were “specialization” and
learning from the “masters.” In their eyes, one of the transgressions committed by
their opponents (the Marxist critics) was “the demand that proletarian poets should
somehow employ particularly simple forms that are accessible to the largest possible
number of people.” Thus they declared Demyan Bednyi’s feuilletons, written in re-
sponse to the latest events, and Mayakovsky’s agitational doggerel to be outside the
borders that define literature.77 The writers of Kuznitsa regarded as unfounded the
pretensions of the members of Na postu and LEF to the role of “proletarian avant-
garde” in literature, and their responses to the former’s ironic invectives were just
as negative: a block of “acrobats of transrational writing and pious icon-daubers of
ideological virtues.”78
Two concepts were inscribed on the aesthetic banner of Kuznitsa, namely “La-
bor and Beauty” (the title of Iakubovskii’s programmatic statement). They regarded
the “beauty reflex” as just as natural to the proletarian as labor itself: “the great art-
ist’s motto ‘beauty will save the world’ is being filled with new content, acquires a
special meaning during the epoch of the proletarian revolution.”79 On the practical
plane such a reading of Dostoevsky presuppposed an aesthetization of labor and all
forms of the new life. The highly expressionistic poetry of the Kuznitsa writers was
created in the context of this and other aesthetic experiments, as was Fedor Glad-
kov’s novel Tsement (Cement, 1925), which stands out for its highly expressionistic
style, hyperbolic treatment of the themes of labor and the family, and the social
romanticism of its main heroes. But in the wake of the party resolution “O poli-
tike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi literatury” (1925), which initiated unification
processes in literature, including proletarian literature, the Kuznitsa writers’ literary
criticism lost its independence. In 1926 the publication of Rabochii zhurnal, which had
become the official venue for Kuznitsa writers after Kuznitsa closed down in 1922,
was discontinued.
Later the Na postu critics would admit that between 1922 and 1925 they had
hardly worked on questions of aesthetics at all, because all their energies had been
concentrated on ideology and the affirmation of the party line in literature. This self-
assessment also found entry into scholarly research on the proletarian movement, but
it is not entirely just. First, in their criticism of the Russian classics and the fellow-
travelers, the Na postu critics defined very clearly that which must not enter the content
of proletarian literature. Second, they suggested a list of the most important themes
for proletarian literature (the thematic approach to literature later became central to
socialist realism), as well as the main forms for their realization and those examples
of contemporary proletarian literature that could serve as guidelines.80 Third, the
Na postu critics founded a school for educating new writers—the groups Molodaia
gvardiia and Rabochaia vesna, which drew young people associated with the Kom-
somol into the ranks of Soviet writers. One can say that it was precisely in this field
that a new poetics emerged between 1922–1925, thanks to the organizational efforts
of the Na postu critics—a poetics of joyful acceptance of the revolutionary present,
exalted and romantic idealization of the themes of world revolution and civil war,
and a cult of the new book.81 In 1926 the situation began to change, and the critics be-
gan to correct the achievements of the Komsomol school of literature in accordance
with the new guidelines (the struggle against Trotskyism and eseninshchina) and the
establishment of the new platform of proletarian literature.
The second period of Na postu criticism (from the end of 1925 to 1927) began
with organizational shake-ups and the proclamation of a new aesthetic platform.

The first victims in the fight for the party line in literature were its main ideologues:
Ilarion Vardin, Semyon Rodov, Grigorii Lelevich, and their greatest literary asset,
the Komsomol poet Aleksandr Bezymenskii. All attempts to stir up a discussion
on the 1925 resolution “O politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi literatury” in
Na postu (the critics regarded the points concerning the peaceful reeducation of the
fellow-travelers, competitiveness in literature, and the establishment of a unified fed-
eration of writers as unacceptable) were harshly suppressed, the journal closed down,
and its ideologues were made redundant. Those who had defended proletarian lit-
erature during the first stage of NEP and polemicized with Trotsky were from now
on ever more frequently branded as “left” oppositionists (by analogy with the “left
opposition” of Trotsky and Zinoviev). The left “deviators” continued to believe that
“stabilizing inclinations” were a danger to proletarian literature that would lead to
a “dulling of class hatred” and the “class instinct” in the proletarian writers, calling
instead for a war against the “little Hamlets” that had appeared in the proletarian
sphere.82
VAPP had an organ that was analogous to the Politburo, namely the Com-
munist Party faction (the analogue to the future party committee of the Writers’
Union), which understood the 1925 party resolution as a “directive in the work to-
ward strengthening those forces in literature which the party has and on which it
can and must count.”83 The journal Oktiabr’ stated: “The resolution now allows us to
finally move the center of gravity of our work towards creative activity. The party
has taken over leadership in literature.”84 The practical implementation of the reso-
lution entailed, apart from party purges of the proletarian ranks (which continued
right until the closing down of RAPP), the need to review the legacy of proletarian
literature and devise a new artistic platform. At the general meeting of MAPP in
December 1925 Iurii Libedinskii, who had been heavily involved in the development
of the platform of 1923, revised the Na postu critics’ attitude to the Russian classics,
at the same time condemning the “comrades from Lef ” for indiscriminately reject-
ing them and accusing Voronskii of having presented the slogan “learn from the
classics” in an idealistic manner.85 Just as the classics, the proletarian writers would
present epic canvasses of the present through the depiction of living man, and they
would learn formal techniques from the classics, too: “reading The Captain’s Daughter
and War and Peace with pencil in hand” (“Ucheba, tvorchestvo i samokritika,” 102).
The proletarian writers would not adopt Voronskii’s mistaken ways because they
had an objective knowledge of that which stood behind the general human ideals
and the psychological life of Tolstoy’s heroes: “Take Nikolai Rostov as an example.
What type is he? Let us assess him objectively: he is a scumbag of a landowner. First
a landowner’s dear little son and then (using our own terms) a White Guardist” (103).
The Na postu critics put the development of the new artistic platform onto solid
organizational foundations. In April 1926 the first issue of the new journal Na liter-
aturnom postu (On Literary Guard) appeared, headed by the senior Na postu men Aver-
bakh and Aleksandr Zonin and their protégé Aleksei Selivanovskii, who in 1924–1925
served as secretary of the Donbass Union of Proletarian Writers. The proletarian re-
alist artist must “combine a psychological analysis of man, in particular the new man,
and a depiction of reality with a scientific dialectic materialist understanding of soci-
ety.”86 This was the new task of proletarian literature. Having condemned romanti-
cism for its planetary dreams (the romantic connotations of the idea of permanent
revolution were obvious) and excluded the possibility that it could influence the style
of proletarian literature, the critics stated that the Russian classics, from which they
were now learning, had reached “unprecedented heights” and produced “immortal
types” of the past, but that the most urgent problem for proletarian literature was the
depiction of the contemporary hero as a “living man”: “All proletarian writers at the
moment are battling with the task of depicting the Bolshevik in literature.”87
In passing from the formulation of the task to its aesthetic realization, the Na
postu critics were facing the same issues with regard to psychologism in contempo-
rary literature as the Pereval critics. But they had far fewer doubts: “the proletarian
writers are interested in the subconscious first and foremost as an object that needs to
be overcome, as something which we must force into submission so that it serves the con-
scious will of the proletariat, which is rationally oriented toward the reformation of
human society. To penetrate into this area, to understand and reform it, to enter it as
a new landlord enters the dark and winding cellars of the huge house in order to break
down unnecessary barriers, throw light into the dark nooks and crannies, clean up,
sweep out, dry out—to bring it into a state that is ‘suitable for living quarters.’”88
As for mastering the classics, a problem Pereval had also faced, the “reaction-
ary school of Dostoevsky” was unequivocally excluded from the ranks of teachers.89
From Gogol, the Na postu critics suggested, one could learn nothing except the cre-
ation of types, as his worldview was reactionary. Pushkin, on the other hand, could
teach the proletarian writers lessons not only in simplicity but also in atheism.90 Hav-
ing been burnt once before for praising the idea of world revolution, the Na postu
critics rejected all forms of the romantic school. To them, romanticism in proletar-
ian literature (Proletkult, the poetry of Kuznitsa and partly of Molodaia gvardiia)
belonged firmly into the past. Nowadays it only led the writer away from reality.
They borrowed two methodological features from Tolstoy: psychological analysis
and relentless realism, the “tearing away of each and every kind of mask.” All the
rest, especially Tolstoy’s “reactionary philosophy,” was supposed to be discarded.
The Na postu critics were more perceptive than their opponents with regard to
the ideological struggle going on inside the party. This was visible in their attitude
to “workers’ writing”—unlike Voronskii and Polonskii (and Trotsky before them),
they had no doubts in its glorious future. In 1926 they once again placed their hopes
in a new appeal to workers to produce proletarian literature. By November 1926
VAPP had 3,850 writing members, 70 percent of which were workers and 60 per-
cent of which were party members.91 There was yet another strategically important
decision that was accepted for implementation by the plenary session of VAPP in
November 1926: the support of groups of worker-critics and the establishment in all
the VAPP journals of a section for readers’ responses to books.92 This decision was
actively implemented and became an important instrument in the literary struggle
of the years 1928–1932.
The Peasant Question in the Literary and

Critical Polemic of the NEP Period
Throughout these years of struggle between various critical groupings, the peas-
ant question accompanied, sometimes openly and sometimes not, the many polemics
on the subject of literature’s development and its new ideology. Thereby the critics
could not avoid the question of the peasant origins of the Russian classics, the aes-
thetics of the fellow-travelers, the genesis of the skaz technique (which had become
dominant in prose), and Esenin’s peasant “deviation.” While the term peasant literature
itself was unclear and the critics often included in it phenomena from different cul-
tural planes that belonged to presently opposed literary-aesthetic camps (Esenin and
the surikovets Spiridon Drozhzhin, Klyuev, and the rural correspondents; the peas-
ant-imitating [muzhikovstvuiushchie] fellow-travelers Pilnyak and Vsevold Ivanov
and the proletarian Panferov; and the Kuznitsa member Aleksandr Neverov and the
Komsomol writers Ivan Doronin and Anna Karavaeva), the characteristic differences
were perceived correctly and were obvious to all participants in the literary-critical
process. At a meeting of critics in the press section of the party’s Central Commit-
tee (1924), intended for the discussion of the party’s literary policy, the argument
centered on the question of who enjoyed the party’s support—the proletarian writ-
ers or the fellow-travelers—and almost all who took the floor mentioned the peas-
ant issue of NEP. Voronskii essentially reiterated the main thesis of his speech from
1922, that young Soviet literature “is neither proletarian nor Communist” but es-
sentially “has its origins in the peasant, in the village” (Izbrannye stat’i o literature, 284).
Trotsky developed the main propositions of his 1922 addresses: “What is the matter
here with the peasant-imitating fellow-travelers? The point is that this phenomenon
is neither accidental, nor small, nor likely to pass quickly. Let us not forget that we
have dictatorship of the proletariat in a country that is mostly populated by peasants.
. . . The intelligentsia . . . is undecided and will remain undecided depending on the
course of events, and in its vacillations it is looking for ideological support to the
peasants—this is where the peasant-imitating Soviet literature comes from” (254).
Bukharin, who curated the movement of workers’ village correspondents, already
spoke about party strategy rather than tactics—the political line of “de-peasantation
[razkrest’ianivanie] in literature just as in any other field of ideology” (242). In points
five and nine of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee resolution “O politike partii
v oblasti khudozhestvennoi literatury” (1925) the proposition about peasant literature
appears in a milder form, without the analogy with “de-kazakation,” resolving “to
go hand in hand” and “slowly recast” the peasantry. The “necessary prerequisite for
exerting influence on the peasantry” are the two inseparable components of peasant
literature: proletarian ideology (content) and “peasant literary images” (form) (378).
This means a literature that is proletarian by content and peasant by form. The critics
did not immediately find a definition for this nascent ideological and aesthetic phe-
nomenon. The most adequate reaction to Bukharin’s guideline was the formula of an
unnamed Na postu critic discovered among the documents of VAPP’s educational
methodology commission: “self-de-peasantizing (raskrest’ianivaiushchaiasia) peasant
literature.”93 This formulation, however, failed to find entry into critical language:
the oxymoron clearly smacked of the grotesque.
During the literary-political battle of 1925–1927, accusations of Trotskyism
would often boil down to Trotsky’s underestimation of the role of the peasantry. If
we translate this into the language of criticism, it was an accusation of underestimat-
ing grassroots peasant literature, and here the influence of Trotsky’s literary-critical
conceptions was indeed palpable. According to Trotsky, the supreme expression of
the cultural cosmos of the Russian peasantry, that is, its “ambivalence in thought,
emotion, and word,” was the poetry of the “genuinely peasant” Nikolai Klyuev,
while Esenin was expressing its lyrical element and soul.94 The “peasant-imitating
intellectuals” (Pilnyak, Ivanov, Nikitin) perceived the revolution “in peasant terms”
(Literatura, 69) and, according to Trotsky, stubbornly shunned the internationale, the
city, and the proletariat, instead turning to everything that was “of the people” in lit-
erature and to the “national moment” (Literatura, 79–81) of the Russian Revolution.
Trotsky had his own way of translating the most varied literary-critical and philo-
sophical-aesthetic statements (and there were indeed many) about the place of the
“Scythians” Klyuev and Esenin within Russian literature onto the political plane.
The critics began to turn their attention to the symbolist, peasant Scythianism
in 1922. In his famous article “Vchera, segodnia i zavtra russkoi poezii” (The Past,
the Present, and the Future of Russian Poetry, 1922) Valery Bryusov suggested a
typology of poetic texts in which the new peasants did not feature at all. The literary
“yesterday” he defined as symbolism, today as futurism, and the literary tomorrow
as proletarian poetry. The peasant poets, in Bryusov’s view (he lumped together Es-
enin, Drozhzhin, Mikhail Artamonov, Sergei Klychkov, Mikhail Karpov, and Pyotr
Oreshin) “have failed to carve out an original poetics, and today typically rehash
Kol’tsov and Nikitin.” His conclusion, fully conforming to Trotsky’s scheme of the
transitional character of contemporary literature, was: “The new peasant Russia has
not yet created its own poetry, although the October events mean it has undergone
a major turnaround, which has changed its entire lifestyle.”95 Similarly, in the same
year, the futurist Nikolai Aseev wrote several pieces about the symbolist paradigm
of the peasant-imitating (krest’ianstvuiushchie) authors (precisely in this ironic key):
“Sergei Klychkov is turning from a ploughman into a symbolist with Solov’evian
nuances.”96
Between 1923–1925 the new peasant and peasant-imitating (muzhikovstvuiush-
chie) writers tried to set up their own literary and critical journal (almanac), albeit
unsuccessfully (just like the fellow-travelers and Serapion Brothers). Esenin, Klych-
kov, Ivanov, and Pilnyak all tried their hand at literary criticism. Esenin’s articles
about contemporary literature remain unfinished and unpublished. Klychkov’s
collection of articles, envisaged for 1924, failed to appear in print. Throughout the
1920s, the impulse toward “de-peasantizing” (Bukharin) Soviet literature had pow-
erful supporters in the person of Maxim Gorky, who was abroad at the time, and the
circle of writers of peasant origin around him (Semyon Pod’iachev, Ivan Vol’nov).
The Russian peasantry and village were one of the main themes of Gorky’s edify-
ing letters to the peasant-imitating writers Nikitin, Fedin, Ivanov, and Leonov. In a
letter to Bukharin dated July 1925 Gorky drew his and Trotsky’s attention toward
Klychkov’s novel Sakharnyi nemets (The Sugar German) and the tendencies it har-
bored, “the resurgent sentimentality of narodnichestvo” and an “ideology of peasant-
worshippers and village-lovers,” and suggested beginning a “merciless fight” against
this dangerous current.97
During the second period of NEP the Pereval critics were the only ones to of-
fer continuous support to the peasant-imitating writers, despite Gorky’s remarks on
the dangers of the peasant theme. In 1926 Voronskii wrote a long article (“Lunnye
tumany” [Moon Mist]) on Klychkov’s second novel Chertukhinskii balakir’ (The Bab-
bler from Chertukhino), calling it a “work of great social significance.” Lezhnev, in
his overview article on Russian literature of the first Soviet decade, justly remarked
that the peasant and peasant-imitating (muzhikovstvuiushchie) writers did not form
a particular group within contemporary literature, but were “scattered over its entire
expanse, from right to left.” The right-wing was made up by those who ideologically
and aesthetically originated in the “new peasant school” or “new peasant grouping,”
including Klyuev, Chapygin, and Esenin. In Lezhnev’s view, Klychkov’s novels, a
“curious anachronism in our literature,” clearly revealed the dead end of this current.
The left-wing of contemporary peasant literature, on the other hand, successfully
blurred the line between the peasant and the proletarian writers—something that
was also reflected in the emergence of the term “worker-peasant writers.”98 Lezhnev
identified the Kuznitsa member Aleksandr Neverov as the most outstanding repre-
sentative of this current.
The Kuznitsa critics insisted that the depiction of everyday life in the contem-
porary village was a principally new phenomenon in literature. This was one of the
demarcation lines in the polemic between the peasant Kuznitsa members with the
Na postu critics, on the one hand, and the Pereval critics on the other. Rejecting the
nineteenth-century peasantphilia, the Kuznitsa members took a clear position with
regard to both Bunin’s and Gorky’s vision of the village. The Pereval critics handed
the winner’s laurels in the depiction of the contemporary village to the Kuznitsa
members: “the pioneers of the new Soviet-village genre.”99
The Na postu critics, who had a much more consistent and integral peasant
platform, propagated Demyan Bednyi and the Komsomol poets as genuine peasant
poets. Beginning in 1926, however, the Na postu critics discussed the “fight for the
peasant writer” and declared that it had become necessary to take a decision on the
very Trotskyite concept of fellow-traveler.100 Inspired by Bukharin’s statements in
“Zlye zametki,” the Na postu critics descended upon the new peasants and peasant-
imitating writers with annihilating criticism. Klyuev, Esenin, and Chapygin were
all stigmatized. Fedin, Seifullina, and Vsevolod Ivanov were also reproached for
some of their writings.
The expulsion of the peasant-imitating writers from the literary process during
the second period of NEP was prepared in many ways by the creation of a new peas-
ant literature, for which the government had made significant means available during
the first period of NEP. The All-Russian Union of Peasant Writers (VSKP), founded
in fall 1921 on the basis of the reformed prerevolutionary Surikov literary and musi-
cal circle, became the center of the grassroots peasant literature movement. Its first
head was Grigorii Deev-Khomiakovskii, the creator of the famous Krest’ianskii
marsh (Peasant March). The Na postu critics, who curated the VSKP, staged him,
the “self-taught poet”, as someone who had “overcome” the motifs of the peasant-
imitating writers: “he has nothing in common with the peasant-imitating poets; his
perception of the revolution is genuinely proletarian.”101 The VSKP ran a large-scale
program devoted to the struggle for a new everyday life and had an army of volun-
tary helpers at its disposal: the rural correspondents (sel’kory) who were prepared to
work, in accord with the government’s NEP strategy for the solution of the peasant
question, in the field of cultural reeducation and “reformation” of the village and
to propagate the party’s antireligious line. This line was also being implemented by
small-scale journals (Krasnaia niva, Novaia derevnia, Izba-chital’nia, Krest’ianka, Lapot’,
and Zhizn’ krest’ianskoi molodezhi), the aim of which was the education of the mass
reader; at the same time, they became the forges in which new peasant writers were
being formed. From the rural correspondent to the new peasant writer—this was
the new strategy for literature about the village.
By 1928, however, all discussions about peasant platforms were over. A clear-cut
opposition had established itself, namely that of kulak literature versus kolkhoz lit-
erature. The camp of the critics of the so-called kulak literature was recruited from
the Na postu critics, and Aleksandr Reviakin, a little-known critic for Krest’ianskii
zhurnal became the main “specialist” for questions concerning the ideology of the
new kolkhoz literature. Neither Voronskii nor Zamoshkin, Gorbov, Lezhnev,
Iakubovskii, or Polonskii, who had written profusely about peasant literature, were
chosen for this role.
 LITERARY CRITICISM AND THE
3 TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE LITERARY
FIELD DURING THE CULTURAL
REVOLUTION, 1928–1932
EVGENY DOBRENKO
Literary Politics and Cultural Dynamics

during the First Five-Year Plan
In the large body of literature on the time between 1917 and 1932 it has become
the norm to regard this period as some kind of unified “age of the 1920s” that is asso-
ciated with revolutionary culture. Revolutionary culture is contrasted with Stalinist
culture, the beginning of which is defined as 1932, when all literary organizations
were disbanded by decree of the Communist Party and the uniform Union of Soviet
Writers was founded, the institutional basis of socialist realism.
The fact that the years 1917 and 1932 constitute turning points in Soviet his-
tory is just as true as the fact that there was little similarity between the year 1920,
when war communism and the civil war were in full swing, and the year 1925, which
marked the culmination of the power struggle in the higher echelons of the party
and the height of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Both 1920 and 1925 were dif-
ferent from 1929, when Stalin established his dictatorship and the NEP was practi-
cally abolished. Soviet Russia was in many respects a different country in 1920, 1925,
and 1929. It was not just the political atmosphere and the economic order that were
different, but culture too changed rapidly: while in 1920 the most influential move-
ments had been Proletkult and the futurists, in 1925 the tone was set by the fellow-
43
44  EVGENY DOBRENKO
travelers, and in 1929 the dominant group was the Russian Association of Proletarian
Writers (RAPP). But the “age of the cultural revolution,” or, as it is also known, the
“age of the First Five-Year Plan,” differed from the previous period, that of NEP, in
that the former was already Stalinist par excellence. It was revolutionary in every aspect:
in political terms it was the age of the Stalinist revolution, beginning with Stalin’s
victory over the internal opposition in the party in 1927, culminating in the great
breakthrough of 1929, and finishing with the beginning of the short Stalinist thaw
in 1932, which continued right up to the murder of Sergey Kirov in December 1934.
In economic terms it was the age during which the foundations were laid for decades
to come: the time of the abolition of the NEP, of the First Five-Year Plan, of indus-
trialization and collectivization. In social terms it was a time of unprecedented social
mobility: the beginning of the end of the history of the Russian village, the mass
influx of the rural population into the towns and cities, the rapid proletarization of
the population, and the irrevocable transformation of the urban cultural sphere. In
cultural terms it was the age during which all cultural institutions were bureaucra-
tized once and for all and the main parameters of Stalinist culture formed, from the
cult of the leader to the production novel. It was the age of the final onslaught on the
traditional culture of the intelligentsia, affecting the members not just of the techni-
cal but also of the cultural and literary intelligentsia.
The new policy toward the old intelligentsia was demonstrated in show trials:
the Shakhty Trial (1928), the trial of the Labor Peasant Party (1930), the trial of the so-
called Union Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic
Workers’ Party (Mensheviks) (1930), and the trial of the Industrial Party (Prompar-
tiia) (1930). All of them were characterized by, in the language of the day, “anni-
hilation of specialists from the prerevolutionary intelligentsia [spetseedstvo],” so that
the very concept of the intelligentsia became fused with the epithet “bourgeois.”
And while the main blow was directed against the technical intelligentsia, the atti-
tude toward the former cultural elites was different only in tactical terms: all power
within the cultural sphere had fallen into the hands of aggressive groups whose aim
was to monopolize the cultural field. These organizations were RAPP in literature,
the Association of Painters of the Revolution (AKhR), the Russian Association of
Proletarian Musicians (RAPM), the All-Russian Society of Proletarian Architects
(VOPRA), and others.
Early Stalinism, although revolutionary in all respects, described itself as a “re-
constructive period.” What we can see here is not only the penchant for inverting
meaning and camouflage that was characteristic of Stalinism, but also, paradoxi-
cally, a statement about a return to “normalcy” in Russian history after a decade of
revolutionary breakdown and unprecedented freedom. The very return to messianic
ideology and a powerful state headed by an almighty leader and reformer already
contained the prerequisites for “Kul’tura-2” and the “Great Retreat” that defined the
turnaround of the mid-1930s.1
A peculiarity of the “reconstructive period” was that while before 1928 litera-
ture had seen a struggle between different groups, each of which had had its own
champions in the higher ranks of the party, after 1928–1929 the only group that had
LITERARY CRITICISM AND TRANSFORMATIONS, 1928–1932  45
official support—and that was used by Stalin in order to demoralize and ultimately
destroy all other currents—was RAPP (and AKhR, RAPM, and VOPRA in the
respective arts). At the turn of the decade the literary struggle was virtually over: the
annihilation of groups and intimidation of opponents was well underway, and the
cultural field was being cleaned up in preparation for the Central Committee decree
of 1932, after which the cultural and ideological landscape, as well as the institutional
infrastructure of the literary field, were to change radically once again. In this sense
the period of 1928–1932 was wholly unique: it no longer belonged to the 1920s, but it
not yet fully belonged to the 1930s either. In this chapter I focus, therefore, on develop-
ments from 1927 onward, drawing from, and elaborating on, Natalia Kornienko’s
chapter on the scene of literary criticism between 1921–1927.
In the specific context of the late 1920s and early 1930s, literary criticism ful-
filled a very special role. It had passed through two important metamorphoses: state
institutionalization and political instrumentalization. While previously criticism had been
the instrument of literary struggle par excellence, now, with the party and state or-
gans backing one particular group, the status of that group changed radically and,
naturally, so did the status of the criticism it produced. Thus the literary criticism
produced by RAPP stopped being simply the critical statements issued by one of sev-
eral literary groups, but instead became the officially sanctioned and only legitimate
criticism, which transformed it into an instrument of the state’s political struggle. It
was the first time literary criticism had assumed such a function.
RAPP and the Political Instrumentalization of Literary Criticism
One specific feature of the organization of literature during the cultural revo-
lution, that is, the period between the confirmation of Stalin as the most power-
ful man following the defeat of the Trotsky-Zinoviev opposition, and especially
the elimination of the “right-wing deviation” after 1929, and 1932, the year the new
organizational structure of culture was institutionalized for good, was the instru-
mentalization of RAPP, the group that turned into Stalin’s main instrument for im-
plementing his cultural policies. RAPP had been striving for hegemony since 1922,
when opportunistically minded members of Proletkult, which had been suppressed
by Lenin, began to organize a new “proletarian literary movement” under the guid-
ance of the Central Committee. In 1925 this hope had been frustrated, following
the Central Committee Resolution “O politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi
literatury” (On Party Politics in the Area of Belles Lettres). After the downfall of
Trotsky, who had been the main persecutor of proletarian literature, RAPP faced
a new situation: although Stalin refrained from officially changing the 1925 resolu-
tion, he nurtured the members of RAPP as he valued their hatred for Trotsky. Thus
Aleksandr Voronskii was removed from the position of editor in chief of the journal
Krasnaia nov’ in 1927, a step the critics around the journal Na postu had been seeking
since 1924, and replaced by Fedor Raskol’nikov, an active member of RAPP.
The RAPP critics regarded Stalin as their patron but, according to Anatolii
Mazaev’s accurate observation, they could not possibly have imagined that:
From the very beginning, the general secretary regarded them as his oprichniki
who were meant to terrorize the literary intelligentsia and thereby suppress any
resistance on its part, but then would be broken up and repressed in the same
merciless way once they had finished their dark task. This would happen in 1932.
The dissolution of RAPP would hugely elevate Stalin’s standing in the eyes of
the literary intelligentsia who had been scared to death and, not understanding
the leader’s secret schemes either, would look up to him as the one who liberated
them from the devilry of RAPP and shower him with gratitude and flattery.2
The RAPP critics’ orientation toward the “average writer” (pisatel’-seredniak),
“shock worker-writer” (pisatel’-udarnik), and workers’ correspondents fully corre-
sponded to the anti-individualist theories of the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), whose
members had insisted on the deprofessionalization of literature. The RAPP critics’
attacks on the fellow-travelers and their campaign against Evgeny Zamyatin, Boris
Pilnyak, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrei Platonov ultimately demoralized the fel-
low-travelers, a demoralization that found expression in their forced support for the
campaigns against Pilnyak and Zamyatin, headed by the Moscow and Leningrad
sections of the All-Russian Writers’ Union, respectively. At the same time, these
campaigns initiated a de facto ban on the publication of the works of Russian émigré
writers in the USSR and Soviet authors abroad, meaning that the development of
Russian literature in diaspora and emigration would now definitely continue along
a different path, and foreshadowed the specific traits of the cultural institutions that
would become established once the uniform Union of Soviet Writers was founded. It
is significant that Boris Volin, one of the main persecutors of Zamyatin and Pilnyak
and one of the founders of the Na postu current, was to replace Pavel Lebedev-Polian-
skii as director of Glavlit upon the end of the campaigns in 1931.
The administrative defeat of the fellow-travelers came with the rout of Pereval
in the spring of 1930. In 1929 the publication of the Poetika series was discontinued,
while Viktor Shklovsky’s repentant article “Pamiatnik nauchnoi oshibke” (A Monu-
ment to a Scholarly Error) signified the “end of Russian formalism.”3 A number of
organizational and political measures, that is, the replacement of the leadership of the
Moscow Art Theater, the Pushkin House, the Academy of Arts, and other central
cultural establishments, marked the “year of the great breakthrough” on the “cul-
tural front.”
RAPP subjugated all other literary groups—LEF, Kuznitsa, the All-Russian
Union of Peasant Writers (VSKP), the constructivists. At the height of RAPP’s
power, Soviet literature had begun to function even before 1932 as if the Union of
Soviet Writers already existed: RAPP was the army of party nomenclature func-
tionaries, appointed by the Central Committee and implementing its policies in
practically all sectors of literary life. The model of literature Stalin had created had
as its aim not the “hegemony of proletarian literature,” as the RAPP members be-
lieved, but the demoralization of all professional writers. By 1932, when this task
had been accomplished, Stalin disbanded RAPP, a step the fellow-travelers perceived
as liberation, although in practice the Union of Soviet Writers continued to act as
LITERARY CRITICISM AND TR ANSFORMATIONS, 1928–1932  47
RAPP had acted, to the point that it took over many of RAPP’s leading figures: the
leadership at different times included Vladimir Stavskii, Alexander Fadeev, Aleksei
Surkov, Fedor Panferov, Vladimir Ermilov, Anatolii Tarasenkov, and many others.
In accordance with the zeitgeist, “struggle” became the key concept in the
RAPP critics’ lexicon. Each time the goal was to find the strongest possible political
accusation to levy against the respective object of persecution: “The class struggle
is becoming harsher. The demarcation lines are becoming clearer. The points of
contact are sharply defined. The differentiation in the writers’ milieu is becoming
deeper. In this situation not to pursue a policy of proletarian offensive means leaving
the initiative to the kulak and the supporter of kulaks.”4 A vivid memoir by Venia-
min Kaverin captures this militant spirit:
I was leafing through a three-year set of the journal Na literaturnom postu, 1928–
1930. . . . Everything breathes menace. Literature is cut as if along a semicircle,
inside of which a different, imaginary, RAPP literature is affirmed and extolled.
Some are busy modeling enemies, others—stroking friends. But yesterday’s
friend suddenly turns into a mortal enemy, if he crosses the magic semicircle.
. . . The journal is permeated with hatred. Another invisible cohesive force is
envy, which is particularly terrible because it is not only unacknowledged, but
ardently condemned. . . . Reading Na literaturnom postu, I asked myself: where
did this suspicion, this zeal come from? What inspired this dangerous game with
literature, which had novelty in its blood, which was psychologically entwined
with the revolution and developed truthfully and fast? It was the opportunity
to seize power, the breathtaking temptation, which, by the way, is treated in the
journal with businesslike consistency, which now seems a bit funny.5
The “bolshevization” of literature pursued by RAPP consisted of a whole series
of actions of an “organizational character” inside the association itself: the struggle
with the Litfront, the continuous purges of the local sections, the restructuring of
publishing policy, the reorientation of the journal Na literaturnom postu, the seizure of
Literaturnaia gazeta, Krasnaia nov’, and Novyi mir, the publication of new journals such
as RAPP, Literatura i marksizm, Marksistsko-leninskoe iskusstvoznanie. Just as important
were various ideological campaigns in which criticism played the central role. These
mostly concerned the promotion of an array of slogans that allegedly constituted the
“creative platform of RAPP”: “Making all literature as accessible as the poetry of
Demyan Bednyi” (odem’ianivanie literatury), “For the dialectical-materialist method,”
“For the great art of Bolshevism,” “For orthodoxy according to Plekhanov,” the
call for shock workers in literature, “tearing off the masks,” “living man,” “learn-
ing from the classics,” “ally or foe.” RAPP needed most of these slogans in order to
justify its own existence as a literary group.
Nevertheless, the most important task was that of “hegemony in literature,”
which was political to the core. In practice, it was realized in the slogan “Not a fel-
low-traveler, but an ally or a foe” (Ne poputchik, no soiuznik ili vrag) and in the cre-
ation of obstacles for, at different times, fellow-travelers such as Gorky, Mayakovsky,
Mikhail Prishvin, Kornei Chukovsky, and many others (alongside the “counterrevo-
lutionaries” Bulgakov, Zamyatin, Pilnyak) who had failed to join the ranks of the
“allies” in time and were now regarded as “foes.”6 For example, Ilya Ehrenburg was
declared “a writer of the petty bourgeoisie in the most genuine sense of the word.”7
Tikhii Don (And Quiet Flows the Don) was accused of idealizing kulak clans that were
allegedly depicted with the same “love and tenderness” with which “writers belong-
ing to the gentry in their time showed their country estates, farmsteads, and nests”
so that “the attempts to associate Sholokhov’s novel with proletarian literature” were
“harmful and useless.”8 Calls to fight “against the Aleksei Tolstoys” had been heard
since the mid-1920s.9 By 1931 the time was ripe for a rejection of the Trotskyite term
fellow-traveler; the slogan “Ally or foe,” which was to be condemned as “erroneous”
in 1932, became the sum total of the history of RAPP—it was merely the realization
of the initial call of the Na postu critics for the “hegemony of proletarian literature.”10
For the RAPP functionaries and critics literature was merely a pretext. The sole
focus of RAPP criticism was politics. This peculiar feature was based on the recon-
ciliation of the seemingly irreconcilable: on the one hand, a keen interest in current
literary policy, on the other, a predilection for pure generalizations. In both cases,
literature as such disappeared from the field of vision. Leopold Averbakh formulated
the task of the literary struggle as derived from politics: “The cultural revolution
is a period during which the proletariat struggles for cultural hegemony, a period
during which the working class works to become the ‘ruling spiritual power’ . . .
the question ‘who eats whom’ also concerns the field of culture. . . . The answer to
the question ‘who eats whom’ depends on us alone, on our consistency, persistence,
steadfastness, on our one-hundred percent commitment . . . the smallest digression
from the Bolshevik policy of class struggle inevitably leads to objective defeatism in
the cultural revolution.”11
The instrumental and political character of RAPP criticism meant that the lit-
erary-critical discourse grew to rely ever more heavily on political and pseudo-phil-
osophical terminology and tended more and more toward the genre of positioning
statements, showy reports, or furious philippics against the many “enemies of prole-
tarian literature.” As a result, “concrete criticism” almost completely vanished from
the pages of RAPP publications. Considering the first four issues of RAPP’s main
critical journals for the year 1931 (RAPP and Proletarskaia literatura), the reviewers of
the leading theoretical journal of the party, Pod znamenem marksizma, were forced
to conclude that “in the four thick volumes of the central organ of RAPP there are
not even four articles dealing with contemporary literary works”—“nothing but
naked and pure methodologizing.”12 Paradoxically, “concrete criticism” (including
the criticism of new proletarian works) survived in the camp of the fellow-travelers,
mostly in the journal Novyi mir, for as long as Viacheslav Polonskii remained its edi-
tor in chief.13
As institutional support for RAPP’s literary criticism grew, the main critics
and functionaries of RAPP cultivated the genre of the critical statement: many of
their articles were in practice reworked speeches and papers of the kind that could be
heard at the endless congresses, conferences, and meetings of activists “in the center
and locally.” Thus the RAPP critics’ attitude to criticism was entirely functional. As
Vladimir Ermilov wrote, “proletarian literature needs to be accompanied by criti-

cism that does not lag behind at the tail end of the literary processes, but actively
directs them, influences them, and supports the proletarian writers in their work.”14
Criticism must lead, direct, provide slogans, “criticism and literature do not [simply]
coexist, rather they cooperate. Proletarian criticism is the leading regiment in art.”15 The
dominant role of criticism was defined by its status: with RAPP, criticism had for the
first time stopped to be just the respective critic’s personal opinion, or the opinion of
a literary group, turning instead into a mouthpiece of the party and de facto into an
exponent of Stalin’s opinion. It was inside RAPP that criticism came close to what
Fadeev was dreaming about, that is, its transformation into a “master of the literary
process.” In fact, it merely remained an instrument in the hands of the real master.
It was also inside RAPP that Soviet literature formed as an institution: an army
of literary functionaries drew the Central Committee’s “line” and provided samples
of polemic, aesthetic criteria, and norms that would remain forever part of Soviet
literary criticism. In practice, RAPP produced not literature, but an excess of criti-
cism. The all-powerful RAPP functionaries Averbakh and Aleksei Selivanovskii,
Vladimir Sutyrin and Ermilov, Ivan Bespalov and Ivan Makar’ev, and also, natu-
rally, Fadeev, Iurii Libedinskii, Vladimir Kirshon, and Stavskii appeared in the role
of literary critics.
Not only with regard to institutional practice, but with regard to aesthetics too,
RAPP created the basic parameters and conceptual apparatus of socialist realism that
was soon to replace RAPP itself. The RAPP critics introduced not only the basic
operating category of class orientation (klassovost’), which they drove to the extreme
slogan “Ally or foe,” but also party-mindedness (partiinost’), which they demanded to
elevate to a height “on which party-mindedness would be not something that coex-
isted with the method, but really functioned as the main driving force, the essence
of our artistic method.”16 Even the very combination of romanticism and realism
on which socialist realism is based had its foundations in Fadeev’s article, or even
perhaps manifesto, “Doloi Shillera!” (Down with Schiller!), in which he equated the
former with idealism and the latter with materialist dialectics: romanticism was “the
line of mystification of reality, the line along which heroic personalities are created”
and opposed to realism as the “most consistent, decisive and merciless ‘tearing down
of each and every mask’ from reality.” Fadeev reached a formula that Andrei Zh-
danov, in his 1934 definition of socialist realism, merely paraphrased: “Unlike the
great realists of the past,” Fadeev insisted, “the proletarian artist will see the process
of the development of society and the main forces driving this process, that is, he
will be able to depict and will depict the birth of the new in the old, the tomorrow in
the today, the new age’s struggle with and victory over the old.”17 Using Zhdanov’s
words, the writer will depict “life in its revolutionary development.”
The only thing that was missing from RAPP criticism was the last component
of socialist realism—orientation toward the people (narodnost’). Part of the reason
why the RAPP critics did not mention it was the fact that this concept had fallen
into disuse, due to its belonging to the well-known triad “autocracy-orthodoxy-
populism” (samoderzhavie-pravoslavie-narodnost’). However, RAPP’s orientation to-
ward conventional realist style can be regarded, to some extent, as an equivalent

to narodnost’. Essentially, the “dialectical-materialist method” proclaimed by the
RAPP critics turned out to be “traditional realism.” And although Averbakh insisted
on a distinction between “proletarian realism” and the “realism of the classics” (“We
do not only exhort writers to emulate realism. Our realism will be different from
that of the classics, from that of writers of another era. . . . Proletarian literature will
not simply inherit previous realist forms, but create new ones”), what was meant was
clearly the tradition of “learning from the classics.”18
Thus thanks to the efforts of Fadeev, Lebedinskii, Averbakh, and Ermilov,
method became a key concept in the theory of RAPP, turning into the group’s quasi-
trademark sign, just as “life building” and “literature of fact” had been the trade-
mark sign of LEF and “organicity” that of the Pereval group. RAPP’s slogans of the
“living man,” “tearing down of masks,” “hegemony of proletarian literature” all
hinged on the concept of method. And it was thanks to RAPP, the dominant literary
group in 1928–1932, that this concept became so important that even the elimina-
tion of RAPP itself became impossible without the proclamation of a new method,
this time the method of socialist realism: literature outside an “artistic method” had
simply become unthinkable.
Method provided an effective solution to the key problem of RAPP criticism,
the problem of how to combine political instrumentalism and a simulated ideological
and aesthetic approach to literature. The very program of RAPP was aesthetically
retrograde.19 “Learning from the classics” was a call for imitation, while the calls to
do “Away with Schiller,” to depict “living man,” and to “tear down the masks” were
in fact an appeal to the stylistic conventions of nineteenth-century psychological re-
alism and the old family novel. This traditionalism was a mirror image of another
extreme of the time, represented by LEF’s avant-garde theory of the “withering
away of art” (otmiranie iskusstva), the rejection of fiction, and the turn toward “factog-
raphy” (the “literature of fact,” “cinematic truth” [kino-pravda], the rejection of easel
painting, and so on).
Both programs were produced on the flanks of the “cultural front,” and both
constituted examples of aesthetic utopianism. The factographic utopia of LEF (the
replacement of literature by the newspaper) was no less radical than RAPP’s aesthetic
revanchism: while the LEF members proposed to accomplish the “leap forward”
over fiction, the RAPP critics imagined the development of literature as if literature
had not passed through the age of modernism, as if there had been neither a Silver Age nor
an avant-garde. But while LEF appealed to the professional consciousness of writers
(technicism and professionalism), RAPP favored the “reading masses.” As a result,
the RAPP organizations flushed out all talent by means of negative selection, while
LEF art failed to find consumers.
This duality of new and old was characteristically present in the way the ap-
peal to “learn from the classics” was met even within RAPP itself. Litfront, the “left
opposition” within RAPP, answered by criticizing the images of the traditional
nineteenth-century realist novel. Georgii Gorbachev emphasized that “learning
from the classics . . . interferes with the creation of the new genres the age demands”
and concluded: “we are against Tolstoy’s ‘autocracy’ and against rolling back to the
times of Chekhov’s dominance; we are for an expansion of the pool of models with
revolutionary, militant, cheerful, socially engaged, effective classical examples that
are topical in their own time.”20 Thus came a critical question and answer: “How
are we to learn? First and foremost we must learn through criticizing the classics.”21
This criticism had to be such as to facilitate the “reboiling of both the realism and the
romanticism of the classics in the cauldron of proletarian content, setting oneself the
task of creating a new proletarian form and a new proletarian style.”22 The mention
of style is no accident: what had to be learned was style, while the method had to
remain “proletarian.” RAPP criticism repeatedly stressed the applied, limited nature
of the “task of learning”: “The issue of literary legacy and study is a matter of the
critical mastering of certain styles.”23 What was meant was a very specific style that
writers should use for orientation. Averbakh openly wrote about it: “When talking
about study we mean that it is first and foremost necessary to learn from the Pushkin
school—from Lev Tolstoy.”24 Thus “learning from the classics” was reduced to the
mastery of “psychological analysis.” With the RAPP critics, this method took the
form of the so-called theory of living man. They tried to overcome the schematic
nature of proletarian literature by showing a “hero in disarray.” Ermilov summa-
rized these demands into a systematic theory in his book Za zhivogo cheloveka v litera-
ture (For the Living Man in Literature, 1928), where he called upon the proletarian
writers to “illuminate and electrify the vast and humid cellar of the subconscious,”
regarding it (unlike Voronskii and the Pereval critics) as an “object to be overcome.”25
According to Ermilov, the task of the proletarian writer, as opposed to the fellow-
traveler, consisted in altering the psychology of the “new man.” The unveiling of
the new man’s subconscious had to serve one single goal: “to tear down unnecessary
barriers, illuminate dark corners, cleanse them, clear them out, dry them out, and
turn them into a state that is ‘worthy of a human dwelling.’”26 This theory triggered
many responses. Its main opponents turned out to be the members of Litfront, who
concluded that the main hero of “proletarian psychologism” was a “divided person,
torn in two by the opposing aspirations of his psyche and poignantly aware of this
disharmony,” that the “psychological literature” cultivated by the Na postu critics
was reviving “biologism,” while “such an abundant intrusion of the subconscious
element into literary fiction in the end means inevitably that in this literature, classes
that have been forced out by the revolution or are standing outside the proletariat
will return to life.”27
Moreover, the “left oppositionists” saw in this divided hero a direct projection
of the author, diagnosing “the identity of the artist of the ‘prolet-psychologist’ school
with the main image of the whole tendency”: “Is not the writer himself divided into
two halves, just like his heroes? Of course he is! The divided man of our time—with
a Communist mind and a petty bourgeois inward nature—who begins to create
works of art and strains all his psychological energy doing so, will inevitably create
two-faced, two-elemental [dvustikhiinye] works.”28
The distinction between those around Na postu and Litfront boiled down to the
former being openly in favor of imitation, assuming that the new reality should be
“reflected”—using the methods of nineteenth-century realism—through the un-

covering of private life in the psychological novel. The latter, on the other hand,
proceeding from the theory of Pereverzev, rejected classical realism and demanded
the celebration of the “psychology of the square” and the movement of the “large
masses” rather than the depiction of private life. One could say that for the Na postu
critics, the example was Fadeev’s Razgrom (The Rout), while for the Litfront it was
Serafimovich’s Zheleznyi potok (The Iron Flood).
After the rout of RAPP in April 1932, Pravda published a leading article in which
all the slogans of RAPP were listed that were now deserving of unreserved con-
demnation.29 And while in the beginning some RAPP critics opposed the dissolu-
tion of the organization, their resistance was soon broken. The most flexible of them
(Fadeev, Ermilov) harshly criticized their comrades of yesterday, for which they sub-
sequently received credit. Many leading RAPP functionaries perished during the
terror, and not only Na postu critics such as Averbakh, Makar’ev, and Selivanovskii,
but their opponents, too. Almost all Litfront members were repressed during the
Great Terror, including the Leningrad-based critics Evgeniia Mustangova, Georgii
Gorbachev, Aleksandr Zonin, Anatolii Kamegulov, Mikhail Maizel’, Georgii Be-
litskii, and Zelik Shteinman.
Just as their hegemony in the other art forms, the era of RAPP’s hegemony in
literature was a time during which the cultural field was usurped and monopolized.
While before 1928 RAPP had been one of many literary groups, on the suggestion
of Stalin it became the main group and swallowed up all enclaves of autonomy. Its
contemporaries thought that RAPP would, in the end, seize all cultural space. How-
ever, there was a force that was capable of devouring RAPP itself, and this force was
the power of the state. After 1932 and the elimination of RAPP as an intermediary,
the entire cultural landscape was finally made level, institutionally, ideologically, and
aesthetically: the era of the Union of Soviet Writers and socialist realism had come.
The End of Pereval and the Crisis of the Fellow-Travelers
The activity of RAPP was directed not just toward the Pereval group, but, as
we have seen, also toward the polarization and fomentation of literary struggle, the
radicalization of aesthetic programs, and the collapse of the infrastructure that had
emerged during the NEP years. A profound reformatting of the literary process
was taking place, confirmed by the publication of the main, and in many cases final,
books of the leading critics of the 1920s: the second edition of Viacheslav Polonskii’s
Ocherki literaturnykh dvizhenii revoliutsionnoi epokhi (Sketches of the Literary Move-
ments of the Revolutionary Era, 1928), as well as his books O sovremennoi literature
(On Contemporary Literature, 1928), Literatura i obshchestvo (Literature and Society,
1929), and Ocherki sovremennoi literatury (Sketches on Contemporary Literature, 1930);
Aleksandr Voronskii’s Iskusstvo videt’ mir (The Art of Seeing the World, 1928) and the
two volumes of his Literaturnye portrety (Literary Portraits, 1928–1929); Dmitrii Gor-
bov’s Put’ Gor’kogo (Gorky’s Path, 1928), U nas i za rubezhom (Here and Abroad, 1928),
and Poiski Galatei (The Search for Galateia, 1929); Abram Lezhnev’s Sovremenniki
(Contemporaries, 1927), Literaturnye budni (Literary Workdays, 1929), and Razgovor

v serdtsakh (Frank Conversation, 1930); Lezhnev and Gorbov’s volume Literatura
revoliutsionnogo desiatiletiia, 1917–1927 (The Literature of the Revolutionary Decade,
1917–1927, 1929); Solomon Pakentreiger’s Zakaz na vdokhnovenie (Order for Inspira-
tion, 1930); and Nikolai Zamoshkin’s Literaturnye mezhi (Literary Boundaries, 1930).
Apart from the Pereval members and critics close to Pereval there was a signifi-
cant group of critics who represented positions close to RAPP but were not func-
tionaries of RAPP. Around the turn of the decade there appeared Naum Berkovskii’s
Tekushchaia literatura (Current Literature, 1930), Valerii Druzin’s Stil’ sovremennoi
literatury (The Style of Contemporary Literature, 1929), Iakov El’sberg’s Krizis po
putchikov i nastroeniia intelligentsii (The Crisis of the Fellow-Travelers and the Intelli-
gentsia’s Attitudes, 1930), Iuda Grossman-Roshchin’s Iskusstvo izmeniat’ mir (The Art
of Changing the World, 1929), and others. Their works were frequently criticized
from various angles for “theoretical confusion” and “severe political errors.”30
However, the distribution of critical factions that had emerged during NEP be-
gan to change fundamentally. This had a noticeable impact on editorial policy: apart
from Na literaturnom postu, Oktiabr’, and Molodaia gvardiia (and later an entire host of
“theoretical journals,” such as Literatura i marksizm, RAPP, and Marksistsko-leninskoe
iskusstvoznanie) in Moscow, RAPP published many journals on the periphery—
Rezets in Leningrad, Zaboi in the Donbass, Na pod”eme in the Northern Caucasus,
Lit’e in Novgorod, Molot in Tula, and many others, not counting a large number of
almanacs. Practically all these publications had a section for criticism. At the same
time, critical publications that had no link to RAPP, such as Novyi Lef, were closed
down or, like Krasnaia nov’, were subjugated by RAPP. This happened to Novyi mir,
Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, and Literaturnaia gazeta.
With Voronskii’s downfall and the seizure of Krasnaia nov’, the fall of Pere-
val, which he had headed, became inevitable. In April 1930 a so-called discussion
about Pereval was held in the Communist Academy. It was attended almost solely
by RAPP critics (including members of the Communist Academy that were close to
them)—Mark Gel’fand, Mark Bochacher, Grossman-Roshchin, Aleksandr Zonin,
Ioann Novich, Isaac Nusinov, and Ivan Bespalov. Pereval was only represented by
Lezhnev, Gorbov, and Pakentreiger. During this discussion all theories of Pereval—
on organic creation, the sincerity of the artist, the art of tragedy, new humanism—
were declared inimical to the “tasks of socialist construction.” The Pereval critics
were accused of Trotskyism and of having links to Voronskii, of neo-Kantianism
and Bergsonianism, Freudianism, biologism, and intuitivism, of subscribing to
“the cult of the chosen one” (izbrannichestvo), of denying class struggle and the class-
relatedness of artistic creation, even of Mayakovsky’s suicide, and all the “highly
complex problems of proletarian literature.”31
In its practice of mass-producing “red Leo Tolstoys” RAPP could not possibly
agree with Pereval’s “priestly aristocratic approach to creation.”32 And because of
this the RAPP members were up in arms against Pereval’s demand for “sincerity in
literature”: “The slogan of ‘sincerity’ is the first mask of bourgeois liberalism . . . The
term ‘sincerity’ is idle chatter, nonsense.”33
The ideas of Pereval are interesting in their liminality. The Pereval critics
broached the question of creative freedom in earnest, trying to adapt it to the condi-
tions of the revolution with the help of concepts such as wholeness, sincerity, and
Mozartism that were contrasted with the rationalism and “self-control” propagated
by RAPP:
In each social task, including art, a person can achieve something only by
applying himself to the task creatively, that is, with all his wholeness. . . . One
such personality was Mozart, no matter to which field he applied his creativity.
Salieri tried to express the same things, but he did it mechanically, in an atomistic
manner. He had no wholeness in him; he was not capable of action as a way of
expressing his wholeness. . . . The regeneration that is happening within man is
the result of the art of tragedy, the most effective, active, and advanced art form.
The tragic principle in art involves the personality. Tragedy has always been
humanist art and remains humanist art.34
These words were pronounced by Gorbov during the discussion, while Lezhnev ex-
plained that the art of tragedy was an art that was “alien to cheap prosperity and
functionaries’ loyalty, an art that does not try to cover everything with the pink
varnish of idyll, does not try to reconcile the irreconcilable as soon as possible and let
the inevitable virtue triumph. And if it is joyful, it has paid dear for the right to be
joyful.”35 Gorbov further affirmed, against RAPP’s bashing of sincerity: “Sincerity
is a necessary precondition for creativity. If you want a man to run well, he must
have uninhibited legs, if you want him to write well he must have a soul that is un-
inhibited.”36 Already in his Poiski Galatei Gorbov had declared: “The artist is obliged
to experience profoundly and honestly the thing about which he is going to write,
and to commit his entire creative effort to the revelation of this experience.” The
proletarian artist, Gorbov went on to affirm, “must always be with his class. But he
must live subjectively, not satisfying a demand before it has entered his inner world,
before it has become his own inner gesture. In this regard the proletarian writer must
be haughty as Pushkin had been.”37 On the basis of this concept, Gorbov developed
his idea of “self-sufficient freedom”:
Not only by its specific weight, but also by its essence and by its very content
the full-blown artistic image that has been brought to completion, that has
been determined and matured in the SELF-SUFFICIENT FREEDOM of the
artist’s inner life, always and ever justifies itself from the point of view of the
great construction of life, which is the construction that is taking place in our
country. Not satisfying the demands of literary politicking, it always, by its very
nature, in the end gives the right answer to every large problem of life because,
being entirely part of its age, it contains the age’s judgment on the phenomena it
embodies.38
The RAPP critics simply did not understand this kind of language. Concepts
such as self-sufficient freedom, person, experience, wholeness, creative haughti-
ness, Mozartism, the tragic element, humanist art, sincerity, inner world, and inner
gesture were inaccessible to them. On the other hand, as Galina Belaia has demon-
strated, the error the Pereval critics committed at the end of the 1920s consisted in the
fact that they “failed to see the most important thing. They thought that they were
living in a transitional period, just like after the revolution. . . . But at that time the
very make-up [sostav] of reality had already changed significantly. The period had
stopped to be transitional.”39 While the circumstances had changed, the Pereval crit-
ics themselves had not: “At the end of the 1920s, the Pereval critics were upholding
the ideals of the revolution just as they had done before.”40
Social Mandate and the End of Left Art
The time of the First Five-Year Plan, with industrialization and its urbanistic pathos,
the collectivization that was perceived as a decisive turn toward the modernization
of the village, the cultural revolution that was to “take the broad working masses
out of the century-old backwardness,” and the political attacks on the “right-wing
deviation as the most important one,” led to a momentous “shift to the left.” The cul-
tural revolution also saw the last ever boom in left art. The left artists and theorists
entered this period already weakened, which was evident from the closing down of
the journal Novyi Lef in 1928. The journal turned out to be one of the shortest pub-
lishing enterprises of its time and practically disintegrated from within.
This weakness was compensated for by pathos and aesthetic utopianism that
sharply distinguished the left artists and critics from the RAPP members with their
politicking, bureaucratism, aesthetic conservatism, and submission to party struc-
tures, as well as from the members of Pereval with their aesthetic traditionalism and
lack of political zeal. The left artists and critics’ merit was their ability to propose
a new aesthetic program for the new age. With the old futurism of Mayakovsky’s
yellow blouse and the age of the first Lef already history, the motto of Novyi Lef was
summarized by Alexander Rodchenko in the following words: “There is no place
for art in contemporary life. It is still alive because there are romantic maniacs and
because there are people upholding the beautiful lie and deceit. The struggle against
art as opium must be joined by every cultured person.”41 This enlightenment pathos
(art equals religion) found its most consistent expression in the theory of the “litera-
ture of fact.”
Having reached its definite form in 1927, this trend produced the last large-scale
manifesto of left art in the collection Literatura fakta (The Literature of Fact, 1929).
This book became a kind of “swansong and . . . apotheosis of the avant-garde that,
having accepted socialism and permitted the end of art, now announces the end of
literature as well.”42 The theory of the literature of fact replaced the early cult of
production, an idea shared by all left currents, from Proletkult to LEF. Lef, and Novyi
Lef afterward, repeated like a mantra the proposition that “the method of LEF stands
at the threshold between aesthetic influence and utilitarian life practice. This border-
line position of LEF between ‘art’ and ‘life’ predetermines the entire essence of the
movement.”43 Sergei Tretyakov formulated this essence in the following way: “LEF
places the uninvented literature of fact higher than invented belles lettres, observing
the growing demand for memoirs and sketches among the active readers and protest-
ing against the fact that publishing houses remunerate a good article that demands
travel, study, and selection of material by only half of what they pay for the most
ordinary belletristic novel, which demands for its realization only a hat for the writer
to talk through.”44 The theory of factographic literature became a synthesis of the
main ideas of left art:
– the pathos of life building: for the LEF group, the literature of fact represented
the realization of the avant-garde’s central aim to “move literature’s center of at-
tention away from human experience and toward the organization of society”;45
– mass orientation and the rejection of “creative individuality” (Osip Brik’s slogan
“Against the ‘creative’ personality”);46
– rejection of intuitivism in favor of rationalism: “Professional writing (and
this applies to all art forms) consists in a corporation of craftsmen who work
on fetishized material using fetishized techniques and protect these techniques
against all labor-saving influences”;47
– constructivism and utilitarianism: “We now must look for leadership of the lit-
erary work of today not among the past masters of aesthetic influence but in
the real tasks that mastery of the word is facing today,” for “we are living in the
times of the social plan and of social directives”;48
– entrancement by materiality: “Not the lone man passing through the order of
things, but the thing passing through the order of people—this is the method-
ological literary technique we consider more progressive than the techniques of
classical belles lettres”;49
– technicism, formalism, and “laying bare the device”: “A revolution of literary
form is the unavoidable task of the day. Only the struggle against the obsession
with the past and fetishism will lead literature out of the dead end. Only the
complete overthrow of dead aesthetics will consolidate the advance of living
mastery”;50
– rejection of the traditions of “petty bourgeois belles lettres,” “imitators of
artfulness,” and “red restoration”: “Belles lettres are opium for the people.”
“Classical literary fiction now represents for the literary tasks of the proletariat
approximately that which the French language represented for the literature of
Pushkin’s time”;51
– rejection of “realism” and “psychologism” (psikholozhestvo): “those who today
‘learn from the classics’ draw a picture of the ‘sorrows of proletarian Werthers’
during their out-of-office hours.”52
Almost all these positions of Novyi Lef were vigorously opposed by both the
“traditionalists” from Pereval and the “imitators” from RAPP with their reaction-
ary aesthetic attitudes (“art as thinking in images,” the “theory of living man,” and
“learning from the classics”). LEF’s predilection for factography was harshly criti-
cized in Izvestiia (Polonskii), Krasnaia nov’ (Lezhnev and Gorbov), and Na literatunrom
postu (Averbakh, Libedinskii, Fadeev, and Ermilov). The latter in particular declared
that “such a barbaric theory can only emerge among those social strata that are good
for nothing and that lost any ability for building anything resembling a wholesome
worldview long ago.”53 Valentin Asmus published a detailed critique of the litera-
ture of fact, claiming that this theory robbed art of its philosophical depth, under-
standing fact superficially and erroneously assuming that factography was the basis
of “objectivity,” while it was itself a product of manipulation and the “fabrication
of facts,” and ultimately failed to accept that invention is one of the most important
tools of cognition.54 The article in Krasnaia nov’ 7 (1929) bore the telltale title “Fetish-
isty fakta” (The Fetishists of Fact).
With the discussion about “social mandate” (sotsial’nyi zakaz) in 1929, the dis-
putes about left art and literature spilled over into an open ideological confrontation.
The issue of “creation on mandate” was always present in Soviet literature. How-
ever, it was in LEF’s theory of social mandate that it first became the subject of a
public debate rather than just the lament of individual writers. While the theories
of Proletkult stipulated a need for the author as the “medium of the class” and “ac-
tive guide of collective consciousness,” and the doctrine of RAPP assigned authors
the role of “exponent of the party line,” in the theory of LEF the author’s role was
passive and effaced. The author is “disconnected” from the sphere of ideological cre-
ation and wholly turned over to the field of “mastery” and “ability” and, therefore,
politically “irresponsible”: “Just as the ideology of a shell, developed in the arms fac-
tory, does not tell us anything about the imperialist intentions of the workers who
produced that shell, the ideology of a literary work does not tell us anything about
its author’s ideology.”55 This attempt to shed the responsibility for the “ideological
quality of the thing” was an unmistakable expression of the writer or specialist’s
unwillingness to share responsibility with his client. And this was what gave rise
to Osip Brik’s famous maxim: “If there hadn’t been Pushkin, Eugene Onegin would
have been written nevertheless. A great poet does not express himself, but is merely
fulfilling a social mandate.”56
The LEF critics consistently defended the idea of social mandate, beginning
with their first manifesto, the editorial in the first issue of the journal Lef in 1923
(“We are not priests and creators, but specialists and executors of social mandate”),57
and continuing until the self-dissolution of LEF. The finale was the discussion about
social mandate organized by Viacheslav Polonskii in the journal Pechat’ i revoliutsiia,
of which he was the editor.
The RAPP critics, on the other hand, assumed that “for proletarian writers, the
execution of the social mandate of the time and the reflection of their class’s ideology
is one and the same thing, organic and indivisible.” Seen in this light, the LEF critics
looked unsightly, like turncoats wanting to “make a cut” on the “victorious class.”58
The argument about social mandate was not so much aesthetic as political: for the
LEF critics it represented an opportunity to avoid responsibility for the mandate it-
self, for the RAPP critics it meant first and foremost power. By casting themselves in
the role of the avant-garde of the “victorious class,” they believed they had the right
to issue orders in its name, and this is why it was so important for them that the re-
sponsibility for the “product” was not with the “customer” but with the “executor.”
LEF’s main opponent in the argument about social mandate from the circles
close to RAPP and the Communist Academy was Isaac Nusinov, who spoke out
against “the naked technicism . . . of the literary specialists,” and “the ideology of
the bourgeois and technical intelligentsia,” the exponent of which was LEF.59 Nus-
inov continues, stating that LEF’s ideology “comes from the declassified intelligen-
tsia, who almost always remained opposed to the bourgeoisie, never able and never
willing to go and learn from capitalism. . . . LEF’s interpretation of the social man-
date exposes the viewpoint of the declassified unemployed, who lost his work many
times because he could not get on with his patrons, but who finally found work with
a good patron, he loves this patron and is content with him, devoted to him and
willing to apply himself wholly to further the prosperity of his patron’s business.”60
An even more radical position was presented by Valerian Pereverzev, who stated
with regard to the insufficiency of the theory of social mandate:
It would have been better to create not a theory of social mandate, but—and this
would be consistently Marxist—a theory of social command, and even more
precisely, a theory of class command. . . . We are not in the least turning to either
LEF or VAPP with an order, we, being in power, demand of those who can sing
the necessary songs to sing, and of those who cannot sing them to keep silent.
We demand this because the objective course of things is with us, because the
material forces that drive history support our cultural aspirations.61
As for Pereval, the theory of social mandate contradicted its main postulates.
Characteristically, Viacheslav Polonskii rejected social mandate unambiguously:
“This theory . . . wrongly interprets the interrelations between class and artist,” it
reduces them to the level of relations “between tradesman and landlord, between
merchant and craftsman, between patron and artist, between enterprise and the per-
son carrying out orders”; it not only “tears the artist away from his class” but ignores
the fact that artists are “living members of their classes.” Consequently, Polonskii
believed, “this theory has been created for the needs of a small stratum of declassified
artists that have lost their old social base and are looking for a new base.”62
Proletarian-Kolkhoz Criticism and the End of Peasant Literature
The conference that had founded the All-Russian Union of Peasant Writ-
ers (VKSP) in 1921 had transformed the circle of peasant writers into some kind of
“peasant Proletkult,” oriented toward “writers of natural talent,” reliance on “one’s
own class,” and contempt for “literary apprenticeship.” Two distinct tendencies were
supposed to serve as points of orientation to the self-referential peasant poets: the
fellow-travelers (for example, Lidiia Seifullina, Leonid Leonov, and Aleksandr Nev-
erov) and the “kulak poets” (Nikolai Klyuev, Pyotr Oreshin, Sergei Klychkov, and
Sergei Esenin). These two tendencies, each of which was much stronger than the
“peasant writers,” relegated VKSP to marginal status.
VKSP was thus facing a dilemma: it had to move either to the “right” (to-
ward the fellow-travelers) or to the “left” (toward RAPP). The pressure on the
VKSP increased until the plenum of the Central Council removed Grigorii Deev-
Khomiakovskii, the chairman of VKSP, in November 1927. For some time VKSP
was in a stage of transition: Deev-Khomiakovskii’s influence was still strongly felt,
but the leadership already had new staff—Aleksei Dorogoichenko, Aleksandr Re-
viakin, Efim Permitin, and others. Finally, at the end of May 1928 a plenum was
convoked that was attended by “local” delegates (Leningrad, Northern Caucasus).
Here VKSP was reconstituted as the All-Russian Society of Peasant Writers (VOKP)
and given political tasks for the first time. Petr Zamoiskii became senior secretary;
a “research and criticism” commission was set up, headed by Reviakin, which went
on to publish a number of books that helped to define the new face of peasant lit-
erature, such as Puti krest’ianskoi literatury (The Path of Peasant Literature, 1929) and
Antologiia krest’ianskoi literatury (An Anthology of Peasant Literature, 1931). The latter
was preceded by a detailed foreword by Reviakin, in which the history of peasant
literature was rewritten in a new key and that also contained a complete bibliogra-
phy of prerevolutionary peasant literature. VOKP grew increasingly close to RAPP.
So close, in fact, that in 1927 RAPP, “in order to strengthen VOKP,” obliged some
of RAPP’s members who were writing about the countryside to join VOKP. Almost
all the leading members of VOKP were RAPP people, including Zamoiskii, Doro-
goichenko, Panferov, Reviakin, and Nikolai Kochin.
The years 1928–1932 marked the height of the activity of the proletarian-kolkhoz
writers. The interest of the authorities in this “literary regiment” was motivated
by the collectivization that was gathering momentum. The collectivization was
also behind the pressure exerted on the peasant writers to become “Soviet” as fast
as possible, which was accompanied by support for their activities. In January 1931
an extended plenum of VOKP was convoked, which adopted the resolution to re-
name the organization since the present name “contradicts the actual situation on
the front of peasant literary fiction, where the Sovkhoz and Kolzhoz is becoming the
main and leading topic.”63 As a result the term “peasant literature” was replaced by
“proletarian-kolkhoz literature” (proletarsko-kolkhoznaia literatura), and the organiza-
tion became known as the Russian Organization of Proletarian-Kolkhoz Writers
(ROPKP).
Moreover, the “organization, which formerly relied on farm hands, poor peas-
ants and middle peasants, and atomized self-employed farmers, now relies on the or-
ganized agricultural proletariat and those working in the kolkhozes.”64 This change
in the “social base” caused the turn toward RAPP. The latter regarded the peasant
writers as the incarnation of fellow-traveling. Precisely in this sphere the RAPP crit-
ics perceived a threat of petty bourgeois degeneration. Averbakh wrote about the
existence of “a real danger of sliding down into the kingdom of peasant narrow-
mindedness, petty bourgeois stagnation, philistine satiety.”65 The manifestation of
this degeneration was “decadence” (upadnichestvo), against which the RAPP critics
conducted a tireless struggle. And because proletarian literature was subject to strict
control, and symbolist writing was not published at all, it was the village that was
perceived as the main source of “decadence.” The incarnation of this decadence was
identified as the “bohemians” (bogemshchina) and their symbol, the poet Sergei Es-
enin. Decadence was declared to be the “main enemy,” while the positive example
was seen in the jolly doggerel of the “proletarian poets” (yesterday’s peasants). “Don’t
hover over the worker and the peasants with your sad eyes and sour faces. They don’t
need that. Give them a song full of joy and life,” were the words Deev-Khomia-
kovskii used to encourage the young peasant poets.66
The subjection of the Peasant Union (originally the All-Russian Union of Peas-
ant Writers, then reconstituted as VOKP and later as ROPKP) to RAPP was a “hi-
jacking operation” very typical of RAPP. In 1931, when the slogan of the struggle
against the fellow-travelers (“ally or foe”) was put into practice, the RAPP critics
redefined the make-up of the group of peasant and kolkhoz writers. While before
there had been several distinct “tendencies” (those who were close to the proletar-
ians, middle peasants, those who wavered, a right-wing group that was close to the
fellow-travelers, and so on), now the RAPP critics mentioned only the “kolkhoz
writers,” “writers who are hiding their attitude to the kolkhoz construction,” and
the “right-wing of the fellow-travelers that form part of the ROPKP, who, having
been peasant writers, are now hesitant: neither kolkhoz nor proletarian writers.”67
The RAPP critics never stopped trying to find deviations in proletarian-kolkhoz
criticism. The accusations ranged from “underestimation of the right-wing danger
in literature” to “right-wing opportunist attitudes” and “kulak theories hostile to
Marxism-Leninism.” As the group did not have their own critics in the provinces,
“proletarian-kolkhoz critics” were often recruited directly from RAPP. The mem-
bers of local branches of RAPP joined the secretariats of the local ROPKP sections,
sometimes taking up responsible positions right up to the rank of senior secretary.
The discussion about peasant literature was instigated by Polonskii’s “Stranitsy
iz bloknota” (Pages from My Notepad) in the second issue of Novyi mir for 1929.
His position was criticized by the eminent party functionary Viacheslav Karpin-
skii, who forced Polonskii to explain his concept of peasant literature.68 In a detailed
article Polonskii disputed Karpinskii’s statements to the effect that those who “sup-
port the capitalist upper ranks of the peasantry” and the “vestiges of patriarchal life”
could not be called a peasant writer.69 According to Karpinskii, this title belonged
only to the peasant writer who represented the “socialist growth of the village.” The
peasantry itself, not being a “developing class” but, on the contrary, a class in decline,
had no ideology of its own and could not possibly have one, and consequently peas-
ant literature could be “peasant” only in form but had to be proletarian in content.
Karpinskii stated that the kulak was not a peasant and that therefore kulak literature
could not be called “peasant.” The class criterion demanded by Karpinskii led to a
paradox that no participant in the discussion could solve in the end: “If the peasant
. . . masters the proletarian, Marxist-Leninist viewpoint not in words, but in deeds,
that is, grasps it with all his experience, mind and feelings, he stops being a peasant and
instead becomes a proletarian. If he stops being a peasant, that is, if he loses the peasant
view of the world, of things and of life that remains characteristic of the peasant
masses, which have not yet turned into proletarian masses, he loses all grounds, both
formal and essential, for being a peasant artist.”70
Polonskii proposed to draw a distinction between bourgeois peasant (kulak),
petty-bourgeois peasant, and, finally, revolutionary peasant writers. Thereby the last
group “is a mixed group, transitional and not proletarian in the direct and pure sense
of this word, but proletarian peasant.”71 But this did not protect him against criticism
from RAPP. Aleksei Selivanovskii perceived Polonskii’s position to be a “right-wing
deviation.” Valerian Polianskii’s position, on the other hand, was labeled a “left-wing
deviation” (Polianskii had claimed that there existed only bourgeois and proletarian
literature, while there could be no peasant literature as the peasantry was not a class).
But while Polonskii and Polianskii were condemned for “blurring the line between
peasant and kulak literature,” the activists of ROPKP were accused of blurring the
line between proletarian and peasant writers. They understood the latter to be the
“proletarian writers of the village.”
The problem of the scope of the concept of “peasant literature” remained irre-
solvable because it touched upon the main question that preoccupied the RAPP crit-
ics, that is, the question of the identity of “proletarian literature,” the very existence
of which had been disputed not long ago. However, while Trotsky had disputed
it from the point of view of the future classless society, now it was being disputed
from the point of view of the existing composition of RAPP and its pretension to
hegemony in a peasant country: as the RAPP critics themselves admitted, “in the
organizations of the proletarian writers there work many writers who are essentially
peasant” (among them, for example, Mikhail Sholokhov).72
At the same time, the RAPP critics, who set the tone in the discussions on pro-
letarian-kolkhoz literature, wanted to get rid of—as we have seen—the very con-
cept of peasant literature. On the one hand, peasant was the term used for everything
that was “not kolkhoz.” On the other hand, everything that was kolkhoz was “not so
much peasant” as “proletarian.” Averbakh claimed that “Klyuev and Klychkov are
not peasant writers but ideologues of the capitalist top ranks of the village. But on
the other hand, even Panferov, whose ‘Bruski’ is among the very best works about
the contemporary village, is not a peasant writer, but a writer of the working class, a
writer of the proletariat.”73 Peasant literature practically lost its niche.
The struggle against the “right-wing threat” was perceived to be the most im-
portant task of the proletarian-kolkhoz critics during 1930–1932. They directed
their criticism against the so-called neopeasant poets Esenin, Klyuev, Klychkov,
and Oreshin. It was thought that the “right-wing opportunistic” criticism of Polon-
skii, Boris Rozenfel’d, and Reviakin connived at the popularization of these poets.
The publications of their works were almost always labeled as “clear examples of
Trotskyite contraband on the literary front and counterrevolutionary ideas dragged
through the platform of our publishing houses.”74 An example of “correct” literary
criticism, on the other hand, was provided by Osip Beskin’s book Kulatskaia khu-
dozhestvennaia literatura i opportunisticheskaia kritika (Kulak Literary Fiction and Oppor-
tunistic Criticism, 1930).75 Beskin considered the work of the “kulak poets” a product
of nationalism—of “the good old-fashioned Russia living out its day,” of Slavophil-
ism that appealed to “belligerent anti-Westernizing moods,” living off the “mystic
spirit of the people,” and satiated with a “double-dyed [makhrovyi] anti-Semitism”
(9). In Esenin, Klyuev, Klychkov, and Oreshin he saw the “ideological representa-
tives of the kulak,” who would love to see the Soviet order overturned and “affirm
Rus’ instead of the USSR” (10). The difference between them, according to Beskin,
consisted merely in the fact that “Klyuev has an old-believer’s timbre, Klychkov an
unctuous one, and Oreshin a lush tenor” (22). Beskin perceived the orientation to-
ward “reactionary form” (that is, folklore) to be a political position: “The impres-
sion [shtampovanie] of the sugary Russian style of domestic industry on revolutionary
plots is a dangerous transfer of the reader’s class consciousness onto the track of Rus-
sophilia that is dragging him toward the past” (24); the “Russian style” to him was
a product of “pickled patriotism and nationalism” (32), while the praise of the “pri-
mordial force of the soil” was an attribute of the “fervent kulak and chauvinist Rus-
sian peasant [rusopiat]” (37). Much of this was continuing the tradition of Proletkult
criticism, in particular Vasilii Kniazev’s famous 1924 pamphlet Rzhanye apostoly: Kli-
uev i kliuevshchina (The Rye Apostles: Klyuev and the Klyuev-Influence).76
A different approach to peasant literature was taken by the critics of LEF. Boris
Arvatov in Zhizn’ iskusstva claimed that since the peasantry was a “cultural conglom-
erate,” then “the culture of the peasantry could merely be material for the work of
other classes” and that “in nature there are no particularly peasant stimuli for cul-
tural, and consequently, literary development.” Because of this there is no peasant
literature but only “literature pretending to be peasant” (krestianstvuiushchaia). The
only difference was that previously those who had pretended to be peasant had been
representatives of the educated classes (Bunin, Remizov, Zamyatin), while now they
were people born in the countryside (Klyuev, Oreshin, Klychkov, and Esenin). In
the eyes of Arvatov they were symbolists, imagists, realists—no matter what—
but as artists they had been torn away from the village and “objectively serve as a
weapon to bring the influence of urban culture to the peasantry.” And thus “peasant
literature” could be no “ally” of proletarian literature because it was a “myth.” The
task was to “de-peasantize [raskrestianit’] writers from the countryside by all means
possible so as to create a proletarian literature for peasants rather than a peasant lit-
erature.” Peasant literature was an invention of “babbling bourgeois aesthetes.” In
fact it was nothing more than a style: “All peasant art is a fruit of the imagination of
the urban intelligentsia who regard the remnants of barbarism and backwardness as
an exotic style.” Ridiculing this style and the “methods” behind it became the LEF
critics’ favorite pastime: “While in the countryside they now breed pigs or chickens
according to the last, revolutionary state-of-the-art methods, or at least set them-
selves the task to do so, the peasant literature they breed will only be laughed at by
these refined chickens. In this field we see either huge backwardness, plain illiteracy
or once again the aspiration to secure a dying, improper inheritance.”77
Naturally, not all critics related to peasant literature in the same merciless way
as RAPP or LEF. Gorky, who really cannot be accused of populist “babble,” saw
different possibilities for this literature.78 In 1931 he wrote about the peasant poets,
having in mind Esenin: “The peasant poet is that very clay pot that, colliding with
an iron vessel, that is, the city, had to break up. This is not just the drama of Esenin,
but the drama of all real, instinctively, and biologically peasant poets [instinktivnykh,
biologicheskikh krest’ianskikh poetov].”79 Gorky lent his support to the poets who sang
the praises of “Soviet” Rus’ rather than the “vanishing” Rus’. It was no accident that
it was Gorky who supported Mikhail Isakovskii, who was totally unknown at that
time and who later, with Tvardovsky, became the founder of the truly Soviet tradi-
tion of kolkhoz poetry.
 LITERARY THEORY
4

IN THE 1920s
FOUR OPTIONS AND A PRACTICUM
CARYL EMERSON
In 2001, the prominent post-Soviet journal of scholarship in the humanities, Novoe

literaturnoe obozrenie (New Literary Review, NLO), ran a retrospective forum on
“1920-e gody kak intellektual’nyi resurs: V pole formalizma” (The 1920s as an In-
tellectual Resource: On the Field of Formalism).1 The image of a field—conceptual
field, gravitational field, minefield, battlefield—is well chosen for this decade, and
Russian formalism is a most useful focus within it. The formalists (active 1916–1927)
were arguably the most distinctive and original group of Russian literary theorists
throughout the early Bolshevik years. Their “field of intellectual resources” was rich
with paradox from the start. In one sense they were exhibitionists, insisting on strug-
gles, battles, and high-visibility techniques (or “devices”) to deform, shock, retard,
and obstruct; they thrilled at the on-display ego of the futurist poet declaiming on a
street corner. In another sense they were laboratory scientists who took pride in their
objectivity and admired systems, standardized parts, and faceless self-referential
models that could separate the evolution of art from the vagaries of individual
personality.
The lead article of the NLO forum is provocatively titled “Nauka kak priem”
(Science [or Scholarship] as a Device).”2 Its authors reviewed all the reasons why for-
malism, and especially its early cutting edge in the so-called Society for the Study
64
LITERARY THEORY IN THE 1920s  65
of Poetic Language (Opoyaz), appealed to this revolutionary decade. Formalism of-

fered a scientific (or at least a systematic) methodology to replace the mysticism of
fin-de-siècle thought. It argued for the cognitive structuredness of art against intu-
itivist and subjectivist theories. With its newly precise terminology, it promised to
restore autonomy to the literary study of single works and of whole traditions. For-
malist models of literary evolution, for example, presumed that the canon revitalized
itself from within, utilizing its own tools, and thus was not dependent on the “fluid
and gradual development” of organic or merely individual psychological processes
(“Nauka kak priem,” 222). Unsurprisingly, this new literary science associated itself
with radical futurist poets and writers who celebrated city and factory—environ-
ments rationally planned and constructed rather than found or grown. Embattled
from the start, the formalists thrived on public polemic; some of them were installed
early (as very young professors) in official, influential state institutions. Unlike the
two powerful, eclectic, visionary movements that flanked them (symbolist criticism
before and socialist realism after), the formalists were militantly secular, passionate
about the objective reality of the palpable world, and keen on literary “specificity” as
well as empirical analysis.
The intuitive critics of the symbolist period had been synthesizers rather than
analyzers. Even serious verse scholars, great practicing poets like Andrei Belyi who
strove for exactitude in data through statistical methods, could not resist seeing in
the resultant numbers, graphs, and proportionality of poetic elements the confir-
mation of a cosmic philosophy. Their friendly rivals, the academic or biographical
critics, countered this metaphysical subjectivism with a policy of indiscriminate fact
gathering. Neither symbolism nor academicism was especially concerned with the
autonomy of the literary sphere, nor with a rigorous definition of their object of
study. “Caught between the extremes of impressionism and pedantry, Russian lit-
erary study drifted aimlessly, uncertain of its methods and of its province,” writes
Victor Erlich of this prewar period in his 1965 study of Russian formalism.3 Para-
doxically, in the historical context of Russian literary criticism the formalist quest
for professionalism and autonomy—often considered an elitist or escapist gesture on
the part of artists—became the single most “revolutionary” innovation of the 1920s.
This chapter situates the Russian formalist experiment of the 1920s in the con-
text of three rival orientations that opposed it and to some extent defined themselves
against it. The first competitor was materialist and social (or “societal”) criticism, a
heterogeneous group that included proletarian and Marxist critics as well as schol-
ars of the sociological school, all loosely linked together by their adherence to some
form of social determinism. The second is Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle, German-
romantic in inspiration, pan-European philosophers with ties to Kantianism and
phenomenology, whose resonance in the world today is far greater than it was in the
Russia of their own time. Third are the psychological or psychoanalytical critics,
largely (but not exclusively) Freudian. Since several chapters in the present volume
address the political and institutional history of these and other literary schools, our
purpose here will be more practical and applied. First, we compare the core values
and relations by which each school of criticism legitimated itself. Then, in a brief
66  CARYL EMERSON
coda, these four critical lenses (formalism plus its three rivals) will be turned on one
exemplary author from the romantic period, Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852). The pur-
pose of this final exercise will be to see, albeit in severely simplified fashion, what
aspects of the artist or artwork each school invites us to elevate above all others. Hap-
pily, no single venue or approach came up with a master key. But each left a signature
footprint, its own recognizable and defensible perspective on verbal art, which has
survived in the critical vocabulary of Russian and world culture to this day.
To nurture its distinctive value, or “dominant,” each school devised its own
critical tools. Since these values mutated throughout the decade in response to in-
ternal and external pressures, the dominants shifted as well.4 The contents of the
resultant “tool kits” did not always cohere, even within the same school. Theoreti-
cal equipment that worked well on one type of literary creativity might produce
ludicrously counterintuitive results when applied elsewhere. Yet the claims made
for each approach by its apologists were often global, for universal paradigms and
transnational explanatory models were in the spirit of the times. Russian formal-
ist thought is a case in point. Attempting to broaden its scope of operations and re-
spond to early criticism, formalism shifted its priorities from “mechanistic” (Viktor
Shklovsky’s early advice to critics to examine a book as attentively as a watchmaker
does a clock or a chauffeur does a car) to more “organic” metaphors (especially useful
in folklore studies) to “functionalist-systematic” frameworks (helpful for organizing
literary history).5 In the Bakhtin Circle, the empathetic “I-Thou” paradigm, adapted
from German philosophers of religion, was reworked in the early 1920s into a more
general “I-other” model involving visual horizons and perceptual fields; by 1927,
this visual dialogism had been recast out of spatial categories altogether and into
language (the interaction of verbal utterances).6 Marxist literary groups were noto-
rious for splintering, regrouping, and anathematizing one another. Their ideologi-
cal dominants shifted in keeping with the vagaries of power. Among the more vital
problems they failed to resolve was where to place the great Russian writers of the
past. Tolstoy was cleansed and recanonized during the 1928 centennial of his birth,
Pushkin likewise during the 1937 centennial of his death, but other literary classics
such as Leskov and Dostoevsky were declared esoteric, “idealist,” or “reactionary”
(with no consensus on the meaning of those terms for literary criticism).7
At times, the core value seemed linked to the vehicle or venue through which
the group’s ideas were communicated. It mattered that Bakhtin’s ideas of dialogue,
loophole, unfinalizability, and empathy emerged from an informal, itinerant study
circle that had, for some of its members, an “underground” Orthodox Christian com-
ponent.8 Early Petrograd formalists, who matured on battlefronts and in bohemian
cafés, respected the shock value of the futurist-style manifesto and the programmatic
anthology (sbornik); later, as academics in Leningrad’s State Institute for the History
of the Arts, these same formalists sponsored provocative public debates with rival
or hostile schools. The brawl or scandal proved to be a useful device. And some of
the fellow-traveling or card-carrying Marxists—who relied on party patronage to
alleviate the acute paper shortage of the war and postwar years—managed to pub-
lish journals, even “thick” journals, thus continuing the hallowed Russian tradition
of the dominant cultural ideology sponsoring a weighty periodical to propagate its

views.9
Organizing the Literary World
Each of these four groups—formalists, Bakhtinians, Marxists, psychological

critics—endorsed its own “primary matter” or prime mover in the realm of culture.
By 1927–1928, all groups were in crisis. We begin with the formalists.
In their early years, the founding theorists of formalism—Viktor Shklovsky
(1893–1984), Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959), Yuri Tynianov (1894–1943), and Ro-
man Jakobson (1896–1982)—identified as their primary value the autonomous word.
Its natural home was poetry. Of all literary structures, a poem is the most efficient
showcase for the dynamics of form, a highly condensed site of “literariness.” By this,
the formalists (and Jakobson most insistently) meant a closed, bounded space of reso-
nance and self-reflection that succeeded artistically to the extent that every formal
detail in it could be related to every other detail, along the maximum number of
parameters. The resultant structure is so marvelously compact and interwoven in
all its parts that nothing rattles around in it, no superfluous noise is heard, and no
intervention from the outside is required to complete its meaning. For the formalists,
who were fond of binary distinctions, the opposite of “literariness” were the words
we use to negotiate “everyday life” (byt), not presumed to have aesthetic value and
collectively referred to as “practical language.”
Practical language is necessity driven. Usually defined by its indicative—de-
scribing or pointing—function, it can succeed even if carelessly or redundantly or-
ganized. We use such language to communicate our everyday needs and intentions
outward to equally needy, disorganized others. It is wedded to results. Since practical
language expects a response, it is not self-contained and thus cannot control its own
shape. And, the formalists taught, as long as verbal relations remain aesthetically un-
shaped, they resemble inert “material.” Creating artists, with their profound sense
of formal wholes, cannot live for long in mere material. (Formalists reject the form-
content dichotomy, since in their view content as such emerges only when form vis-
its it.) Arguably, this poetic versus practical language distinction shares more with
the early-romantic worldview of the Schlegel brothers than it does with modern-
ism.10 Early formalism insisted on the inherent unpoeticality and unstructuredness of
interpersonal—and thus by definition open-ended—“referential” communication.
Understandably, this became a highly vulnerable platform in the formalist program,
attacked by its Marxist opponents in the Bakhtin Circle and elsewhere.11
It must be stressed, however, that for all their polemical denigration of the
nonaesthetic realm, the formalists did not preach “art for art’s sake.” They were
not elitists or “retreatists.” They acknowledged the interdependence of art and
life. Indeed, they were far more democratic in their scholarly pursuits than previ-
ous Russian criticism had been, researching not only the literary canon—masters
and masterpieces—but secondary, second-rate writers as well, together with popu-
lar genres (travel literature, detective fiction, film) and their reception by lowbrow
audiences. In Shklovsky’s view, literary history and everyday life interacted sym-
biotically through an oscillation of two principles, “estrangement” (ostranenie) and
“automatization.” It was the duty of art to “make everyday objects strange” so that
our habitual perceptions, dulled by the stress and boredom of byt, would be jolted
and thereby renewed. As he put it evocatively in his most famous essay, “Art as De-
vice,” after viewing nature—or people, or events, or ideas—through the lens of art,
“the sun seems sunnier and the stone stonier”; without the experience of art, our
dazed and automatized existence would “eat away at things, at clothes, at furniture,
at our wives, at our fear of war.”12 In this dynamic, art—that is, the foreground-
ing of form—most definitely serves life. It is a therapeutics designed to arouse and
revivify us.
Nevertheless, this “service to life” in no way resembles the optimal relation-
ship between life-experience and artistic expression in the Bakhtinian, Marxist-
sociological, or psychological models. The natural sister (or supporting) discipline for
the formalists’ word-centered aesthetic remained linguistics. This alliance set Rus-
sian formalists apart from Western European formalism, which took its cue from
the fine arts of music and painting. In Russia, on the contrary, ridding verbal art of
its dependence on the image—easily recognizable, passively appreciated, soporific—
was one of early formalism’s most urgent tasks. This priority explains the abrupt
and sarcastic attack made by Shklovsky, in the opening lines of “Art as Device,” on
the nineteenth-century Ukrainian philologist Alexander Potebnya, who taught that
“art is thinking in images.”13 Images were dishonorable shortcuts. Only formal fea-
tures—and especially the category of sound, the phonic envelope with its poetic eu-
phony, rhythmic organization, and potential for morphological inflection—could
not be paraphrased or “painted in” and thus were able to guarantee the autonomy of
the word as such. Roman Jakobson provides a telling example. Editing some Czech
versions of Pushkin in the late 1930s, Jakobson remarked that the great poet’s mor-
phological and syntactic inventiveness was both the locus of his creative genius and
the reason why he failed so miserably in translation.14 Pushkin tended to avoid meta-
phor, the easiest—because the most pictorial—element of a poem to be transferred
out of one language into another. Instead of metaphor he manipulated for poetic
purposes a variety of grammatical categories, especially the case endings and ver-
bal aspect so peculiar to Slavic tongues. For not only do morphological details have
no necessary image, they are in principle untranslatable out of one language into
another. Unsurprisingly, one wing of formalism remained deeply implicated in the
live performance of Russian poetry. But another wing, personified most radically by
Shklovsky, took up the study of narrative prose.
The dominant here is different. Although artistic prose is endowed with far
more “literariness” than is practical language, still, the formal and phonic envelope
of the prosaic line is rarely considered as delicate or sacrosanct as the soundscape of
“self-valuable words” in a poem. Novels, stories, and dramas can succeed brilliantly
on several levels, even when moved into alien languages and cultures far distant from
their birthplace, without suffering the charge of “betrayal” so often leveled against a
translated poem. In the first, ambitious Bolshevik decade, with its spirit of ideologi-
cal internationalism, many literary theorists were keen on discovering panhuman,

panlinguistic rules of narrative. Consonant with these ambitions, prose-oriented for-
malist studies redefined the familiar reverence toward the autonomous (poetic) word
as a reverence for the “autonomy of the literary (or poetic) function.” To aid the for-
malist narratologist, Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, and Boris Tomashevsky (1890–1957)
devised further technical categories in addition to estrangement. These included
“motivating” a device or motif (setting it into artistically meaningful motion); “de-
formation” to violate a preexisting norm; “braking” or “slowing down” narrative to
increase suspense; “defacilitating” to obstruct habituation; “baring the device” by
which a structure is organized (thereby delivering to the reader a jolt of cognitive sat-
isfaction); and distinguishing between “story” (events reconstituted in real time) and
“plot” (the same events shaped into a literary narrative). By such objective terminol-
ogy, these theorists hoped to rescue artistic prose from the practical realm of rheto-
ric and elevate it to a self-consciously “literary” (or poetic) construct. If it could be
shown that a work of prose, like every other structure, was governed by wholeness,
transformation, and self-regulation, then in keeping with the principles of structural
linguistics its relations too could be examined by means of binary distinctions.
Several aspects of this technical arsenal deserve note. First, the devices and func-
tions mentioned above are disproportionately appropriate to one literary mode,
parody. Parody is a vital posture in the life of the word, to be sure. But it is hardly
universal or panhuman—and it is incompatible with many other literary satisfac-
tions, for example, those provided by romance and epic. Second, orthodox for-
malism (as practiced by the founding Opoyaz trio of Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, and
Tynianov, plus Jakobson) was at its best measuring relations between a thing and
a thing: a sound and its repetition, a motif and its inversion, a norm and its defor-
mation, a plot element and its migration to another work or series. Formalism was
also good at a narrow type of relation between a person and a thing: the effect of
a literary device on the expectations of a given reader or epoch of readers. It did
not pretend to study relations between a person and a person. Most formalists took
it for granted that to qualify as a science, “literariness” was obliged to contain at
least one objective, and therefore predictable, “thing”—and surely poetry appealed
so strongly to their research instincts in part because it yields up a treasure trove of
precisely measurable things. When, however, the formal, grammatical, or phonic
envelope disappears from a verbal construct, as it inevitably does in translation, or
when it becomes less vital, as it does when plot movement or character type becomes
the focus of critical attention, the conscientious formalist critic must seek some other
“invariant thing” that stands above the individual text and monitors its behavior. It
is significant that Shklovsky, the most aggressive and fertile of the prose theorists,
wrote brash influential essays on the narrative prose of Miguel Cervantes, Charles
Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Lawrence Sterne (all included in his 1925 O
teorii prozy [Theory of Prose]), working solely and apparently with full confidence in
Russian translation. Shklovsky, with his working-class education, did not know
Spanish, English, or any foreign language. Did he consider this monolingualism
a handicap? Shklovsky’s practice as an analyst of literary prose suggests that in his
view, a higher-order authenticity residing in the very structure or movement of nar-

rative permits it to transcend the specific material out of which it is made. No verse
theorist, of course, could take seriously the “scientific” results of such a method ap-
plied to his subject matter.
One final aspect of formalist theory should be emphasized, because it both
mimics and undermines the Hegelian dialectic that would become mandatory (at
least as a cosmetic) for all human and social sciences in the 1930s. Literary history,
the formalists claimed, is also a structure. Its mechanisms are intrinsic and systemic.
Forms of art evolve not because life (or the life experience of authors) develops in
some open-ended way, spurring artists on to original solutions for never before en-
countered dilemmas, but because the impersonal logic of the literary craft itself re-
quires that exhausted devices be revitalized. Reassuringly, the repertory of devices
is finite. Readers are expected to recognize when an old, automatized technique is
targeted by an author and a fresh one applied to the material. For writers do not
just sit down and describe raw experience. They care about life’s problems, to be
sure, but mostly they care about learning how to write. For this they need literacy: a
rich repertory of formal devices. In his study Molodoi Tolstoi (The Young Tolstoy, 1922),
Eikhenbaum boldly suggested that Tolstoy’s obsessive “self-improvement lists” and
periodic condemnations of his own behavior in his diaries, as well as his elaborately
public, exaggerated confessions later in life, were tasks more intrinsic to literariness
than to moral conscience.15 Tolstoy’s “Franklin diaries” were designed to experi-
ment with various literary forms of punitive self-exposure rather than to combat,
or repent of, the actual sins being recorded—which often continued unabated. This
skeptical verdict on Tolstoy’s spiritual quest was an extreme formalist position, and
Eikhenbaum himself later backed off from it. But the radical approach of Molodoi Tol-
stoi is instructive. For the formalists, professionalism in the realm of the word applied
equally to great writers and to their critics. For both, literary evolution was a sort of
mechanical pas de deux, a dialectical shuttling back and forth between a newly acti-
vated constructive principle and the eventual, inevitable forgetting of it. There are
two states: awake and asleep. Art always serves the cause of waking up.
In 1928, when literary tensions were coming to a head—and then to a mandated
end—in Soviet Russia, Tomashevsky visited Prague. There he shared his program-
matic statement on “The New School of Literary History in Russia” with his friend
Roman Jakobson, already in exile in the Czech capital. Tomashevsky had delivered
the same remarks on 6 March 1927, during a celebrated showdown between formal-
ists and Marxists at the Teatr iunykh zritelei (Theatre of Young Spectators) in Len-
ingrad.16 They would soon be published in 1928 in the French journal Revue des études
slaves. Informing a foreign audience about his besieged movement, Tomashevsky
addressed its evolution, errors, achievements, and polemical overstatements with
commendable evenhandedness. But on the issue of autonomy, both for the literary
work and for the craft, he was firm. “Biographical facts can furnish only a chance
impulse preceding the creation,” he wrote. “The profound causes of the work reside
(and should be looked for) in the entire development of literature, which determines
the paths and poses the problems.” Historian-biographers who acted otherwise were
akin “to low-level agents in the secret police who inquire in the servants’ quarters
about minor facts in the life of the master, but who do not dare approach him openly,
face-to-face.” The progressive journalist-critics were no better, Tomashevsky in-
sisted, when they treated the heroes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Turgenev as “docu-
ments of social history,” as “types representing political, social, and moral ideas.”
Literature was not served by such methods. The formalists, happily, “considered
literary works bad historical documents. Real life is not reflected in novels; it is de-
formed in them.”17
It is in this expanded sense, then, that we might understand the formalist domi-
nant of autonomy. The prose writer and poet are in life, of course. However, their
craft is nourished and governed not by events “out there” but internally, by inter-
locking, balanced parts intrinsic to each work, and by the binary oscillatory rhythms
of literary history. Creators are real but not free, for their subjective agency is sub-
sumed by a mechanism immanent to the literary process. This situation has led one
recent scholar of formalist aesthetics to suggest that “author” is not the best name for
“the producer of an artistic text in such a scenario”: better, perhaps, would be “op-
erator of the device.”18 In many ways this humanly operated, mechanically reliable
device called literary authorship is closer to scientific experimentation than to sub-
lime inspiration. It serves, as does science, cognitive progress. In 1967, four decades
after the end of formalism as an organized movement, Shklovsky reaffirmed these
basic beliefs in a retrospective essay commissioned by a Hungarian journalist and
titled, after Tolstoy’s essay on War and Peace, “Neskol’ko slov o knigakh OPOYAZa”
(Several Words about the Books of Opoyaz). “Art is connected with surprise—with
estrangement,” he wrote. “But estrangement is also necessary in science. This does
not mean that science ends on this note of unconscious surprise. It passes through the
stage of the ‘miracle’ and then pauses to verify, creating ever new methods of veri-
fication. Then science again enters a new phase on the upward spiral of cognition.
Poetry is also cognized, cognized over time, and also moves forward. . . . The work
of the literary scholar, in my opinion, speeds up the forward movement of poetic
cognition.”19
The similarities along this progressive “cognitive front” among formalists,
Marxists, and to some extent psychoanalytic critics are striking. The differences be-
tween those three schools and the Bakhtin Circle are profound and unbridgeable.
The Bakhtin Circle
Let us now consider the first of our alternatives for organizing a literary world
in the 1920s. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) is a fascinating and difficult case. His cur-
rent immense fame must be narrowed to what was achieved and known during that
decade—which means writings not by him (almost nothing by Bakhtin appeared in
print until 1929, by which time he was already under arrest) but by his better known
colleagues: Valentin Voloshinov (1895–1936), Pavel Medvedev (1892–1938), and Lev
Pumpianskii (1891–1940).20 The first two were nondoctrinaire Marxists; Voloshinov
was also a respected philosopher of language. Pumpianskii, until his abrupt conver-
sion to Marxist sociological criticism in 1927, was a classicist, quasi-symbolist theo-

rist of nineteenth-century literary form (in which he saw an abundance of classical
elements), and the founder, together with Bakhtin, of a short-lived wing of Gogol
criticism in which Dionysian impulses functioned as a sort of primitive cognitive
carnival.21 Our discussion will be limited to the circle’s critical response to the for-
malist project. The four variables, here as in our subsequent comparisons, are those
by which we measured the formalists themselves: distinctive dominant; supporting
or sister discipline; “what serves what” in the life-art relationship; and the optimal
proportion, in literary study, of persons to things.
Along all four parameters, the contrast is stunning. Where the formalist domi-
nant tends toward the self-contained autonomous word (or, in literary history, the
impersonal poetic function), the Bakhtin Circle endorses the outwardly oriented,
interdependent, intersubjective personal gesture, which by the end of the decade had
been refocused in the addressed word or utterance. Where orthodox formalism feels
a common bond with structural linguistics, the circle’s cognate discipline is German
moral philosophy. Both schools distinguish rigorously between the work of art and
the work of life, and both insist that these two realms are indispensable to each other.
But if the formalists expressed this “unfused but inseparable” relation by revering
the poetic word and downgrading everyday experience (byt), all the while valuing
those literary devices that wake us up to life, then Bakhtin, in his early philosophical
essay “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” suggests a very different justification
for their interdependence. He was inspired, perhaps, by the Jena romantic Friedrich
Schelling, whose metaphysical writings and intuitive schemes for animating the cos-
mos Bakhtin knew well and deeply admired.22 The realms of art and life are dis-
tinctly separate, Bakhtin insists; one does not serve or subsume the other. But to be
valid, the interpersonal dynamics of life (how we perceive and “co-create” other per-
sonalities, possible only through acts of love) must correspond to and not contradict
the interpersonal dynamics of artistic creativity (how an author imagines, realizes,
and obligates himself to a fictive character). This reciprocity provides a clue to our fi-
nal comparative parameter. If thing-thing and thing-person relations are privileged
for the formalists, for the Bakhtin Circle—despite its pleasure in taxonomies and
terminologies—the starting and ending point is always person-person.
The most extensive response to formalism by a Bakhtin Circle member is Med-
vedev’s Formal’nyi metod v literaturovedenii (Formal Method in Literary Study, 1928), which
incorporates an eclectic Marxist perspective.23 It targets several of formalism’s most
vulnerable areas. A device-centered poetics, Medvedev insists, risks turning art into
an elite, nihilistic word game. This game is further trivialized by a theory of percep-
tion that reduces the aesthetic effect to a sequence of arbitrary stimuli played out
on the body. The division of language into “practical” and “poetic” is denigrating
to both sides. How could any experienced user of language presume that everyday
communication is without art, as if quotidian utterances are no more than barked
commands? The autonomy of art is hardly served by such a presumption. If poetry is
valued only to the extent that it is able to negate (disrupt or de-automatize) everyday
speech, the poet becomes a parasite on whatever linguistic forms happen to be tossed
his way in the round of ordinary verbal life. Surely artistic creativity commands
more agency than this. Medvedev raised other complaints related to the role of art in
a revolutionary society. Formalists might praise the avant-garde and admire futurist
poets, but a theory of literary evolution that rearranges parts, reassigns functions,
and “wakes us up” by merely inverting what came before can never recognize the
genuinely new. What is more, formalist readings misconstrue the nature of authorial
intent and readerly freedom. Shklovsky’s celebrated example of ostranenie in War and
Peace—Natasha Rostova at the opera—is simply wrong: Tolstoy did not “estrange”
the scene in order to free it up for the reader’s fresh and idiosyncratic perception,
but in order to tie it down to his own premeditated, authoritarian, moral meaning
(Formal Method, 61).
In addition to the hedonism, nihilism, and sterility to which the formal method
condemns art, Medvedev notes its strange, exhibitionist view of verbal narrative.
Always on show is the word for its own sake. One motivation appears to be as good
as another, as long as it shocks or draws attention to itself—for “plot is a crooked path
of digressions” (Formal Method, 106) in which event and person are mere auxiliaries.
At fault for these misprisions is the formalists’ deluded view of genre. In their view,
genres are no more than bundles of devices, assembled (or activated) by a cobbled-
together agent called the “hero.” But ask any reader: fictive worlds and their inhabit-
ants are not experienced by most of us in that way. Fictional consciousness is not the
by-product of plot, nor are genres mere accretions of narrative tricks. A hero inside
a plot possesses a face, that is, an inner unity made possible by the artist’s ability to
grasp an animated (albeit unfinalized) whole. The mark of success for both author
and reader is the ability to empathize with this developing whole, to understand the
givens with which it must work (its genre constraints) as well as its potentials—in
short, to “see reality with the eyes of the genre” (134).
Medvedev’s critique was not unwarranted, but it was blunt and unkind.24 He
targeted the earliest, most aggressive formalist positions at a time (1928) when the
movement was already under dire threat. Just because formalists valued sounds “as
such” and, as binary thinkers, appreciated parodic inversions, to accuse them of “ni-
hilism” with regard to meaning was harsh; negation, after all, is the essence of revo-
lution and can be intensely meaningful. To insist that no creativity is possible within
a closed system is unpersuasive; many structurally delimited vocabularies (those of
music, painting, and chess, for example) gain in creative potential by virtue of their
formal constraints. Moreover, a genre with its own “eyes and ears” might sound in-
timate and caressing to some—but to others it surely suggested a world more sinister
than scientific, a matter of spies and eavesdroppers rather than of loving, enabling
neighbors. Medvedev fails to appreciate what Iurii Lotman and his Tartu semioti-
cians grasped with such acuity in the 1960s and ’70s, on the far side of the Stalinist
night but still under the boot of ideological mandates: that the human can be co-
opted by a vicious politics (“Marxist-Leninist humanism”) far more easily than can
the mechanical and scientific—so the scientific, under certain conditions, becomes a
refuge for the human.
The dismissive tone of Medvedev’s critique is not duplicated in Bakhtin’s own,
more indirect rebuttal of this rival movement. Bakhtin prepared his essay, “The
Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art,” for publication in 1924. It
appeared only in 1975, however, and thus played no role in literary debates for half a
century.25 In it Bakhtin builds off his distinctively intersubjective sense of the binary.
The Bakhtinian binary is not thing-thing and not thing-person but rather the cre-
ative tension between two categories of person, “I” (my own self, felt from the inside
and thus open, unfinished, blurred) and “the other” (seen from outside and thus al-
ways appearing articulate and precisely shaped). The formalists were materialists and
positivists. Bakhtin was a Kantian, and as such he refused to limit the effects of art
to a mechanics. Nor could he sympathize with a methodology (or a theory of cogni-
tion) that hinted at possible access to things-in-themselves. Only our personal ex-
perience could animate the a priori categories of the mind; we can only know what
we ourselves create. Overtly distancing the formal method from Kant, Schelling,
and Hegel—systematic philosophers for whom he had the highest respect—Bakhtin
labels the formalist concept of art a “material aesthetics” marked by “primitivism
along with a dose of nihilism” (“Content, Material, and Form,” 262–65). Like Med-
vedev four years later, Bakhtin is not opposed to this approach for certain prelim-
inary analytic tasks (the method is harmless as long as it acknowledges its limits),
and he highly praises verse studies by Viktor Zhirmunsky and Tomashevsky. But
aesthetically creative form cannot be approached in this “compositional” way, by
merely poking at material with a device.
Art subject to such analysis “can be explained and understood only in purely he-
donistic terms,” Bakhtin argues, as a stimulus to “pleasant sensations and states in the
psychophysical organism” (“Content, Material, and Form,” 264). Again, for limited
pragmatic and utilitarian ends, such analysis is justified. But programmatic essays
with titles like “how a given work of art is made” can only confuse composition with
its spiritually quickened counterpart in the realm of aesthetics, which is architectonics.
For Bakhtin, a major drawback of material aesthetics is that it is “incapable of ex-
plaining aesthetic vision outside of art” (271). By this reservation, Bakhtin is not sug-
gesting that life and art are one. Nor does he advocate conflating the aesthetic task
with ethical action or the cognitive act (two Kantian categories of human event that
flank the domain of the aesthetic). But he does insist that a certain type of intuition
is natural to aesthetic activity: a heightened receptivity, a “distinctive kindness” and
“mercifulness” providing us with the courage necessary to handle originality, un-
expectedness, and freedom (279). It is normal practice, he writes, that artworks situ-
ate themselves in a tradition. In any cohesive culture, “one work of literature comes
together with another, which it imitates or which it ‘makes strange,’ and against the
background of which it is perceived as something new” (284). However, an act of im-
itation or estrangement is of transitional, lower-order significance, a cognitive and
not an aesthetic event. The goal of creativity cannot be limited to this gesture alone.
That is mere technique, and the “technical work” in any artistic product should not
be foregrounded but removed, “just as the scaffolding is removed when a building is
completed” (295). Bakhtin acknowledges, of course, that not all types of art share the
same priorities. Prose has its tasks, drama and epic have theirs. Poetry, for example,
“squeezes all the juices” that can be squeezed out of language (294) and places maxi-
mal demands on the verbal medium, exhibiting it in all its glory. But even in that
realm, the material of the word must be transcended and some new thing built on
“the boundaries of words, on the boundaries of language as such” (297).
What precisely Bakhtin meant by language transcending itself and some new
thing built “on the boundaries” would become clear only later, in the 1930s and ’40s.
At the end of the twenties, he laid out his minimum program for a positive dialogic
alternative to the “autonomous word” in Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Problems
of Dostoevsky’s Creative Work, 1929). By the time reviews appeared, Bakhtin had
already been sentenced to internal exile and his name proscribed. Thus the impact
of this path-breaking book was not felt until its second, revised edition (1963), and
discussion of it does not rightfully belong to literary theories of the 1920s. But given
Bakhtin’s stature today, a few words are in order. The book on Dostoevsky set itself
a “formalist” task. It pointedly excluded analysis of the novelist’s contributions to
moral philosophy, theology, abnormal psychology, Great Russian chauvinism—all
items that had made Dostoevsky a persona non grata and unsuitable subject of re-
search in the new Bolshevik state. Instead of those extra-literary topics, Bakhtin was
interested in the “way words worked” in Dostoevsky. Toward that end, he provided
a taxonomy of the prose word that was as precisely calibrated as one of Jakobson’s
charts.26 But this novelistic (nonpoetic) word was neither self-sufficient nor designed
to be contained within an echo chamber of calculated effects. It was malleable and
exposed. This vulnerability of the utterance, always poised on the border of anoth-
er’s yet-to-be-finalized answering word, is the distinctive feature of the Bakhtinian
dominant. In Bakhtin’s view, the uttered word does not exist as such until it is ad-
dressed to (conceived in the presence of, humbled by) another’s responsive conscious-
ness. We cannot speak at all, Bakhtin believed, until we have another person “in
mind,” but at the same time we cannot be sure how much of our intent will register,
or when and how that other person’s responsive word will come out. The boldness of
Bakhtin’s polyphonic theory lay in its presumption that language was indeed com-
petent to create uncontrollable, freely developing “life,” bestowed by novelists but
felt by characters as open-endedly their own. Heroes are designed by their author
to resist, surprise us, and talk back. Novelistic polyphony, which Bakhtin called a
“Copernican revolution” in the realm of the word, was Dostoevsky’s most brilliant
formal device.
Anatoly Lunacharsky, prominent Bolshevik critic and Commissar of Enlight-
enment, published a timely (and favorable) review of Bakhtin’s book in the October
1929 issue of Novyi mir. It probably saved Bakhtin’s life. But overall, domestic recep-
tion of the Dostoevsky study was indifferent or hostile.27 Hard-line Marxists then in
the ascendancy were not persuaded by its “formalist” protestations—which in any
event was hardly a safe port for literary critics by 1929. They declared Bakhtin’s book
(correctly) an idealist, ahistorical, insufficiently class-conscious work.
The Sociological School and the Marxists
We can now turn to the heterogeneous group of materialists, fellow-travelers,

and Marxists whose opposition to the internal, seemingly asocial focus of formal-
ist literary science had been steady since the early twenties. Before considering the
Marxists proper, however, mention must be made of Valerian Pereverzev (1882–
1968) and his “sociological criticism” of the 1920s. The sociological school was an
ideological hybrid that reflected certain formalist principles of literary autonomy,
some social factors valued by Marxist critics, and even a trace of then current, collec-
tively grounded psychologies of art.28 The failure of this protean movement became
clear in 1929–1930, when a vicious campaign was mounted against pereverzevshchina,
“Pereverzev-it is,” by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP). Per-
everzev had been an established academic critic before the revolution, with two
well-known monographs (one on Dostoevsky in 1912, another on Gogol in 1914).
His sociological school practiced an empirical, inductive methodology that limited
itself to analyzing—optimally, in a descriptive and nonteleological manner—the
material offered by the literary text. The literary work, in this view, was the result of
the imprinting of social experience. Social experience did not have to be derivative
of economics or class, but it did have to be collective, the conscious or unconscious
voice of the communal sounding inside each individual. Because a child’s psyche is so
receptive and permeable to outside influences, sociological critics often concentrated
on categories key to children, such as an attachment to “one’s home” and the concept
of play. Pereverzev reproached Marxists for their insufficient attention to the role
of the unconscious, as well as for their narrowly circumscribed roster of acceptable
factors on which to base a socially determined theory of literature. Literature is a
playground, he asserted, and for that reason it is also a testing ground for the imagi-
nation. This play space is stocked not with ideas, but with images. An image, for Per-
everzev, was always social. The sum total of images in a work constituted a “central
image,” which was an authentic reflection of social experience (perezhivanie).
By 1929, radical proletarian critics were condemning the sociological school for
a different slate of sins than those discovered in Bakhtin’s Problemy tvorchestva Dos-
toevskogo. Both Bakhtin and Pereverzev were charged with “psychologism,” how-
ever, and with an unwillingness to highlight the determining influence of politics,
economics, and social class. Overall, Marxism’s arguments against its rivals did not
grow more subtle or robust as the decade ripened into the First Five-Year Plan. What
did grow more robust was their patronage in party-supported institutions. As re-
gards formalism, arguably the most sensible and principled Marxist rebuttal of that
doomed movement appeared not near the end but early in the decade, by Leon
Trotsky in his Literatura i revoliutsiia (Literature and Revolution, written 1907–1923, pub-
lished 1923).29
Like Bakhtin, Trotsky appreciated the efforts of this “first scientific school of
art,” which had raised the study of its subject matter “from a state of alchemy to the
position of chemistry” (Literature and Revolution, 162). Despite its overall “superficial-
ity and reactionary character,” formalism could be useful, Trotsky felt, both for its
specific local findings and in its symbiotic, explanatory relation to such great poets of
revolutionary futurism as Vladimir Mayakovsky. The arrogance and danger began
when formalism claimed for its method “more than a subsidiary, service-oriented
and technical significance” (164). As we have seen, these anxieties Trotsky shared
with Bakhtin and Voloshinov. But in the major domains—the parameters by which
we are measuring our four theoretical options during this decade—Trotsky’s cri-
tique of formalism is an index to his profound departure from the worldview and
priorities of the Bakhtin Circle.
The dominant for formalism is the autonomous self-valuable word. For Bakhtin
it is the interdependent, unfinalized, addressed word. For the Marxist Trotsky, in
contrast, the dominant is human behavior embodied in an act that is socially de-
termined, class conscious, material, and dialectical. The formalists—so the famous
ending to Trotsky’s chapter five sums up the matter—“are followers of St. John.
They believe that ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ But we believe that in the be-
ginning was the deed. The word followed, as its phonetic shadow” (Literature and
Revolution, 183). The word as a shadowy parasite on action is part of an ancient tradi-
tion, of course, stretching back to Plato. Trotsky inserts himself into this tradition
by identifying with those modernizing Russian thinkers who turned to Hegel as a
way out of the lethargy, stasis, and lack of direction of their vast country. The for-
malists and idealists (both of whom chose Kant as their “greatest genius,” Trotsky
notes) “did not look at the dynamics of development but at a cross-section of it, on
the day and the hour of their own philosophical revelation” (182). Such thinkers have
been part of Russia’s problem, not her solution, and literature in their hands ceases
to be a force for progress or public good. Trotsky’s scarcely concealed polemic here
against subjectivity and self-centeredness in philosophy is indebted to Lenin’s 1908
screed, Materializm i empiriokrititsizm (Materialism and Empiriocriticism), with its near-
hysterical insistence on an objective material world “out there” that is potentially
accessible to, and identical for, each of us—a world constituted by “a view from no
one.”30 As Lenin saw it, only the unquestioned existence of such objective reality
could instill in writers and other activists the confidence and fearlessness we require
before we will risk acting on the world forcefully enough to change it. To grasp the
issue at stake here, and the powerlessness of any individual dissenting consciousness
to refute it in subsequent Marxist “art versus life” debates, it is helpful to review
some basic assumptions of dialectical materialism. This philosophical term was
formally introduced into criticism by the first Russian Marxist of stature, Georgii
Plekhanov (1857–1918) and became mandatory for all officially approved Soviet-era
humanists and scientists. Bakhtin had reproached formalism for its “material aesthet-
ics.” Trotsky would find both Bakhtin and the formalists not nearly material enough.
And Trotsky would further insist that neither of those two critical schools yoked
matter to the proper principles, which are generated by the “objectivity of historic
necessity” (171).
The logic of dialectical materialism might be summarized as follows. All real-
ity, in its essence, is material. Matter is objective and primary. But matter is not dead;
Marx insisted that motion is an essential quality of all matter, and by this he meant
not mere mechanical motion but a vital impulse, a tension inherent in the material
world. Since the psyche that receives this vital material is initially blank and has no
independent existence, reality is fully knowable. The knowing subject must act on
matter so as to release the energy in it. In this sense, subjects are both born into their
world and become the responsible “makers” of it. But a subject does not—and can-
not—act or think in an autonomous way, as romantic or idealist theories of cognition
would have us believe, because the material world, to a very large extent, determines
the subject. This conditioning takes place through “social being,” of which the sub-
ject can be more or less aware, and is made manifest in habits, mental prejudices, and
deliberate acts. Social being is deterministic but never static. Although all material
nature forms an interconnected whole, there is nothing absolute or eternal in that
whole. Material nature evolves, although not as a smooth or uniform process. At
every level development, societal as well as personal, is punctuated by periods of
cataclysm (that is, revolutionary change). All change is the result of conflict between
opposing tendencies. Consciously or not, authors are a product of this struggle, as are
their fictional heroes.
Pereverzev and his sociological critics conscientiously applied this dialectical
materialism to literary study, respecting the socially shaped image and a collective,
dynamic unconscious. Only under pressure at the end of the decade did Perever-
zev narrow his social variables to endorse the specifically class-based “dialectical
material” approved by Marxist-Leninists.31 The most compatible sister discipline
for this narrower view of Marxist literary criticism is, of course, socioeconomics—
and failing full cooperation there, the politics that would coerce it. But throughout
the relatively pluralistic 1920s, sociological criticism was only one of a wide variety
of creative experiments involving matter, movement, and social action. Achieve-
ments in this realm were as spectacular in developmental psychology as in literature
proper, especially in the work of Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934).32 It is noteworthy that
Vygotsky’s optimal learning scenarios for young children were worked out after a
lengthy apprenticeship in literature and drama, reflected in his subtle readings of
Bunin, Pushkin, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his 1925 treatise Psikhologiia iskusstva
(The Psychology of Art).33 Starting points for materialist criticism could be ideologi-
cally quite heterogeneous. Since matter is prior to knowledge, literature (and literary
knowledge) need only demonstrate that the word is a verbal reflection of the socially
realized deed. A great deal of romanticism, sentimentalism, lurid violence, injustice,
and unvarnished bodily appetite was welcomed under the umbrella of a “materialist
Marxist approach” to that deed. Aleksandr Voronskii (1884–1943), moderate Marx-
ist, dabbler in Freud, and embattled editor of the “thick” journal Krasnaia nov’ (flour-
ished 1921–1928), provides a good example of the subject matter permissible under
this rubric in his 1925 essay on Isaac Babel. Babel—Voronskii writes with gusto—is
a “physiological writer. He celebrates reality, life, the elementary human urges, pas-
sions, lusts. . . . Babel the artist is a heathen, a materialist, and an atheist. He is inimi-
cal to the Christian, idealistic world view that considers flesh and matter base and
sinful, and the ‘spiritual’ the only positive force.”34
With the cumulative deeds of revolution, savage civil war, and widespread
famine as one’s “material,” a wide variety of styles and contents could be justified
under the banner of a Marxist “reflection theory” of art. They stretched from con-
ventional psychological realism to the brilliant, at times lurid ornamentalism of Evg-
eny Zamyatin and Babel. But not only great masters of prose benefited from these
guidelines. So did the self-taught proletarian artists sponsored by Proletkult (until its
curbing in 1920) and, after 1922, by the many groups that eventually fed into RAPP.
Valued above all in these literary workshops were self-confidence, the will to study
(Russian classics as well as the trajectory of one’s own life), and a working-class mi-
lieu. Native gift, intellectual expertise, and awe before inimitable genius were sec-
ondary considerations. Evgeny Dobrenko has chronicled the proliferation of these
“armies of poets,” as well as the predictable, dispiritingly banal results. The creation
of a textual canon that reflected—quite literally—the level of skill of its average am-
ateur practitioner was one key contribution made by the 1920s to orthodox socialist
realism. Among the many personal comments from these aspiring poets quoted by
Dobrenko, one has special pathos: “‘Yes,’ the chief Komsomol poet lamented [in re-
sponse to a local criticism], ‘there are many such things that we have not yet mastered
from Pushkin.’”35
The “dialectical-materialist creative method,” proclaimed authoritative by
RAPP in 1928, had a curious fate.36 For all its card-carrying collaboration with
the ruling ideology, this method, like formalism, was also selectively criminalized
as a “deviation” after 1932. Unlike the poisonous epithet “formalist,” however, it
never became an arbitrary or lethal form of abuse. Literary criticism in an acceptably
Marxist-materialist vein could support a mechanical, trivial economic determinism,
such as that applied to both authors and heroes by Vladimir Friche (1870–1929), as
well as the more imaginative, flexible readings of Pereverzev. Part of the rigor of
such interpretation, as suggested above, was the presence in its calculations of “at
least one thing,” that is, one factor external to the opaque and willful subject, which
could objectively anchor its claims. This external thing was socioeconomic being. As
Petre Petrov has argued in his comparison of the formalist and Pereverzev schools,
these two projects—for all their immensely different dominants—resemble one an-
other in two crucial respects. First, whichever transpersonal value is chosen “as the
truly or ultimately determining one: the outside of the objective dynamics of form
or the outside of objective social being,” in both scenarios the author is not quite fully
the author, “the individual subject is not enough.” And second, both schools aim to
dispel the illusion of literature’s “privileged relation to the personal ‘inner world.’”37
Marxist-Leninist literary interpretation, then, had a distinct investment in the
person-to-thing ratio. As a socioeconomic doctrine rooted in the materially ex-
pressed human deed, constructed against the isolated Cartesian ego and devised to
foster communal bonding, it was in principle person-to-person. But persons, orga-
nized by class, molded by material conditions, and fixed in their destiny by economic
laws, had become as predictable as things.
The Psychoanalytic Critics
Our final literary option, the psychoanalytical, explicitly did claim a privileged
relation to an individual’s “inner world.” But this was innerness of a peculiarly so-
matic, palpable sort. To many of its spellbound students, advocates and detractors
alike, this world seemed scarcely conscious, more a hydraulics than a poetics. In such
a model, the creative imagination is governed not by impersonal form foregrounding
itself, not by dialogue on an interpersonal boundary, not by the struggles of social or
economic class, but by another dominant altogether: physiological drives within an
isolated organism. So thoroughly does this core Freudian value appear to resist the
grain of our other methodologies, it can hardly surprise us that Valentin Voloshinov,
Marxist-oriented member of the Bakhtin Circle, published a book-length attack on
Freud’s baleful influence in 1927.38 “What is the basic ideological motif of Freudian-
ism?” Voloshinov asks. His answer: not class, nation, social or historical existence,
but exclusively biological being—and (in a further narrowing of scope) biology re-
duced to sex and age (Freudianism, 10). Such dominants come to the fore whenever a
social class enters its endtime of crisis and decay, as bourgeois Europe, during the
Great War, definitely had done. One’s own body becomes more interesting and more
real than the legacy or potentials of culture. The private, the personal, the asocial
“abstract biological organism” and the “supreme power and wisdom of Nature”
(meaning animal pleasures, animal warmth) always become the hero, Voloshinov in-
sists, when a declining class senses its impotence in the larger historical scheme (11).
Like the Marburg neo-Kantians generally, the Bakhtin Circle considered the preser-
vation and nurturing of culture to be no less vital a human task than the propagation
and nurturing of biological families.
Voloshinov’s book against Freud contributes more to sociology than aesthetics.
But the author does occasionally comment on literary matters—for example, on the
plot setting and trajectory of the European bourgeois novel. The “wholesale sexual-
ization of the family” in Freudian theory is “an immensely interesting feature,” he
admits (Freudianism, 90–91). It testifies to the fact that the nuclear family, that “castle
and keep of capitalism,” has ceased to be socially justified and perhaps even to be
understood. So stupefied has modern capitalist life become, the family is taken for
granted even as it is disintegrating. But (Voloshinov continues coyly) the teachings
of Freud provide a convenient “way to make it newly meaningful, or ‘strange’ as our
formalists would say. The Oedipus complex is indeed a magnificent way of making
the family unit ‘strange.’ The father is not the entrepreneur, and the son is not his
heir—the father is only the mother’s lover, and his son is his rival!”
Voloshinov’s critique, which crudely debunks some of Freud’s crudest formu-
lations, does not surprise us on its own ground. What does surprise is the fact that
such wholesale discreditings were not the norm for the Bolshevik 1920s. In his his-
tory of psychoanalysis in Russia, Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii (The
Eros of the Impossible, 1993), Aleksandr Etkind notes signs of strong, active curiosity at
many levels.39 These include a surge of interest in psychoanalysis after the revolution
among high-ranking party members; massive campaigns between 1922 and 1928 to
translate all of Freud into Russian; and ingenious attempts to synthesize Freud and
Marx as twin prophets of a nonmystical secular ethics, which peaked in 1925. Rus-
sian thinkers renewed their quest for theories of the unconscious more socially com-
pelling than Freud’s reductive sex-and-death hypotheses. The interaction among
practicing psychoanalysts, the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (founded 1911, re-
vived 1921), and literary criticism was showcased in the indefatigable person of Ivan
Ermakov (1875–1942). Revolutionary-minded Russian advocates of Freud appreci-
ated the monistic, deterministic, potentially dialectical aspects of his doctrine, which
(many believed) was compatible with materialism and thus could be collated with
Pavlov’s achievements in neurophysiology.40
During these shattered post–civil war years, much attention was paid to the
therapeutic promise of Freud’s teaching. It was hoped that an empirical science that
acknowledged, inside the psyche, the pain of struggle (whether class or otherwise)
could also suggest ways of resolving this conflict for the larger health of the organ-
ism. Freud could help reconcile us to pain and loss. Well known in this regard is the
literary and personal travail of Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895–1958), a wildly popular
satirist of the 1920s and life-long clinical depressive who described his fifteen-year
battle with despair in Vozvrashchennaia molodost’ (Youth Restored, 1933). In the course
of recalling that novella in his much later work Pered voskhodom solntsa (Before Sunrise,
begun 1943), Zoshchenko cited an exchange with a scientist on the topic of auto-
therapy. By then, of course, Zoshchenko was insisting that the method came from
Pavlov, not from Freudian psychoanalysis—“I swept away the incorrect conditioned
connections that were mistakenly established in my consciousness”—but the two
therapies clearly share the same inspiration.41 In both, the person-person relation was
primary. This was not, however, the interpersonal, outward-oriented scenario of
Bakhtin. Rather, a fragile ego is encouraged to forge a connection with its “deeper”
or “higher” levels—its id, superego, and earlier selves—within a closed model that is
fueled not dialogically but hydraulically, through metaphors of pressure and release.
Freud’s critique of religion, and in general Freud’s relentless secularism, ap-
pealed to the new atheist state. It was a useful weapon, since spiritual philosophy
and symbolist mythmaking still enjoyed high status and currency among creative
artists. The rising Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria (1902–1977) noted that Rus-
sian psychoanalysis, happily, could help explain the production of culture without
recourse to the soul. All this material concretization of creativity also appealed to
Lenin, but he was overall as indifferent to the Freudian frenzy as he was to all non-
political issues. Trotsky on Freud was another matter. Trotsky was a known figure
in psychoanalytic circles in Vienna, whose meetings he had frequented. Although
he considered Freudian conjectures about the human mind quite arbitrary as clinical
science, he was open to these ideas as hypotheses. At the end of Literatura i revoliutsiia,
he expresses the hope that once the proletariat has finished with fighting and work
on philosophy can again resume, “the psycho-analytic theory of Freud” might be
reconciled with materialism. “It would be fine,” Trotsky writes optimistically, “if
a scientist would come along who could grasp all these new generalizations meth-
odologically and introduce them into the dialectical materialist conception of the
world” (Literature and Revolution, 220).
In part because psychoanalytic criticism was linked with Trotsky’s name, the
exile and then expulsion of this brilliant foe of Stalin’s in 1927 also marked the end of
the Freudian “deviation.” The second half of the decade witnessed a growing num-
ber of complaints against Freud along Voloshinov’s lines. It was argued that clinical
psychiatry and biological instincts could not legitimately ground a theory of cul-
ture that valued consciousness as highly as did Marxism. “What serves what” in the
art-life duality remained as unresolved in Freud as in formalism: whereas orthodox
formalists presumed that writers served solely the interests of artistic form, orthodox
Freudians reduced art to a sort of somatic overflow, to compensation or sublimation,
which ignored the social dimension as surely as it undermined the noble aspirations
traditionally ascribed to Russian writers by their reverent service industries. One ex-
ample is Ermakov’s volume on Pushkin, Etiudy po psikhologii tvorchestva A. S. Pushkina
(Studies in the Psychology of Pushkin’s Creative Work, 1923), which, as Etkind tact-
fully notes, together with its 1924 companion volume on Gogol, has “for all practi-
cal purposes disappeared from scholarly circulation” (Eros nevozmozhnogo, 262). In his
Pushkin book, Ermakov links the Little Tragedies to other masterpieces in the poet’s
canon through their common fixation on horror or terror (strakh), which, in his view,
is an appropriate organizing motif for Pushkin’s output overall. Ermakov’s essays on
Gogol were less theory-driven and thus somewhat more successful, given the mani-
festly darker nature of that writer’s genius.
As the twenties drew to a close, so did our literary schools. Ermakov lost his
position as director of the State Psychoanalytic Institute when it was closed in 1924.
He ceased to be published, turned his attention to collecting embroideries by the
Crimean Tatars, was arrested during a routine round-up in 1940, and perished in
the Gulag in 1942. The founding formalists at first became more intractable as they
sensed their slipping influence after 1927; the survivors then adjusted their rhetoric
and scholarly method to quieter, more conventional keys. After Bakhtin’s arrest and
exile in 1928–1929, the circle fell apart and its Marxist-oriented members relocated.
Voloshinov died of tuberculosis; Medvedev was arrested in 1938 and shot in July of
that year. By the end of the twenties, Pereverzev and his sociological school were
already being accused of “vulgar sociologism”; in 1938, he too was arrested and spent
eighteen years in a labor camp, to be rehabilitated only in 1956. Literary theory of
the 1920s has a ghastly cohesion to it. It did not mature; it was cut off. Perhaps for
that reason, its rediscovery in the 1960s and ’70s, by Russia and by the world, had the
freshness of Pompeii about it. Methodologies frozen in midlife could be excavated,
resuscitated, and reinvigorated from well-preserved traces. What follows are four
critical vignettes, a comparative sample from the most durable of these critics’ works
applied to a single writer.
A Gogol Practicum through Four Lenses
Formalist
Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) was an enigma in his own time, a stylistic revolu-
tionary, and a recurring touchstone to generations of critics. The formalist school
produced two classic essays on him, one intrinsic (immanent to a single work) and
the other extrinsic (relating to literary history). The first, Eikhenbaum’s “How Go-
gol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made” (1918), was among the earliest sustained formalist readings
of narrative fiction and the closest their method came to reading a piece of prose as
if it were a poem.42 In this Petersburg tale about a poor copy clerk who acquires, and
then loses, his precious winter cloak, Eikhenbaum sees neither human tragedy nor
social protest but instead the folksy stylistic footprint that Russians call skaz, a nar-
ration built up entirely out of personal tone. “Shinel’” (The Overcoat), Eikhenbaum
insists, is best read as a fabric of puns, semantic auras, and “phonic gestures”—some
exaggeratedly comic, others melodramatic and declamatory. Farcical and pathetic
tones alternate so nonsensically in this story that no coherent “psychology” can ever
coalesce, around the narrator or around a fictive character. The story is a masterpiece
precisely because of this artfulness and artifice: “there neither is nor can there be any
place in it for the reflection of the empirical reality of the inner [and private] self [du-
shevnaia empirika]” (“How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made,” 287). Gogol’s plot line is not
made out of human beings (always represented by Gogol as partial, incidental, acci-
dental and temporary), but out of this zvukorech’ or “speech soundscape.” In Eikhen-
baum’s view, this device technically qualifies the story as a grotesque.
The concept of an “orally based grotesque” was part of the formalist struggle
against the easily accessed visual image. But it had its drawbacks. If Shklovsky reads
Tolstoy “deaf”—his presentation of the sublimely musical Natasha Rostova expe-
riencing an opera in terms of its “estranged” stage sets rather than the intoxicat-
ing flow of its music—then Eikhenbaum, likewise provocatively, reads Gogol blind.
Eikhenbaum is not interested in what living human shapes we might see on those
freezing Petersburg streets, only in what we hear of them through the voice of the
storyteller, who delights in manipulating the grotesque from the outside. This re-
duction of Gogol’s “Overcoat” to the intrinsic play of linguistic or phonic devices
was part of Eikhenbaum’s lifelong devotion to protecting a work- (and word-) cen-
tered poetics.43
In formalist theories of literary evolution, the work of the device was defined
more broadly. Extratextual reality had to be brought in—for the historically ori-
ented critic could no longer take refuge in the intrinsic closed structure of a sin-
gle literary work. In keeping with the formalists’ professional research standards,
however, this additional material could only be other literary texts. A given device
became a historical motivator when it served a new function. In such functional-
ist models, genre is not (as it is for Bakhtin) some intimate womb of consciousness,
growing its own eyes and ears, but a “historical reference system” containing domi-
nant as well as worn-out forms, forgotten for a while but always revivable in a fu-
ture context.44 Exemplary of this dynamic is Yuri Tynianov’s 1921 study Dostoevskii i
Gogol’: k teorii parodii (Dostoevsky and Gogol: Toward a Theory of Parody).45 As in so much
cultural theory written during the twenties, the rhetoric of struggle is paramount in
it: battles with tradition, with earlier literary genius, with contenders for the rights
of succession. But “struggle” for the formalists, like cheerful abuse and fisticuffs for
Bakhtin in his carnival writings of the 1930s, is not disdainful, contemptuous of the
enemy, perverse, or even necessarily concerned with inflicting pain. If it is armed, it
is hard to say with what weapons. The most recent party to enter the fray does not
reject (much less annihilate) the prior authority, but studies it, strives to be worthy
of it, and supplements it through some recycled device that highlights the old while
celebrating the wake-up potential of the new.
In this spirit, Tynianov argues that the apprentice Dostoevsky was at all lev-
els respectful of his romantic predecessor Gogol yet at all times eager to creatively
“deform” him. First came an enthusiastic period where Dostoevsky tried out, al-
most indiscriminately, the famous Gogolian devices: exaggerated types, animate
and inanimate masks, grotesque images, nonsensical contrasts, illogical sentence
construction and skaz, phonic and phonemic caprice (especially in proper names).
Tynianov calls this intense period of play “stylization,” when influence is not hidden
but flaunted. Only when stylization is comically motivated does it become parody.
This comic impulse need not imply disrespect, laughter, or lightheartedness, how-
ever, only a “dislocation of intent” (“Stylization and Parody,” 104, more literally a
“discrepancy between the two planes, their displacement” [neviazka oboikh planov,
smeshchenie ikh]). Such motion can work vigorously and in a value-neutral way in all
directions. As Tynianov provocatively ends his study: “The essence of parody lies
in the dialectical play with the device. If a parody of a tragedy results in a comedy,
a comedy parodied may turn out to be a tragedy” (“Dostoevsky and Gogol,” 116).
Mandatory for this transaction, of course, is that both levels, the authoritative origi-
nal and the upstart new intent, be sensed as present at the same time (otherwise all
that remains is comic effect). Certain devices are “mechanized,” debased, and then
reapplied. Where Dostoevsky broke new ground in this otherwise familiar, oscil-
lating formalist field was to adapt Gogol’s maniacally thing-like masks to serve the
ends of three-dimensional, developing, truth-seeking personality. But the Gogolian
substrate of Dostoevsky’s prose, with its non sequiturs and unreliable narrator, never
ceases to be felt.
Bakhtinian
Bakhtin himself did not produce a reading of Gogol during the 1920s; this was
a task for the following decade (his work on Gogol’s Ukrainian folktales and the
carnival impulse). But his friend and colleague Lev Pumpianskii did produce a study,
“Gogol,” in 1922–1923.46 Like so much of the Bakhtin Circle’s work, it remained a
late-breaking sketch: initially an oral presentation, it was then worked over, inten-
sively researched, and left unfinished at the time of its author’s death (in 1940, of liver
cancer), to be annotated and published in full only in 2000. Its opening pages provide
a fascinating glimpse into an early component of the carnival idea, that of “holi-
day,” leisure, freed-up time, release from work or fixed plans (prazdnik, dosug). The
desperate intonations of such a topic in this newly regimented society and soon-to-
be-sacrificial Bolshevik culture, so full of the impossible production quota and the
criminalized shirker, would become audible only in retrospect. Pumpianskii’s larger
hypothesis, inspired by the satyr plays of classical Greek drama, is that all comic art
begins with the rejection or negation of goal-oriented activity. Comedy of this sort
is essential, since the health of a culture depends not only on positing goals (which, in
the extreme, can lead to a sort of hypnosis vis-à-vis the reality of the present) but also
on “glancing sideways” or askance at those goals. Purposelessness suddenly descends
upon the weary laborer, the superstitious believer, the tragic mourner, and brings a
moment of relief and freedom. Consciousness is at last permitted to stand outside the
lofty purpose and assess it.
Pumpianskii suggests that Gogol’s world is intrinsically hostile to a kingdom
of ends.47 Purposeful, calculated activity can always justify itself by rotating busily
around its own axis. But humor cannot: “Eternally vacillating, laughter provides
no exit in principle and draws no moral conclusion from its decrowning the serious-
ness of goals; by means of laughter one escapes both the goal-oriented world and the
moral world, one celebrates the defeat of goals, but one also exaggerates this defeat,
in order to rid oneself of any inevitable conclusion. Whence the terrible difficulty
of understanding laughter. It is always hyperbolic; like a landslide it gathers inten-
sity on its own path; and we always put an end to our laughing too late” (“Gogol,”
259). Pumpianskii proceeds to trace the fate of purposeless laughter through Gogol’s
Ukrainian horror tales, comic and carnival epic (where parallels are drawn with
Pushkin), the Cossack epic Taras Bul’ba, the distinctively tender and sterile Gogolian
“comic idyll,” and finally, the struggle between personality (lichnost’) and madness.
The madman’s laugh is an indication that he has lost his battle for “social signifi-
cance”—which is our only bulwark against the free fall of humor. Since in Gogol’s
world, significant social status is so rarely achieved by the heroes and antiheroes, “the
task of humor is completed by its own wiping out [iznichtozhenie], its own subsiding
into nothing” (327).
Gogolian laughter is a device. But unlike the technically neutral formalist de-
vice, Pumpianskii’s variant bears the stamp of its Nietzschean and symbolist-era ori-
gins, where Gogol’s laughter was heard as demonic, nihilistic, and Dionysian. When
Bakhtin reworks this idea of laughter as a cosmic liberation from purpose into his
incarnational carnival, it will assume the same radiantly optimistic intonations that
polyphony provided for Dostoevsky’s art in 1929.
Marxists and Sociologists
Very different from both Eikhenbaum and Pumpianskii is the “Marxist-

sociological Gogol,” which we sample through Pereverzev’s Tvorchestvo Gogolia (Go-
gol’s Creative Work, 1914, 2nd ed. 1926).48 If Pumpianskii insisted on purposelessness
as the key to Gogol’s comic world, liberating that world from its goals and other
grim conditions through laughter, then a Marxist lens reveals a landscape far more
sober and anxious. In his preface to the second edition (1926), titled “Gogol Criti-
cism over the Last Decade,” Pereverzev testily defends his decision not to revise the
original text, since “there have been no new achievements [since that time], and my
book, without any changes or corrections, remains just as new now as it did ten years
ago” (Tvorchestvo Gogolia, 17). Among the pseudo-new and unscientific approaches
cluttering up the field, he singles out biographical mysticism of the symbolist sort,
the psychoanalytic reductionism of Ermakov, and the formalists—the least absurd of
the lot, he admits, except for Eikhenbaum’s essay on “The Overcoat,” which offers us
“metaphysical nonsense, resulting not in understanding but in a muddle of concepts”
(8). For Pereverzev, understanding can be achieved only by correlating Gogol’s style
(multiplaned and brilliantly devious) with socioeconomic being. Exemplary are the
Petersburg tales (1834–1842) “from the life of clerkdom” (iz zhizni chinovnogo kruga)
(40). Their fragmentation and disjunction are the result of Gogol’s “rupture with the
gentry estate, his flight to the city” and his clash with a money economy. This auto-
biographical crisis caused the “primitive harmony of the [Ukrainian] landed-gentry
psyche” to totter and be submerged by motifs of economic collapse.
How is this shock of fragmentation portrayed artistically? The epic similes,
epithets, declamatory apostrophes—obsessively noted by so many critics—are not
unique to Gogol’s style (Tvorchestvo Gogolia, 49). What is significant, Pereverzev in-
sists, is the “intellectual impoverishment, the terrible poverty of ideas” (52) in the
Gogolian landscape. There are no ideas to work with, only gossip or wordplay.
For the sociological school, however, ideas matter less than images, and here too
there is a dearth of visual anchors. Instead of a structural center that could serve as
the work’s hero—such as we have in Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy (60)—there is a
strange diffusion at the periphery, where it’s hard to find a human being: “there is no
hero in Gogol, but also no [social] crowd” (61). Replacing both is a sequence of attentive
but random focusings on petty parts, all equally important and all equally resistant
to true humanization, because growth is not a question of psychology but of physi-
cal expansion. Chapters in Gogol do not grow out of one another in an organic way,
as with Tolstoy, but “grow together” after the fact. Indeed Pereverzev argues that
Gogol’s work is not an organism at all (in a true organism, “parts have no life outside
the whole, and the whole cannot live without each of its parts”) but something more
resembling a colony, where “parts grow together via an external mechanical connec-
tion; thus a torn-off part preserves its life and [loss of it] does not destroy the life of
the whole” (63–64). Such operations and autonomy of parts would be impossible in
Tolstoy (64).
Pereverzev’s sociologism is not without aesthetic insight into Gogol’s universe.
Some of the socioeconomic motivation might even be true. What would scandalize
formalists and Bakhtinians about the method is not so much its observations as its
causal explanations, and the enfeebling constraints imposed upon creative imagina-
tion by the Marxist “copy theory” of art endorsed by sociological critics. In speak-
ing of Gogol’s portraits, for example, Pereverzev affirms that “primitiveness and
monotony do not themselves exclude a kind of strength and beauty. But the petty-
gentry and clerkly environment of pre-reform provincial Russia did not permit the
appearance of powerful and beautiful people” (Tvorchestvo Gogolia, 91). This bit of
determinism in real life is then reinforced by statements equally deterministic con-
cerning the writer’s own resources. Landowners and civil servants receive unfor-
gettable treatment by Gogol, Pereverzev notes, but not the thinking intelligentsia.
And the reason: “Generally speaking he [Gogol] had no understanding of what a
vigorous intellectual life was like, obviously because he had never had a really solid
education, unlike Pushkin and Lermontov, or, later, Turgenev and Tolstoy.”49 Push-
ing at the author from without and from within, these two complementary sets of
conditioned pressures—what the environment offered and what the writer (happily
or unhappily) had experienced—produced literary genius. It turns out that Gogol
as a conscious artist was something of an accident. Socioeconomic being was not
forbidden to recruit consciousness as an ally in aesthetic expression—but was under
no obligation to do so.
Perhaps this is one reason why Bakhtin had so little interest in the Marxist proj-
ect, at least as it relates to literary creativity.50 Although consciousness in general was
an advertised Bolshevik virtue and a necessary curb on the anarchic excesses of spon-
taneity, the Marxist variant of this virtue did not necessarily imply a differentiated,
individuated, answerable consciousness. And this precisely was what Bakhtin every-
where required. As he wrote approvingly of Dostoevsky in the first edition (1929) of
his monograph (in a chapter titled “Functions of the Adventure Plot in Dostoevsky,”
deleted from the 1963 revision): “From the first to the final pages of his artistic work
he was guided by the principle: never use for objectifying or finalizing another’s con-
sciousness anything that might be inaccessible to that consciousness, that might lie
outside its field of vision.”51 This dictum did not provide for tidy plots or happy he-
roes. Bakhtin took it for granted that an ability to discriminate, and the willingness
to answer for one’s discriminations, was as much a burden as it was a right for both
author and hero. “Consciousness”—as he wrote in his 1961 notebooks—“is much
more terrifying than any unconscious impulses.”52
The Psychoanalytic Method
Our final exemplary method is the psychoanalytic, which can also (it so hap-
pens) dispense with consciousness. Inevitably the primary text here must be Gogol’s
1836 story “The Nose,” and Ermakov’s 1923 reading of it.53 As a practicing psycho-
analyst, proud to follow in the steps of his mentor Freud, Ermakov used literature
as both the source and the illustration of his clinical categories. This diagnostic is
confidently applied to literary creature and literary creator alike. Gogol—with his
obsessive attention to digestion and defecation, his pigeonholing and stinginess, his
capricious treatment of his friends, his manipulation of a controlling but adoring
mother—easily qualifies as an anal erotic. His swings between “self-deprecation and
self-exaltation” (“The Nose,” 162), as well as his habit of begging plots from his liter-
ary acquaintances, suggest a “repressed aggressiveness” that was both fearful of as-
suming control and resentful of others’ competing views.
Once Freudian symbolism is accepted as valid, Ermakov’s reading of “The
Nose” unfolds in persuasive detail. Ermakov was familiar with the formalists’ take
on Gogol and appreciated their linguistic adroitness. His discussion of Kovalyov’s
errant nose as phallic image—part shamefully concealed, part egotistically exhib-
ited—is infused with bodily analogues: the nose is coprophilic (arousable by odors),
associated with eating, linked with tails and footwear, capable of changing at will
both its size and its bureaucratic rank, and thus triggering humiliation as well as
terror. But Ermakov supplements these orthodox observations by many astute mi-
cro-observations on individual words, repeating phonemes, and the etymology of
surnames. Even the unsurprising conclusion of castration anxiety is made more in-
teresting by Ermakov’s attention to psychological aspects of the story that are not
strictly physiological, for example, the fact that “not a single character in ‘The Nose’
shows any surprise at the improbable happenings” (“The Nose,” 193). This is pre-
cisely what one would expect when the repressed is brought to the surface. Irrita-
tion, despair, and embarrassment there would be in abundance, but not surprise.
Given the universalist and pancultural claims of the Freudian economy, the
content of Ermakov’s reading of “The Nose” is predictable. What might not have
been predicted, and what can serve to sum up the four Russian critical approaches
surveyed in this practicum, are those points where these “Freudian” priorities high-
light (and even reinforce) core values encountered in our other three schools of 1920s
literary criticism. Addressing the skeptical Russian reader in this young, material-
ist, barely modernized and recently ruined revolutionary state, Ermakov justifies his
approach by several interlocking arguments (“The Nose,” 156–57). Each bears the
imprint of that stern moralist and unsentimental disciplinarian, Sigmund Freud.
First, the creative process is fueled by an immense unconscious, filled with all
the “uncomfortable and intolerable” strictures laid on our psyches by civilized soci-
ety. The pain caused by social progress and transformation is real, Ermakov reassures
us, and individuals are not fantasizing when they suffer from it. Fantasy is itself an il-
lusion. On every level, the real will make itself felt. “The creator draws materials for
his work from [external] reality” (“The Nose,” 157) and can be strong and true only
to the extent that he makes contact with that reality. Aesthetic expression, therefore,
is a real-life cognitive problem, “the artist’s way of knowing the world” (157) as it ob-
jectively exists. This knowing is neither hedonistic nor selfishly insulated from oth-
ers. The quest to know grows out of a need not to be alone and is thus a social project.
Since unconscious drives and fears are shared by all, they can be understood by all:
“in the dark and teeming realm of primitive instincts” (not in the civilized conscious
mind) “the artist finds the basis for communion with humanity” (157). And finally,
in the process of taming these forces by directing them outward into a vigorous
“healthy art,” new cultural values are created that will struggle against and defeat
“all that is egotistical for the sake of everything that humanity has in common” (157).
Looking back on this argument, it is clear that Ermakov would credit very few
of the complaints Voloshinov made against the Freudian project in 1927. The Freud-
ian subject is not the isolated, biologically discrete ego, crippled by its doomed social
class, seeking no more from its waning life than erotic pleasure or the sleep of death.
On the contrary, the self-awareness of this subject appears to have benefited from a
variety of available models. Among them are Aristotelian catharsis, Leo Tolstoy’s
infection theory of art, the Scythianism and Dionysian cult of the symbolist era,
philosophical monism, and most of all, an activist, materialist striving on the part of
artists to turn deeds into words, and then (on the far side of the therapeutic artwork)
to turn words back into social deeds.
This two-way operation was common to the spirit of this ambitious, inventive
decade, although the dominants governing the various movements differed radi-
cally. As remarked by the authors of “Nauka kak priem” (Scholarship as a Device) in
the 2001 NLO forum on Russian formalism referred to at the beginning of this chap-
ter, one way or another, “the orientation of the epoch was toward rational control of
spontaneous and natural forces” (230). But crucially, this control was exercised over
an artwork conceived in a new revolutionary way. It was no longer the absolute, per-
fected, resurrected whole implied in the classical model, but a work (however auton-
omous) that was studied in terms of its relations. The larger hope, which ended when
Stalinism began, was for a dynamic “non-classical approach to the humanities” (231).

The present chapter has been devoted to a segment of those internal struggles
that shaped the study of literature in the Soviet 1920s. I end on a broader, more pan-
optic view. In his 2004 essay “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Cen-
tral and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?),” Galin Tihanov suggests that
Russian formalism was the founding impulse of an ambition in literary studies that
lasted well into the 1970s: to “emancipate itself from the master discourses of philos-
ophy.”54 After the cyber revolution of the 1970s, for all the reasons we know, philoso-
phies and ideologies were again invited in: “thinking and writing about literature
thus lost the edge of specificity and uniqueness, and the boundary between literary
and nonliterary texts, solemnly guarded since the Formalists’ time, was rendered
porous and eventually insignificant” (“Why Did Modern Literary Theory,” 62). Ti-
hanov asks why the case for specificity was made with such forcefulness and success
precisely during World War I in Eastern Europe, and he offers several hypotheses.
The familiar world had fallen apart. Monolithic philosophical discourses were disin-
tegrating. The carriers of culture, such as remained alive, were multilingual cosmo-
politan exiles, all of whom spoke everything with a heavy accent (Roman Jakobson
being the most celebrated example); for them, such deviations from a native norm felt
just like home. The thirst was great to find some universal translator, some common
theoretical denominator that would transcend and connect all this surface polyglos-
sia. Literariness, dialectical materialism, consciousness, dialogue, the unconscious all
won their converts. Only in the 1930s would these law-abiding options give way
before the debased face of a far more arbitrary organizing principle: power.
 SOVIET LITERARY CRITICISM AND THE
5
FORMULATION OF THE AESTHETICS OF
SOCIALIST REALISM, 1932–1940
HANS GÜNTHER
Debates on Normativity
The resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party

(Bolsheviks) “O perestroike literaturno-khudozhestvennykh organizatsii” (On the
Restructuring of the Literary-Artistic Organisations) on 23 April 1932 marked the
beginning of a new era in Soviet cultural history.1 The liquidation of artistic asso-
ciations and the creation of a single All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers prepared
the ground for the canonization of the doctrine that became known as socialist real-
ism. Socialist realism not only reflects the ideological goals of Stalinism, it is also
deeply rooted in the worldview of the Stalinist period. After the stormy years of
collectivization, the mobilization and spurt in industrialization of the First Five-Year
Plan gave rise to the demand for “normalization” and a return to the traditions in-
terrupted by a decade of revolutionary developments. These aspirations found their
expression in the public discourse. The word utopia acquired a negative connotation
and was seen as the opposite of “healthy” realism.2 The word proletariat gradually
gave way to the classless “Soviet people,” and the construction of Socialism in “one
country” revived the ideals of patriotism.3
The functions of literature and criticism changed. During the initial phase of
the establishment of socialist realism, the normative function prevailed. While so-
90
SOVIET LITERARY CRITICISM AND THE AESTHETICS OF SOCIALIST REALISM  91
cialist realism existed only as a slogan, no one as yet understood what it really stood
for. At that time, writers still allowed themselves to joke about it as little more than
the next new slogan, as did the playwright Nikolai Pogodin: “Now everyone repeats
very loudly: ‘socialist realism.’ I ask: excuse me; what does one eat it with? Serious
criticism does not respond to that slogan.”4 The real task of criticism became to fill
in Stalin’s invented slogan with ideological and aesthetic content and to apply it to
concrete works of literature.5 The discussions in 1933–1934 on language and on James
Joyce and John Dos Passos furnished a more concrete idea of the aesthetic norms that
were being formed.
The statutes of the Union of Soviet Writers stated that the primary method of
Soviet literature “demands from the artist an accurate, historically concrete repre-
sentation of reality in its revolutionary development. Within this, the veracity and
historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality should be combined
with the task of ideologically transforming and educating the workers in the spirit of
socialism. Socialist realism guarantees artistic creation the exceptional opportunity
to demonstrate creative initiative and to choose various forms, styles and genres.”6
This passage highlights three primary components—the accurate representation of
reality, the pedagogical function of literature, and the variety of forms. Here it is
necessary to pause and think about the relationship between the education of the
workers and the choice of artistic forms. The establishment of the normative aesthet-
ics of socialist realism illustrates that the pedagogical function encourages certain
artistic movements and excludes others. In order to educate the masses, it is necessary
to choose literary forms that are accessible and understandable to them. Establish-
ing the new aesthetic doctrine therefore inevitably meant selection of artistic devices
according to their functionality, as the norm-setting discussions that took place in
1933–1934 clearly demonstrate.
As literary life became a centralized state affair, criticism was transformed into
a conveyor belt of literary politics. Criticism should “act as a transmitter of the liter-
ary politics of the party rather than just evaluate or provide commentary on literary
works.”7 That means that there was no longer a question of maintaining a “normal”
relationship between artist and critic.8 Criticism not only took on the function of
educator of both the writer and the reader, it also became a branch of the system of
censorship.9 The task was to turn “the author into his own censor.”10 The sharp de-
cline in authorial freedom and individuality led to the transformation of the literary
text into a sort of “half-fabrication,” cooked up collectively by the writer, editor,
critic, reader, and censor.
To the ordinary observer of literary life in the 1930s, a ritual of criticism and
self-criticism developed, “self-flagellation, as the culmination of an ominous process
of social therapy.”11 The case of Marietta Shaginyan, who was subjected to harsh
criticism for unexpectedly leaving the Union of Soviet Writers in 1936, serves as
a good example of this process. Shaginyan changed her mind and wrote to Sergo
Ordzhonikidze: “Your letter saved me; it forced me to understand how far I have
sunk and helped me to honestly admit my guilt. . . . My terrible action and the subse-
quent retribution have sobered not only myself. If it is somehow possible to comfort
92  HANS GÜNTHER
a deeply and deservedly disgraced person, then it is the thought that others will un-
derstand the lesson no less than I have and that their work will become more honest
and more serious. . . . Let Comrade Stalin and the party know that I will expiate my
guilt before him.”12
The question of the norms and, in a wider context, of the level of aesthetic nor-
mativity of the developing canon takes on an exceptional importance. The discourse
of criticism was dominated by phrases that began with thinly veiled commands, such
as “it is demanded from the writer” or “the writer should.”13 The idea of partiinost’,
capturing the general ideological base of literature and art, became an integral part
of the founding postulates. The aesthetics of socialist realism also demanded tipich-
nost’ (typicality) of representation, which often took on schizophrenic features as the
writer was trying to find a compromise between that which really existed and that
which ought to exist. The canon also demanded a revolutionary romanticism, which
allowed the artist to go beyond the confines of the real and thus opened up limitless
opportunities to “transform” (in fact, whitewash) that reality.
The processes of canonization were central to the history of criticism in the
first half of the 1930s. It is therefore not accidental that at the beginning a discus-
sion on normativity took place but then faded away quickly. Already at the second
plenum of the Organizational Committee of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1933,
Anatoly Lunacharsky advised: “Less abiding by the norms. Do not create premature
rules. Fewer comic arguments among the poets (à la Trediakovsky and Sumarokov’s
squabbles) about whose ‘poetic rules are more reasonable.’ More free creativity.”14
Literaturnyi kritik published an article by Valentin Asmus, “O normativnoi estetike”
(On Normative Aesthetics), which was written in the form of a conversation be-
tween a philosopher, a critic, and a writer. To the question of the critic, “And you
suggest that the concept underlying normative aesthetics is false?” the philosopher
replies: “It is absolutely false on the theoretical level and harmful in its practical im-
plications, especially for the art of socialist realism.”15 While the writer adds: “In
some sense aesthetic norms may well exist. But they are not applied to the work from
outside. They grow from within, from the poet’s conception.”16
Such an approach could not be left without an answer. Iogann Al’tman saw in
it “a veiled fight against normative aesthetics—in essence a refusal to establish the
principles of the new art. Under the guise of an attack on the old canons, it protects
the old Kantian theory of ‘the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgments,’ it advocates
anarchy of artistic tastes and undermines the planned development of art.”17 Such a
tone was highly characteristic of the literary discussions of the 1930s. The writer was
suspected of attempting to conceal in his work as many coded meanings as possible
(in the language of the critics of that period, “to smuggle in ideological contraband”).
Therefore, the main task of the critic lay in unmasking these “veiled” subtexts and
dangerous deviations. The rules of the “game” that was shaping the critical discourse
could also be observed in the discussions of 1932–1934, in which the boundaries of
the new canon were defined.
The Assertion of a Neutral Style
Two critical discussions of the first half of the 1930s deserve special atten-
tion—the discussion on the language of literature and the discussion on Dos Pas-
sos and Joyce, the latter primarily dedicated to the question of the composition of
the novel. Already in 1933, the journal Literaturnaia ucheba published an article by
Maxim Gorky entitled “O proze” (On Prose), in which Gorky reproached Andrei
Belyi, Fedor Panferov, Fedor Gladkov, Boris Pilnyak, and other authors for corrupt-
ing the Russian language and advocated the simple, clear, and precise language of
the classics. Gorky’s standing as key member of the literary hierarchy and founder of
socialist realism meant that his orientation in favor of the language of the classics in
the discussion on language that took place in 1934 was taken up by an entire range
of literary journals and canonized in the newspapers Pravda and Izvestiia. It is worth
reconstructing the course of the discussion, the results of which not only defined
Soviet language policy and the culture of language, but also the language of the new
literature for decades to come.
The discussion on language flared up in response to the novel Bruski (Brusski) by
Panferov, who was accused of polluting literary language with dialecticisms, popu-
lar speech, jargon, and so on. When Panferov, in the course of the discussion of his
novel in January 1934, complained that there was a lot of talk about the language of
the classics but only very little about the language of the revolution, Gorky sharply
spoke out against sullying the Russian language with inappropriate words and con-
structions from the dialects. In response to Gorky’s statement, Alexander Serafimov-
ich, in his article “O pisateliakh ‘oblizannykh’ i ‘neoblizannykh’” (On “Smooth”
and “Coarse” Writers), defended the “coarse, healthy, muzhik-like” strength of
Panferov’s language.18 His article in turn provoked a sharp reaction from Literatur-
naia gazeta in the editorial “O koriavoi muzhitskoi sile” (On Coarse, Muzhik-like
Strength):
In his article, Aleksei Maksimovich, as an unsurpassed proletarian master of the
literary word, is absolutely right to fight for the Leninist line in language. It is
known that Lenin actively fought against the defilement of the Russian language,
insistently calling “for a declaration of war on the distortion of the Russian
language.” This is because the struggle for the purity of language has both a
stylistic and a political meaning. The arbitrary use of words, ignoring syntax
among other things, obscures the writer’s thought, facilitates the contraband
sale of all sorts of nonsense, of incorrect and harmful suppositions, and brings
about unruliness of thought. That is why it is incorrect to juxtapose the literary
language and the arbitrary new language, the language of the revolution.19
As one can see, the polemic immediately took on a sharply political character. The
discussion unexpectedly moved toward the “Leninist line in language,” which os-
tensibly includes both stylistic and political criteria. Language found itself within
the zone of control exercised by the political power of the day. Only pure, that is
transparent, language excludes “illegally imported” and “dangerous” subtexts, and

with this the very possibility of “ideological contraband.”
Gorky’s argument in his “Otkrytoe pis’mo A. S. Serafimovichu” (Open Letter
to Alexander Serafimovich) already contained politically pointed themes. According
to Gorky, low language culture “is always linked to insufficient ideological literacy.”
From this Gorky infers: “A merciless fight is needed to cleanse literary language of
boorishness, a fight for the purity and clarity of our language, for an honest tech-
nique, without which well-defined ideology is impossible.”20 In Gorky’s next article,
“O boikosti” (On Boldness), a new emphasis emerges: the target of criticism here is
not only the “naturalism” of dialecticisms and popular speech but also the “nonsensi-
cal words” and “verbal chaos” of the language of such writers as Velimir Khlebnikov
and Andrei Belyi (whereas Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s Optimisticheskaia tragediia [Opti-
mistic Tragedy] is mentioned as an example of superficial innovation).21 In Gorky’s
summarizing article “O iazyke” (On Language) the sullying of language is already
explained with reference to class struggle: shiftless people, merchants, wanderers,
and theologians put in circulation senseless and useless parasitical words, from which
it is necessary to purify language.
The editorial “S nekotorym opozdaniem” (With a Bit of a Delay), published in
Literaturnaia gazeta, illustrates how the discussion quickly turned into a campaign.22
The article accused Literaturnyi Leningrad of not taking a principled enough position
in the current discussion. In fact, it is possible to find in Literaturnyi Leningrad many
statements that do not correspond to the line articulated in Literaturnaia gazeta. For
example, Olga Forsh presented a positive evaluation of Belyi’s work and entered
into a direct polemic with Gorky: “It is possible that an unsuccessful but serious ex-
periment by a great artist will become a ‘creative stimulus’ to some in the younger
generation that will succeed him. And it is possible that guarding the purity of lan-
guage will turn into an involuntary castration of the limitless possibilities of that
language.”23 In his contribution to the discussion, Mikhail Zoshchenko averred that
the exclusive orientation toward the nineteenth-century classics is incorrect and
stated that the introduction of living language into literary language is inescapable.
The linguist Lev Iakubinskii warned about purist tendencies, citing examples
from the Middle Ages:
Images of purists of the past are rising in front of me. The Metropolitan Kiprian
who in the fourteenth century copied the Church missal; with fear and passion
he entreated posterity to guard the purity of the holy text: “do not introduce
or omit one word or one dot . . . , lest out of carelessness you fall into sin.” And
then there is Zinovii Ottenskii with his famous—and a classic in the Middle
Ages—purist formula. But the medieval “book” language was the language of
the Church, the ruling economic and political organization of the Middle Ages;
it was a holy and inviolable language, foreign and incomprehensible to the masses
(Latin in the West, Church Slavonic with us).24
Iakubinskii’s article is an excellent example of the use of Aesopian language in ideo-
logical debate. The explanation of medieval purism as the fear of falling into “sin and
heresy” accurately characterizes the situation in which “verbal rubbish” is identified

with a false ideological position, while the remarks on the language of the sacred
text “of the ruling economic and political organization,” which was “foreign and
incomprehensible to the masses,” describes with equal precision the relationship to
the authorial text of the Stalinist period.
The significance of the laboratory work of the writer attempting to establish a
contemporary language was also underlined by Marietta Shaginyan:
It is a twofold process —on the one hand, the splintering of the local language
and its alignment with the general literary language, and, on the other hand, the
saturation of the general literary language with rich local resources. This twofold
process is a real historical event in the development of the Russian language.
. . . Take Babel for example. Try and take Babel’s language out of his work, grown
on the emotionalism of a purely local melodious speech, and what remains of his
theme? Take Vsevolod Ivanov and try to remove from his first (and best) books
that local “–at” [the ending of the third person singular verb “–at” instead of the
regular “–aet”]—and what remains of the image of his partisan that has entered
literature? The saturation of the general literary language with local oral and
syntactic richness is an accomplished fact.”25
Regardless of the fact that the discussion on language continued almost until
the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in September 1934, its results were al-
ready known in March–April 1934. Gorky’s article “O iazyke” (On Language) was
published on 18 March not only in Literaturnaia gazeta but also in Pravda, which sup-
ported Gorky “in his fight for the quality of literary speech and the further progress
of Soviet literature.” In its “Otvet opponentam” (Answer to the Opponents) Literat-
urnaia gazeta openly settled the score with its critics: “It is now clear to everyone that
A. S. Serafimovich’s statements in support of the language of F. Panferov’s Bruski are
incorrect at their root. . . . It is clear that both Comrade Shaginyan and Comrade
Forsh are pulling us backward, that they are for ‘freedom’ (read arbitrariness and
spontaneity) in the use of linguistic material.” The article further asserts that “free-
dom is self-limitation, freedom is the realization of necessity. This is what Gorky
calls for and this is the crux of the discussion.”26
Panferov, whose novel Bruski, as we noted, was the immediate trigger of the
discussion, defended the thesis of the “language of the revolution,” which he laid out
in his speech at the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. Panferov argued that the
revolution could not help but impact on language. He reminded the congress that
after the French Revolution there was an invasion of popular language into the lan-
guage of the nobility: “If the French Revolution created such an enormous transfor-
mation in the realm of language, then of course our October Revolution could not
pass by that question. Everyone is aware of the great difference between the city and
the countryside before the revolution.” The language of the revolution is in constant
motion and in a process of evolution, it “cleanses itself of rubbish, rust, provincial-
isms, becoming an advanced and cultured language of the world.” Panferov criticizes
the point of view of those who “are slavishly committed to the classic past. It is the
easiest thing to take the floor and to begin to glorify from the lectern Tolstoy, Gogol,
Dostoevsky, Lermontov—all of the classics. . . . But in fact this points to a fear of
crossing an earlier defined border and to the lack of knowledge of our reality.”27 The
notion of the “language of the revolution” rested on, what was at that time, Marr’s
widely spread language theory, according to which language is part of the ideologi-
cal superstructure. It upheld the difference between the language of the upper and
lower classes—the peasantry and the proletariat on the one hand and the nobility
on the other. For Marr, these languages reflect different class psychologies, and only
thanks to consciously conducted language policy will the differences between the
city and the countryside disappear over time.
Although the main target of Gorky and Literaturnaia gazeta was language “natu-
ralism,” from time to time, as we noted, criticism also appeared of the “verbal chaos”
of such writers as Khlebnikov and Belyi. The struggle on the language front against
formalism flared up in full only two years later. It is worth, however, drawing at-
tention to an extensive article by the literary critic Nikolai Stepanov, “Slovesnaia
butaforiia” (Verbal Window Dressing ), in which, already in 1934, naturalism and
formalism are identified as equally dangerous and, in essence, closely related devia-
tions from the “realistic language” of such canonized works as Alexander Fadeev’s
Razgrom (Rout) or Dmitry Furmanov’s Chapaev. Naturalism “aspires to ‘coarseness,’
to the introduction of swearing into literature, of thieves’ language, and even of to-
tally ‘unprintable words.’ With all its seeming ‘innovation’ and aesthetic nihilism,
it is just the opposite side of aesthetisized poetic language. Just as aesthetisized lan-
guage, it places the emphasis on the ‘effectiveness’ of the word, on its emotional ex-
pressiveness, regardless of its sense or accuracy.”28
According to Stepanov, writers following the path of ornamentalism, “arrive
at senseless, ‘subjectless,’ formless, imprecise language or at language window-
dressing, cheap beauty that lacquers reality. Inadequate appreciation of the mean-
ing of the word and a false understanding of the expressiveness of language always
forces authors to run toward paraphrases or to an especially flashy word or phrase”
(“Slovesnaia butaforiia,” 112). Even such works as Tsement (Cement) or Energiia (En-
ergy) by the proletarian author Fedor Gladkov are contaminated by this tendency.
Ornamentalism contradicts the precise, meaningful word: “We need the ‘intelligent’
[umnoe] not the ‘unintelligible’ [zaumnoe] word because our literature should truth-
fully, objectively show reality and not just scratch the surface. Some of our authors,
because of the lack of great ideological content, replace it with verbal tracery” (107).
Stepanov praised Vsevolod Ivanov who “crossed over from ornamentalism, from
lexical adornment and language tracery in his early works [Tsvetnye vetra] to a sparing
and precise ‘Bunin-like’ ‘style,’ and is even reworking his early works” (106; emphasis
in the original).
As Stepanov observes, the essential difference between simple and ornamen-
tal prose dates back to the Russian tradition of the nineteenth century, the poles
of which were Gogol and Pushkin. The Gogolian skaz line, which was renewed in
the symbolism and ornamentalism of the postrevolutionary literature, turns out to
be harmful in the current cultural situation: “Once again the question of Pushkin’s
‘naked simplicity,’ of the precise and clear word, fully replete with meaning, has
arisen” (“Slovesnaia butaforiia,” 111). Through realism and Gorky, the Pushkinian
classical line was supposed to find its continuation and reach its apogee in socialist
realism.
The discussion on language demonstrates that what really mattered most was
not this or that stylistic or literary current but the endeavor to put an end to the lin-
guistic discord of the 1920s in the name of a normative neutral style.29 The goal of the
discussion begun by Gorky was the submission of literature, which had preserved
relative stylistic independence, to ideological control. The advocates of the official
position addressed this goal directly. In literature and in art, the danger arose above
all from ambiguity and lack of transparency, which—not without foundation—
were seen as the source of dissidence and the possibility of “ideological contraband.”
But the introduction of language into the zone of control and the demand for
its ideological “transparency” was only one side of the problem. The other no less
important goal of the fight against the naturalistic “cluttering up” of language and
the ornamental “senselessness” was the accommodation of literature to pedagogical
functions. Socialist realism was based on the assumption that these goals could be
realized only under the conditions of accessibility (comprehensibility) of literature
and art for the popular readers and viewers, under the conditions of conformance
to their taste. Linguistic purism, transformed in the course of the discussion into the
norm, led to a situation in which practically all works of Soviet literature were sub-
sequently exposed to stylistic “refinement” (Fedor Gladkov’s novel Tsement, which
went through various phases of stylistic and ideological cleansing, can serve as an
example). The text became a movable palimpsest. In the project of educating the
masses, the Stalinist adaptation of texts was considered to be their “improvement.”
This “refinement” was closely linked to narodnost’, a key concept that was born pre-
cisely in these formative years of socialist realism, echoing the demand for acces-
sibility and the centrality of the people as subject matter and producers of the new
literature.
Dos Passos and Joyce, Montage or Composition?
In March 1933, on the initiative of Vsevolod Vishnevsky, a discussion took

place on “Sovetskaia literatura i Dos-Passos” (Soviet Literature and Dos Passos),
which addressed the relationship between Soviet literature and modern Western lit-
erature. The distribution of power in the debate was uneven. With the exception
of Vishnevsky, only Viktor Pertsov spoke in defense of the open forms of composi-
tion, while the majority of the participants in the discussion (among them, Valentin
Stenich, the translator of Ulysses) considered the influence of Dos Passos on Soviet
literature undesirable. The polemic, which continued at the All-Union Congress of
Soviet Writers, concluded by stigmatizing Joyce’s experimental “microscopic” view
of the world and Dos Passos’s montage technique.
In his contributions, Vishnevsky stressed the necessity of gaining knowledge of
Western literature. “Znat’ Zapad!” (Know the West!) was the title Vishnevsky gave
to his article, in which he warned against aesthetic isolation and the cutting off of
Soviet literature from world experience.30 Pointing to the inevitability of mutual in-
fluence, he referred to Sergei Eisenstein’s great interest in Ulysses.31 In his paper “Chto
khorosho u Dos-Passosa?” (What Is Good in Dos Passos?) Vishnevsky demanded a
serious conversation about Western culture and claimed that offering ready-made
lists of examples and rules for writers did not address the issue: “It is a completely
fruitless exercise. It will not leave any trace in the history of our literature and cul-
ture.”32 Pointing to the history of the church schism, he came out in favor of the
freedom of artistic experimentation: “Trust artists to search. . . . Do not stop them,
you who are riding the crest of the old art formations” (167–68).
Critics of Vishnevsky reacted with particular indignation to his thesis that the
classics of Marxism-Leninism did not leave any “laws and discoveries” in the field of
art. His allusions to the widespread practice of producing perfunctory quotes from
Marx, Engels, and Lenin on literature and the arts triggered sharp criticism, as it was
precisely during this time that a process of stitching together accidental or discon-
nected quotes into a “Marxist-Leninist aesthetics” was under way. Valerii Kirpotin
spoke for many when he charged Vishnevsky with a tendency “to belittle the role of
Marxism-Leninism in the critical analysis of the paths of our literary development.”33
What did socialist realism find unacceptable in Joyce? Aleksandr Leites accused
him of moving away from the wide social themes of critical realism: “What do fash-
ionable Western slogans, such as ‘the destruction of the novel’ and ‘the disintegration
of narrative form,’ which seem innovative to the uninitiated, actually mean? These
slogans mean only that capitalism is pulling out of the hands of the artist the tele-
scope or the field binoculars and handing him a microscope with the refined lenses of
Joyce. If only the writer wouldn’t look far ahead, for those horizons, which one can
see in the binoculars of genuine realism, augur the death of the bourgeoisie.”34
This metaphor is used frequently by participants in the discussion. Viktor
Pertsov had earlier written about the hyperbolic effect of the microscope in the po-
etry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, observing that the seeming distortion of the gener-
ally accepted with the help of this device in Mayakovsky’s poetry is “not a distortion
of reality but, the opposite, an illumination of its truthful face.”35 For the creators
of the socialist-realist canon, however, the view of the world through a microscope
had a rather negative connotation. For Leites as well as Karl Radek, who stated at
the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers that Joyce was “a pile of dung, in which
worms swarm, photographed through a microscope,” one should demand of great
art not a flight from the large scale “to the stagnant waters of small lakes and swamps,
in which frogs live,” but the inclusion of wide perspectives.36 Engaged in a polemic
with Radek, the German author Wieland Herzfelde spoke out in defense of Joyce,
asserting that although the Western writer is not able to serve as a model for socialist
literature, it is still worthwhile studying his technique of revealing the inner world
of the hero.37
In relation to Dos Passos, the criticism focused on his technique of the cine-eye
(kinoglaz), a concept he openly adopted from Soviet filmmaker and cinematic theo-
rist Dziga Vertov. Leites saw in Dos Passos a victim of “Joyceism still not left be-
hind”: “This immediately impacted on the composition of his novels. He was forced
to bring together mechanically various artistic methods, devices, genres. I repeat,
bring together mechanically, not dialectically, not organically. . . . The effectiveness of
his novels is weakened by the mechanical coexistence of genres.”38 Aesthetically, the
critic is unhappy that Dos Passos does not subordinate the heterogeneous devices and
stylistic intonations to an artistic whole, that with him they move in “disorder.” For
that reason his novels cannot serve as an example for the Soviet authors but only as a
call to creative competition.
According to Fadeev, socialist realism is not looking for self-conscious writing,
but for “large synthetic forms”: “It is not enough to decompose a thing into parts—it
is necessary to take it as a whole. From this comes the demand for types, characters,
and monumentality of form.”39 Valentin Stenich also accused Dos Passos of replac-
ing composition with montage: “Dos Passos takes a man, dips him in an ice hole and
pulls him out of another ice hole—the man dies in the meantime, and the reader
forgets what he said, what he did, the reader forgets his sound and color. This is an
incorrect composition of a work. Montage does not help here at all.”40 Viktor Pertsov
was the only one who justified montage and the cine-eye construction and claimed
that with regard to the montage insets Dos Passos’s 42 Parallel resembles Tolstoy’s
War and Peace. According to Pertsov, the free composition and especially the dotted
(punktirnaia) characterization of the heroes could even be of interest in the depiction
of the masses in such collective projects as Istoriia zavodov (The History of Factories).41
In articles that appeared even before the discussion in Znamia had begun,
Dmitry Mirsky made important pronouncements on Joyce and Dos Passos. Mir-
sky, having returned to the Soviet Union from emigration in Great Britain in 1932,
was probably better acquainted with the works of the writers under discussion than
the other participants. He recognized their aesthetic merits but suggested that their
experience did not accord with the tasks of Soviet literature, as these writers lack
both a holistic understanding of the revolutionary process and a unitary worldview.
Mirsky considered Joyce a representative of the ultra-psychologism of the epoch of
capitalism’s decay: “Joyce is a formalist and a stylizer, and although he took ‘more’
from reality than the ‘traditional realists,’ he did so only in order to distort it. The
mirror, which he holds up to reality, is a cubist mirror, assembled from pieces of
glass of different colors, different sizes, and different curvatures.”42 Mirsky contrasts
the fragmentation and disconnectedness of Dos Passos’s newsreel with the collec-
tive book from the series on the history of mills and factories, Liudi Stalingradskogo
traktornogo (People From the Stalingrad Tractor Works). In his eyes, the static method
of Ulysses that resembles the pyramid of Kheops is not applicable to the dynamics of
Magnitostroi.43
The dispute on Joyce and Dos Passos was not only an argument over the mean-
ing of these two modernist Western writers for Soviet literature, but it was also a
dispute over the “rules” of novelistic composition. A summary can be found in Teo-
riia literatury (Theory of Literature) by Leonid Timofeev, which presented the first
attempt at a textbook reflecting the new aesthetic norms. The fact that Timofeev
chose image as the central category of his book actively appeals to an important Rus-
sian aesthetic and critical tradition: imagery is a central category in the discourse
of the “organic” aesthetics and poetics of the nineteenth century. Timofeev himself
referred to Hegel, Vissarion Belinsky, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, bypassing Al-
exander Potebnya’s theory of imagery. He criticized formalism for the rejection of
imagery; the notion of theme and the opposition between plot and story were cast
aside as unconnected with the theory of imagery. For Timofeev, composition and ac-
tion are defined almost identically, as a “system of the development of the image and
the combination of images.”44
Action is the key concept in socialist realism. Formally, Timofeev describes it
with the assistance of a well-known scheme from drama theory: layout, opening,
culmination, and denouement. But it is much more important that the action is un-
derstood as a kind of reflection of the narrative of class struggle:
Reality itself presents a process of incessant struggle—of classes, of man against
nature, which again has a specific class meaning, since for capitalism conquering
nature is one of the means of oppressing the workers, while for the proletariat
conquering nature is one of the means of liberating the workers. Therefore, a
work should contain certain conflicts and the clash of fighting forces. It is clear
that the nature of this conflict can be rather different: in Razgrom we have the
fight between the Reds and the Whites, the revolution and the counterrevolu-
tion; in Tsement, it is the fight for construction, the overcoming of collapse, and
so on. At the beginning of the work, the hero is set some kind of goal or the
accomplishment of some kind of task, then the fight to attain that goal follows,
along with the overcoming of obstacles, and finally the struggle ends in success or
failure.45
Timofeev distinguishes between the old plot, at the center of which stands the di-
vorce between individuality and society, and the new one, in which the course of
social development is reflected. In socialist realism, the “personal” plot of the old
literature is replaced by a social plot, the most gifted example of which he finds in
Gorky’s Mat’ (Mother). The critic Viktor Novinskii bluntly claimed that the plot of
a literary work represents a “refraction” and “transformation” of the class struggle.
“The challenge is to reveal behind the personal motives of the heroes, without can-
celling these personal motives, the direction-setting forces of the historical process.”46
In this way, the discussion on Joyce and Dos Passos concluded with the condem-
nation of the “wrongly” and the assertion of “correctly” understood composition. It
is not by accident that Timofeev emphasized in this context the significance of “the
normative task of criticism, that is, the advancement by criticism of those norms of
the content-related aspects of composition, of its character, which flow from those
ideological goals that confront literature.”47 The discussion on Joyce and Dos Pas-
sos confirmed the unconditional domination of organic thought, which in the 1930s
replaced the formalist and constructivist approach of the preceding period. In the
name of an integrated novelistic composition, all forms of fragmentation, episodic
techniques, and montage were rejected, for they were considered to be expressive of
chaos, arbitrariness, and subjectivism.48
Logocentrism or “Spontaneous Impressions”
The discussion on method and worldview, which took place in 1933–1934 on

the pages of the journal Literaturnyi kritik, was as a critical response to the “dialectic-
materialistic method” championed by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writ-
ers (RAPP) that advocated the direct subjugation of artistic creativity to ideological
tasks, lumped together art and worldview, and, as such, was in need of being re-
placed with a new, “artistic method”—socialist realism. In the debates of the 1930s,
“method” was used in direct opposition to the RAPP term; the purpose was to stress
the specifically artistic side of creativity, whereas worldview was defined as a cate-
gory describing that creativity’s general ideological direction. It is not accidental that
Literaturnyi kritik initiated that discussion, the journal which in 1933–1934 success-
fully fought against the “ultra-leftist” orientation of RAPP and in 1935–1936 against
vulgar sociology.
In his criticism of RAPP’s views, Anatoly Lunacharsky emphasized that “it is
incorrect to believe that socialist realism is only accessible to those possessing full
knowledge of the philosophy of dialectical materialism.” The artist—here Lunacha-
rsky was referring to the fellow-travelers—is in the position to “instinctively reveal
many of the most important aspects of our reality. Man clearly understands the type
of battle taking place, he takes sides in that battle, but he is not sufficiently educated
in philosophy to have the right to lay claim to understanding life in its entirety, a
way of understanding offered by dialectical materialism. Such a writer writes with
all the simplicity of spontaneous observation.” Lunacharsky insisted that dialectical
materialism “is a goal toward which we are striving, and not the point of depar-
ture from which we should apparently proceed.”49 In the same issue, Pavel Iudin, the
journal’s editor in chief, evoked Lenin’s well-known statements on Tolstoy to touch
upon the problem of the divergence of worldview and artistic method.50
The main opponents in the argument over method and worldview were Mark
Rozental’ and Isaac Nusinov. Rozental’ accused the sympathizers of RAPP of view-
ing art as merely a speculative process, so that instead of a reflection of objective real-
ity art for them is a reflection of ideas. Since the artist is in spontaneous contact with
reality, his worldview could encounter opposition “in the form of life itself, which
persuades the artist with living facts that reality, its processes, and its course are en-
tirely different from what seems to him to conform to his worldview.”51 Rozental’
quoted Engels, who stated that Balzac wrote his novels “in spite of his worldview
and thanks to his realistic method.”52 The contradiction between worldview and
method (named the “Balzacian paradox”) is caused by the class society and will con-
tinue to exist during the transitional period.
From Nusinov’s point of view, taking the position of Rozental’ meant giv-
ing up “the fight for the ideological reeducation of the fellow-travelers among the
writers.” If Tolstoy, Gogol, and other writers presented accurate pictures of reality,
“then what sense is there in our entire work to clarify the ideology of the writer,
the class origin of his work?” According to Nusinov, Rozental’ ignores worldview
and “asserts some ‘artistic characteristics,’ independent of the ideological beliefs of
the writer, which allow him to show reality, even though he hasn’t quite under-
stood it.”53 In his reply, Rozental’ reproached Nusinov for “repeating the mistake of
RAPP” and “altogether dismissing the problem of artistic method.”54 Rejecting the
“leftist vulgarity” of RAPP, David Tamarchenko commented that Rozental’ was
giving in to the opposite extreme. He saw the roots of Rozental’’s interpretation of
artistic creativity in the theory of spontaneous impressions espoused by Aleksandr
Voronskii and the Pereval critics.
Leontii Spokoinyi precisely captured the ideological subtext of the discussion:
“To think that the contradiction between the ideas that form the base of the writer’s
imagination and the realization of these ideas in his work could disappear is to adopt
the view that art is unnecessary in a socialist society.” In this case, socialist realism
should dictate to the artist all the details of his craft. “But if the slogan of socialist re-
alism were to dictate all of that, it would not be any different from the RAPP slogan
‘for diamat [dialectical materialism],’ against which Comrade Rozental’ is trying to
fight.”55 The further development of the canon of socialist realism proved that these
concerns were not unfounded.
The thesis that the artist can reflect reality “in spite of” his worldview was, of
course, best illustrated by the work of the realists of the nineteenth century or the
work of the fellow-travelers, whereas the socialist writer was supposed to possess
the correct outlook. It is therefore surprising that the circle around Literaturnyi kritik
could maintain their position, striving as they were to “uncouple” literature from
ideology and emphasizing the spontaneity of the creative process. Their success was
facilitated by the fact that the critique of RAPP’s views was at the very center of lit-
erary politics during this period. Literaturnyi kritik was thus able to secure official ap-
proval both for its criticism of RAPP and for the unmasking of “vulgar sociology,”
which it pursued between 1934–1937.56 During the period of the formation of the
aesthetics of socialist realism, the journal succeeded, if only temporally, in softening
the pressure of worldview on artistic method.
From Aesthetics to Myth Creation
The first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, which took place in Moscow
from 17 August to 1 September 1934, put an end to the discussions of 1933–1934.
Such heated and relatively open debates on literature in Soviet criticism would not
take place again for the next two decades until the Thaw. The echo of these discus-
sions was still noticeable in many of the speeches at the congress, but all the principal
questions (of the structure of the Union of Soviet Writers and its statutes, of its ideo-
logical and aesthetic line) were already solved. Apart from Russian writers, represen-
tatives of the literatures of various Soviet nationalities and Western writers (André
Malraux, Louis Aragon, Wieland Herzfelde, Ernst Toller, Johannes R. Becher, and
others) took part in this grand spectacle. Against the background of rising National
Socialism in Germany, the Congress took on added international significance. For-
mer fellow-travelers were given the opportunity to have their say (above all in a self-
critical tone) and consider themselves full “Soviet” writers, on equal footing with
the former “proletarian” writers. But the diversity of the opinions expressed at the
congress was deceptive. In fact, the direction of future development was charted not
in the statements of the fellow-travelers and the Western authors, but in the speeches
of such authoritative figures as Andrei Zhdanov, Gorky, and Kirpotin. The politi-
cal authority of Nikolai Bukharin was already shaken, and this resulted in a sharp
controversy around his speech on poetry and in his self-critical statement at the end
of the congress.
The speeches by Gorky and by the secretary of the Central Committee,
Zhdanov, made important contributions to the developing mythology of the 1930s.
Zhdanov pointed out that writers, being the “engineers of souls,” derive “their ma-
terial from the heroic epoch of the cheliuskintsy.”57 The notion that literature should
be worthy of the heroism of the “great epoch” became mandatory in Stalinist cul-
ture.58 Heroism was connected to revolutionary romanticism, the latter mentioned
in Zhdanov’s formula of socialist realism as the representation of reality in “its revo-
lutionary development.” The demand for revolutionary romanticism, dating back to
Gorky’s early work, meant the legitimization of the hyperbolic treatment of the pos-
itive aspects of reality. In the Soviet context, this usually served as a justification for
idealization. Following Gorky, Zhdanov differentiated between romanticism of the
old type, which depicted a nonexistent fantasy life, and revolutionary romanticism
as a component of socialist realism: “for the entire life of our party, the entire life
of the working class and its struggle are summed up in the combination of the most
rigorous, most sober practical work with the greatest heroics and grand prospects.”59
The question of revolutionary romanticism figured centrally in Gorky’s speech
on Soviet literature. Revolutionary romanticism was promoted simultaneously with
the rehabilitation of mythology and mythological thinking, which during the 1930s
took the place of the unrealized and unattainable revolutionary utopia. In his speech,
Gorky stated that “myth is invention. To invent something means to extract from
the sum total of reality its principal meaning and embody it in an image—that is
how we arrived at realism. But if we add to the meaning extracted from reality, if we
think ourselves through to—according to the logic of hypothesizing—that which
is desired and possible, and supplement the image with this, then we arrive at that
romanticism which lies at the base and which is highly useful in that it helps stimu-
late a revolutionary attitude to reality, a relationship which practically changes the
world.”60 In essence, this paradoxical synthesis of realism and romanticism, of fact
and myth is a rather precise definition of socialist realism.
Marietta Shaginyan observed entirely correctly that Gorky’s speech “is not at all
Marxist . . . it is Bogdanovism.” In her opinion, Gorky is “a Raznochinets, a populist
[narodnik].”61 In fact, the general conception of the speech is surprising, in that, simi-
lar to the 1909 article “Razrushenie lichnosti” (The Destruction of the Individual)
it proposes three phases in the development of human culture: mythical collectiv-
ism, the collapse of culture in the age of bourgeois individualism, and the rebirth
of collective mythmaking under the sign of socialism. The realistic mythmaking
of the people is at the center of primitive culture; in its epic literature, legends, and
stories the people created heroes as carriers of the collective energy and developed
a conception of God as artistic summation of labor practices. After this follows a

period of the collapse of the individual, the manifestations of which in nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century Russian literature Gorky describes in some detail. The
third, contemporary stage, the stage of the liberation of socialist labor, will once
again, after the decline of bourgeois literature, open up previously unseen possibili-
ties for collective epic creativity: “We should choose labor as the fundamental hero
of our books, that is the person who is shaped by the processes of work, which in our
country is armed with all of the power of modern technology.” This is why socialist
realism “asserts existence as deed, as creativity.”62
Narodnost’ and the Campaign against Naturalism and Formalism
The rhetoric of the flourishing of the first socialist country finds its reflection in
one of the central categories of socialist realist aesthetics—narodnost’. Narodnost’
had an exceptionally wide semantic range: it could mean accessibility and compre-
hensibility, simplicity, antielitism, but also organic development, traditionalism,
folklore-based principles of creativity, and so forth. A definition of narodnost’ in the
literary criticism of the 1930s was either absent or tautological. Its main function, as
we shall see, was political prohibition.
The theme of narodnost’ was repeatedly mentioned at the All-Union Congress
of Soviet Writers after Pravda had begun publishing the first enthusiastic articles
about the motherland in the middle of 1934. Now the novelty of that conception was
being underlined: “In our revolution, the proletariat, by liberating itself, also liber-
ates all of oppressed mankind. We conquered, we created for ourselves a great and
powerful Motherland, the Motherland of humanity. Motherland! Only seventeen
years ago, this was just a false etymological concept, a tool of deceiving and dulling
the working people. Today this word represents all that the working class and the
working peasantry attained in the revolution. It is her, our Motherland, that unites
the multinational assembly of writers in one family. It is the people that guarantee
the growth of art, which feeds on ‘the deepest roots of the very depths of the people’s
life.’”63
Needless to say, certain obligations of the artist to the people flowed from this:
“The socialist people of our country love their writers, but not with a blind love.
The people present the writers with various demands.” The element of threat here
is entirely to the point: if the artist ignores the demands of the people, then the peo-
ple will withdraw their love. According to Kirpotin, “simplicity, which today we
are pursuing in art,” occupied an important place among these demands.64 It soon
turned out that “simplicity” and narodnost’ were real weapons in the hands of the
party in the fight with naturalism, formalism, and other “deviations.”
The requirement for narodnost’ lay indeed at the base of an entire system of
aesthetic prohibitions; it was in the name of narodnost’ that a campaign against for-
malism and naturalism was conducted in 1936. On 17 January 1936, the All-Union
Committee on Art Affairs (headed by Platon Kerzhentsev) was established and in
the following years became the primary censor in the spheres of music, film, theater,
and painting. On that same day, Stalin met with the creators of the opera Tikhii Don
(And Quiet Flows the Don) and called for the establishment of Soviet classics. A series
of infamous articles in Pravda followed, such as “Sumbur vmesto muzyki” (Chaos
instead of Music), “Baletnaia fal’sh’” (Balletic Falsehood), and “Iasnyi i prostoi iazyk
v iskusstve” (Clear and Simple Language in Art), all of them lambasting the work of
Dmitry Shostakovich. Under the flag of the fight against formalism and naturalism,
meetings of writers took place in Moscow and Petersburg.
As a result of the campaign of 1936, the demand for simplicity solidified and
became a cornerstone of Soviet literary criticism. It was clear that the devices of la-
bored form in language and in composition did not correspond to the demands of
narodnost’. Thus in an article on the opera Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda (Lady Mac-
beth of the Mtsensk District) we read the following critique: “This is music that is
constructed on the very same principle of negation of opera, on which ultra-leftist
art in general negates simplicity, realism, the comprehensibility of image, and the
natural sounding of the word in theater. This amounts to transferring the most nega-
tive features of ‘Meyerholdism’ in multiplied form into opera and music. This is ul-
tra-leftist chaos instead of real, human music.”65 Another article called for “liberation
from dead, passé, stagnant formalism, from lifeless, barren falsity and progression
into the wide expanse of socialist creativity, to the masses, who live vibrant, rich
lives and speak a clear, simple, and powerful language” (37). In an article on the il-
lustrations in a book by Marshak, the artist was accused of turning a children’s book
into a “patho-anatomical atlas,” in which the human figures are disfigured, “trees are
sickly bent,” and “even things, ordinary things—tables, chairs, suitcases, lamps—
are all corrupted, broken, stained, presented in such a way as to be offensive to look
at and impossible to use” (92). All this speaks to the fact that the artist hates “all that
is natural, simple, joyful, happy, intelligent, necessary—and he ruins everything and
leaves a dirty mark on everything” (92). Formalism as “the departure of art from
the people” and “the degeneration of art” is “a deadly enemy of narodnost’ in art.”66
In the principle of narodnost’, socialist realism found the final contours of the aes-
thetic canon, and Soviet criticism was enriched with a new “menacing weapon in the
struggle for communism.”
The key term degeneration in connection with narodnost’ illustrates the closeness
of Stalinist and national socialist cultural policy. National Socialism also regarded
modern art as not only antiaesthetic but as pathological, an expression of psycho-
logical disorder, contradicting the healthy taste of the people. As is well known, the
term goes back to Max Nordau’s book Entartung, which enjoyed great popularity in
both Germany and Russia.67 It is telling that Gorky’s article of 1896, “Pol’ Verlen i
dekadenty” (Paul Verlaine and the Decadents), was republished in 1937 in the journal
Zvezda with an instruction as to the necessity of fighting against the socially danger-
ous influence of the decadents. The campaign of 1936, which marked the beginning
of the cruel repression of numerous artists, anticipated the infamous Munich exhibi-
tion of “degenerative art” (Entartete Kunst) in 1937.
One could thus conclude that the norms of the Soviet canon functioned above
all as prohibitions, sealing off literature and the arts from hostile tendencies. The
positive norms, such as simplicity and narodnost’, were rather vague, exhausted by
references to the great traditions of the classics and realism. But insofar as the realism
of the nineteenth century distinguished itself by the predominance of a critical and
analytical beginning, now images were needed that reflected the optimism of the
official Stalinist culture, and these images were primarily sought in the preliterate
tradition—myth, folklore, heroic epics, and the like. Paradoxically, a society with
an officially declared orientation toward the future, in which the art of the avant-
garde left indelible marks and that widely used modern means of communication in
propaganda, directs its gaze toward the remote past, the result of which was a quaint
folklorization of modernity.68 The birth of Stalinist folklore and pseudofolklore be-
gins with Gorky’s speech at the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers.69 From the
middle of the 1930s one can observe in the Soviet Union not only a new growth of
research in folklore but also the active infiltration of literature by folkloric texts.
Popular “bards” appear, such as Dzhambul Dzhabaev, Suleiman Stal’skii, or Marfa
Kriukova; the methods of folklore are used primarily to extol the leaders, who were
decorated with quasi-folkloric epithets.
Soviet criticism of the 1930s played a key role in the formation of socialist real-
ism as an institute and aesthetic canon that was designed to include the writer in the
process of collective mythmaking and life-affirming creativity. The aesthetic norms
that were canonized in the first half of the 1930s were formed in accordance with
that goal and functioned above all as prohibitions directed against elitist art. The
art that was “foreign to the people” and “of labored perception” was rejected by the
political-aesthetic doctrine, which set itself the objective of removing the borders be-
tween high and low culture and the classics and folklore.70 Literary criticism, whose
function during these years was practically entirely exhausted by the advancement
and realization of the new aesthetics, bears out the conclusion that the “popular sim-
plicity” it proclaimed was by no means a simple phenomenon in that it became es-
tablished not only as a dictate from on high but also as a “compromise” between the
ideological demands of the regime and the aesthetic tastes of the mass reader. In liter-
ary criticism, the voice of the regime and the voice of the “people” met and reached
accord through negotiation.71
The Unmasking of the False Hero
The period 1932–1940 in the history of Soviet literary criticism was full of cam-
paigns on a much smaller scale: various discussions, debates about individual works,
the extolling of certain authors, and the dethronement of others. The focus of our
examination has revolved around the underlying political-aesthetic content, but in
order to feel the pulse of literary criticism in those years, it is worth looking at a
concrete example. Andrei Platonov in this sense is an entirely representative figure:
one of the greatest Russian writers during that period, he nonetheless remained a
marginal figure at the time. His case illustrates both the novelty of the situation in
the 1930s and the preservation of the hostile attitudes of the former RAPP members,
whose influence during that decade was still significant.
Beginning at the end of the 1920s, Soviet literary criticism had repeatedly come
down upon Platonov. His primary works, such as Chevengur and Kotlovan (The Foun-
dation Pit) could not be published. The short stories “Usomnivshiisia Makar” (Doubt-
ing Makar, 1929) and “Vprok” (Of Benefit, 1931) were crushed by RAPP critics on
the direct orders of Stalin. However, in 1936 the general secretary of the Union of
Soviet Writers Vladimir Stavskii unexpectedly praised Platonov’s short story “Bess-
mertie” (Immortality) which originated in the collective project about the heroes
of rail transport. Stavskii condescendingly stated: “The story is not without faults.
It is necessary to work on it some more. . . . But, I think, Comrade Platonov will
recognize the faults in the story and fix it.”72 Encouraged by the praise from above,
Literaturnyi kritik printed two stories by Platonov, “Bessmertie” and “Fro.” The edi-
torial article “O khoroshikh rasskazakh i redaktorskoi rutine” (On Good Stories and
on the Editorial Routine) justified the unusual decision to publish short stories in the
pages of a critical journal by the fact that the hero of “Bessmertie,” with his dedica-
tion to the cause of transport and his genuine optimism, rises above the prevalent
mediocre literature and embodies the Stalinist attention to the individual.73
The publication of “Bessmertie” called forth a sharp objection from the critic
Abram Gurvich.74 His article was published in Krasnaia nov’, whose editor, Vladi-
mir Ermilov, wanted to demonstrate his vigilance.75 Gurvich began by attacking the
hero of “Bessmertie,” Emmanuel Levin, the head of a railroad station who selflessly
dedicates his life exclusively to the cause of transport and who, in Platonov’s words,
attempts to “penetrate each individual, to torment and touch his soul so that a plant
grows out of it, blooming for everyone.”76 In Gurvich’s opinion, Levin resembles
more an ascetic, a schismatic, and a Christian martyr than a socialist hero: “An in-
surmountable abyss separates Platonov’s heroes from the real heroes of our time. Pla-
tonov and his heroes are not moving toward the party. Quite the opposite, they want
to draw the party, to pull it closer to themselves; they want to use the name of the
greatest and most powerful party to cover and assert their philosophy of destitution,
their anarchic individualism, their spiritual poverty, their cachexia and bloodless-
ness, their Christian fool’s sorrow and martyrdom” (Andrei Platonov, 388). Platonov is
accused of romanticizing suffering and declared a writer not only not of the people
but against the people, “as the true qualities of the Russian people are perverted in
his works” (408). Platonov’s reply to Gurvich, “A Comeback without Self-Defense”
(“Vozvrashchenie bez samozashchity,” 414–16), bears witness to his defenselessness in
the face of the harsh attacks of the critics, as does his unpublished letter to Literatur-
naia gazeta, in the conclusion of which he quotes the words of the unfortunate Bash-
machkin from Gogol’s “Shinel’” (The Overcoat): “leave me alone” (429). It is worth
adding that when Literaturnyi kritik was accused in 1940 of holding “harmful views,”
it was also charged with “making a banner of Andrei Platonov’s entire work, with all
of its decadent characteristics.”77
What the official criticism found especially disturbing and upsetting in Pla-
tonov was that he was difficult to accuse of bourgeois formalism or of a hostile at-
titude toward socialism, although it was clear that his characters differed principally
from those beings that Soviet writers and critics were busy crafting and who were
given the title “positive hero of Soviet literature.” Although the selfless life of the
standard socialist hero possessed certain elements of masochism, in comparison with
these optimistic warriors, Platonov’s humbly submissive characters seemed “false”
heroes, whom it was necessary to unmask mercilessly.78
The situation with Platonov illustrates certain basic features of Soviet literary
criticism in the 1930s: its repressive character, which dates back to the RAPP years,
its doctrinaire nature, its complete indifference to the writer’s individuality, and, fi-
nally, its subordination to the tasks of ideology and literary politics.
Platonov’s affiliation in the mid-1930s with Literaturnyi kritik, which was without
doubt the most interesting and important literary-critical publication of the 1930s,
determined both his fate and that of the journal. With the closure of Literaturnyi kritik
in 1940 the only specialized journal for literary criticism disappeared. Critics dis-
persed among the various literary-artistic journals, which led to the fragmentation
of criticism and even more centralized control over it. At the very least, “groups” of
the type that existed under Literaturnyi kritik could no longer arise. In essence, Liter-
aturnyi kritik was the last Soviet journal with its own distinct direction and platform
until the Thaw. Not by accident did a few of the active critics and men of letters, who
were grouped around this journal in the 1930s, reappear twenty years later in Alex-
ander Tvardovsky’s famous Novyi mir.
 SOVIET LITERARY THEORY
6
IN THE 1930s
BATTLES OVER GENRE AND THE
BOUNDARIES OF MODERNITY
KATERINA CLARK and GALIN TIHANOV
In this chapter we explore the process of establishing a Soviet Marxist canon in aes-
thetics during the 1930s, the attending methodological polemics in left-leaning liter-
ary studies and cultural theory, as well as the trends that diverged from them. In the
polemics of the 1930s genre became a foremost preoccupation; its role as a complex
ideological instrument for conceptualizing reality and its significance as a battle-
ground over the boundaries of modernity were highlighted in numerous discus-
sions. We thus accord central attention to the debates on the novel, the epic, and the
lyric and, therefore, to the authors around Literaturnyi kritik and the Institute of Phi-
losophy, Literature, and History (IFLI), most notably György Lukács and Mikhail
Lifshits. Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings on the novel and epic, including his book on
François Rabelais, are similarly in the spotlight. We seek to give a general character-
istic of Bakhtin’s evolution as a thinker and his style of theorizing and to determine
his significance for literary theory and his legacy in later discussions on subjectivity.
To place the most significant features of Bakhtin’s methodology in their proper syn-
chronic context, we also undertake the first ever systematic examination of semantic
paleontology, a noteworthy facet of the theoretical landscape of the 1930s, with par-
ticular reference to its impact on literary studies.
109
110  K ATERINA CLARK AND GALIN TIHANOV
The Formation of the Canon of Marxist-Leninist Aesthetics
The 1930s were the most decisive decade in the history of Soviet literary theory.
During the 1920s the question of what literature might be appropriate for the new
Soviet state was hotly debated, yet not resolved. But at the beginning of the thirties
guidelines were provided in the “theory” of socialist realism, promulgated between
1932 and 1934 and outlined in two addresses to the First Congress of the Union of
Soviet Writers in 1934, by Andrei Zhdanov and Maxim Gorky, which became ca-
nonical sources. In many respects, however, in these speeches, especially Gorky’s,
the guidelines were vague; socialist realism, as it emerged in practice, was highly
conventionalized and both compositionally and thematically constricting. The di-
rection it should take, the “theory” of socialist realism, and its place both in literary
history and in contemporary world literature continued to be debated throughout
the decade, though often in oblique ways. The more sophisticated versions of this
debate focused on questions of genre. Looking from the perspective of today, Lukács
and Bakhtin emerge as the major players, though Bakhtin, who was in internal exile
for most of the decade and unable to publish, was not visible at the time.
Following the dissolution of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers
(RAPP) and the formation of the Union of Soviet Writers, many critics and theo-
rists sought to place socialist realism within a broader, leftist, internationalist literary
tradition that would supersede the narrow purview of RAPP, restoring “aesthetics,”
literary “quality,” and professionalism as criteria. Implicit in the new demands for
literary quality and professionalism was a de-emphasis on the importance of class
in literature. Central to the Stalinist literary platform of the 1930s was an attack on
so-called vulgar sociology, particularly associated with Valerian Pereverzev and his
school, that is, on approaches to literary history that insist there is a direct correlation
between changes in the socioeconomic sphere and changes within literature. This
went together with a rejection of the notion that only “proletarians,” or in some
formulations writers with a Bolshevik orientation, could produce a literature that
would be valid for the new society, a doctrine that at the height of RAPP’s power
had given priority to campaigns to have the worker masses produce their own lit-
erature about their workday lives. In fact, in general the early 1930s saw a reaction
against the largely pragmatic, utilitarian, and materialist approach to most fields
of culture that had characterized the immediately preceding cultural revolution.
Authoritative voices began to lament the fact that the cultural revolution’s obses-
sion with technology, statistics, and immediate practical needs had crowded out the
higher and more enduring value of beauty. Culture itself became a value, and not
only for its instrumentalist potential but in its own right.
Soviet Marxist theoreticians of the 1920s (Pereverzev, Aleksandr Voronskii,
Vladimir Friche, Iurii Libedinskii, and Trotsky) had not generally used the word aes-
thetics (estetika)—except in commenting on Georgii Plekhanov’s theories, which were
by now largely discredited; for different reasons but to similar effect their avant-
garde and formalist rivals decried all mention of “art” and “beauty” as vapid and
unscientific fetish. Starting around 1931, however, in other words approximately at
SOVIET LITERARY THEORY IN THE 1930s  111
the time the Union of Soviet Writers was formed, one sees a more concerted effort
to elucidate a comprehensive Marxist aesthetic theory, one that would cover not just
literature, let alone just proletarian or avant-garde literature, but general principles
governing all the arts, though literature was the main focus.
It has commonly been contended that Marx, Engels, and for that matter Lenin,
never produced a systematic aesthetics, just random comments.1 Most of the canoni-
cal sources for their “aesthetics” were the occasional letters Marx and Engels wrote
to individual writers commenting on their works (the majority of these letters were
by Engels). Lenin, on the other hand, had produced specific articles on literary ques-
tions: “Partiinaia organizatsiia i partiinaia literatura” (Party Organization and Party
Literature, 1905), which became the canonical source for the doctrine of “party-
mindedness” (partiinost’) as the cornerstone of socialist realism, and also his essays on
Tolstoy of 1908–1911.
Starting with its first volume in 1931, a new scholarly serial, Literaturnoe nasledstvo,
presented letters by Marx and Engels on literary matters (largely unpublished previ-
ously), accompanied by scholarly introductions and interpretive commentaries that
sought to stitch together their scattered remarks to form a whole.2 Both the publica-
tion of the relevant writings from Marx and Engels in 1931–1933 and the subsequent
publication of comprehensive, interpretive accounts of “Marxist-Leninist aesthet-
ics” were almost entirely undertaken by the same small group of germanophone and
Soviet scholars: Lukács, Ernst Fischer (an Austrian), Lifshits, Frants Shiller (actually
Soviet, but of German extraction), and Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lukács and Lifshits’s
erstwhile patron and former minister for Culture and Education (who was at the
time the director of the Institute of Literature and Art at the Communist Academy,
until his death in December 1933). These documents, the majority of them appearing
in print for the first time, became the central texts for many of the future discus-
sions of Marx and Engels’s positions on literary and aesthetic questions. Odd articles
on such questions also began to appear in the party theoretical journal, Bol’shevik,
in Pravda, in Literaturnaia gazeta, and in other literary and scholarly journals. Most
theoretical articles on socialist realism by authoritative Soviet figures tended to pay
only glancing attention to Marxist theory and were more likely, especially as the
decade progressed, to discuss socialist realism in terms of the writings of figures from
Russia’s pre-Marxist radical tradition, such as Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Cherny-
shevsky, or Nikolai Dobrolyubov.
The most prominent among this new group of canonizers was Lifshits. He com-
piled, together with Shiller, Marks i Engel’s ob iskusstve (Marx and Engels on Art),
an anthology that appeared in 1933 with an introduction by Lunacharsky. Trans-
lated into French, German, Spanish, and English, by 1938 it had become a canoni-
cal text, replaced in the Soviet Union that year by a new version of the same title,
edited by Lifshits, which was both expanded and reorganized (this revised version
later appeared in translation in France and most countries of the postwar Eastern
bloc). Other influential publications by Lifshits in this period include his book Vo-
prosy iskusstva i filosofii (Issues in Art and Philosophy, 1935), which discusses both Marx
and Lenin, and the first major collection, compiled by him, of Lenin’s statements on
aesthetic questions, O kul’ture i iskusstve: Sbornik statei i otryvkov (On Culture and Art:
A Collection of Articles and Excerpts, 1938).
The documents elucidating Marx and Engels’s aesthetic views appeared as part
of a general flurry of rediscovering and publishing Marx and Engels’s texts, in par-
ticular Marx’s previously unpublished Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
considered a prime source for “the early Marx.” This text, which deals with, among
other things, the problem of alienation, has been important for Western Marxism
and the Frankfurt School, and Lukács had also worked on it as part of a Germano-
Soviet team focusing on the Nachlass in the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin (IMEL).
These editions of Marx’s texts began appearing in 1927, but in the early thirties the
effort was more concerted. The Soviet Union was appropriating Marx for itself and
claiming the role of the center of Marxist scholarship, using its “ownership” of Marx
(they had actually spent a great deal of foreign currency to buy the archival materi-
als) to attack rival leftist positions such as the Trotskyite, the Second International,
and the Communists’ main German rival party, the Social Democratic Party (SDP).
By 1932–1934 the first books that attempted to provide a comprehensive account
of these foundational Marxist thinkers’ aesthetic positions were beginning to appear:
Mikhail Lifshits’s K voprosu o razvitii vzgliadov Marksa ob iskusstve (On the Question
of the Evolution of Marx’s Views on Art, 1933), based on his entry on Marx in vol-
ume six of the Literaturnaia entsiklopediia (Literary Encyclopedia) of 1932 (it was to be
published in English in 1938 as The Philosophy of Karl Marx and subsequently in other
languages, becoming a standard source); the first book presenting a comprehensive
account of Lenin’s views, Anatoly Lunacharsky’s (posthumously published) Lenin i
literaturovedenie (Lenin and Literary Scholarship, 1934), likewise based on an entry in
volume six of Literaturnaia entsiklopediia; and Ernst Fischer’s Engel’s kak literaturnyi kri-
tik (Engels as a Literary Critic, 1933).
Literaturnyi kritik , Lukács and Lifshits, and IFLI
Several of this group, notably Lukács and his close associate Lifshits, were also
key players in Literaturnyi kritik (founded 1933), the one central journal from the 1930s
that was devoted to literary theory and criticism and was the principal mouthpiece
of the theoretical campaign against “vulgar sociology,” which was being promoted
on high as well. Literaturnyi kritik was effectively run by a Germano-Soviet clique
that included Lukács, Lifshits, Vladimir Aleksandrov, Vladimir Grib, Igor Sats (who
had worked as Lunacharsky’s secretary), and Elena Usievich (who had political clout
in that she had returned from exile in Zurich together with Lenin and her father, the
prominent Bolshevik Feliks Kon, in the famous train of 1917, but who also, thanks
to the years in emigration, had good German). Most of them had been part of Lu-
nacharsky’s circle at the Institute for Literature and the Arts; in fact, the official edi-
tor, Pavel Iudin, the director of the Institute of Philosophy, had been Lunacharsky’s
pupil.
The journal had a distinct leaning toward German theory, yet at the same time
an orientation, as suggested earlier, toward the Russian radical tradition of Belinsky,
Dobrolyubov, and Chernyshevsky. The predilection for Hegel and German phi-
losophy was particularly noticeable. Starting in 1934 the journal began publishing
sections of Hegel’s Aesthetics in translation, followed the next year by an extended,
if critical, account of Kant’s aesthetics.3 The articles were on a wide range of writ-
ers, both European and Russian, but, virtually, whatever the subject, they were pep-
pered with quotations from, or references to, German thinkers, especially to Hegel
and Schiller.
Despite the journal’s promotion of such “idealist” philosphers, the theoretical
positions of the Literaturnyi kritik group in the 1930s are generally labeled “Stalin-
ist,” and indeed their being in favor was alleged to account for the very founding
of the journal. However, Lukács and Lifshits had formulated their respective un-
derstandings of “Marxist aesthetics” in the twenties (Lifshits in 1927, Lukács around
1922–1923), when they were out of step with the dominant Soviet trends of that time
(proletarian culture and constructivism), and they maintained much the same views
until their deaths well after Stalin’s (Lukács in 1971, Lifshits in 1983). In other words,
sometimes their positions coincided with “the line” and sometimes not. They and
their associates, it should be noted, were not figures who might be described as of-
ficial spokesmen of the party or the Union of Soviet Writers. Lifshits himself did not
join the party until 1938, that is, until he had already produced virtually all his major
theoretical work and anthologies of texts that became standard sources for Marx,
Engels, and Lenin on literature. Pavel Iudin was something of an exception. A party
member, he was the head of the Institute of Philosophy where he had distinguished
himself in recent years with articles expounding the Stalinist line. Since 1931 he had
also involved himself in literary questions and was put in charge of organizing the
First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers and also assigned by the organizing
committee the task of heading the “brigade” to work out the theory of socialist real-
ism for the congress. His article “Lenin i nekotorye voprosy marksistskoi kritiki”
(Lenin and Some Issues in Marxist Criticism) appeared in the first volume of Liter-
aturnyi kritik, which came out in June 1933, while another major statement by him
on the Marxian basis of the new cultural policies had been published in Bol’shevik in
1932.
Both Lukács and Lifshits, however, sought to integrate Marxist literary theory
with the European philosophical tradition. This position had been out of favor in
the late 1920s when they first met, but after the establishment in the early 1930s of
literary quality as an important criterion for socialist realism, and especially after the
Nazi takeover when the Soviet Union began to play an active part in the anti-fascist
movement with its central slogan “world literature,” the changed historical moment
became propitious for an internationalist literary platform that would propel the
two friends to prominence in Soviet literary theory. Lukács wrote extensively on
realism and its evolution into socialist realism. His stance on this offered a rational-
ization for the more cosmopolitan drift in Soviet culture, and he and Lifshits could
command the kind of erudition and theoretical acumen to present formulations that
would give this position authority.
In his second Moscow period (1933–1945), Lukács participated in two worlds
that were interlocking but also distinct. On the one hand, he was a central and high-
profile figure among the German writers in exile in the Soviet Union and as such not
only published in their periodicals but was also leader in the German section of the
Union of Soviet Writers. He produced several writings directed against Nazi ideol-
ogy, such as Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (The Destruction of Reason), the ideas for which
were basically formulated by 1933, where he identified Marxism with the rational
and declared it the antithesis of the irrational, which he associated with Nazism. But
at the same time he had been assimilated into Soviet cultural institutions.
One such remarkable institution, in which both Lukács and, especially, Lifshits
were involved, was IFLI. The founding of IFLI in 1931, when it was separated from
Moscow University, was symptomatic of a gradual revival of the arts and humanities
(indicatively, the Communist Academy was abolished in 1934 and melded with the
Academy of Sciences). It collected under its roof some of the main disciplines of the
humanities (the history of art was also represented but only as a branch of the history
department). IFLI from 1934 was located on the (then) far periphery of the capital, in
Sokolniki, which gave it some degree of independence.
Though IFLI was semiautonomous, it was also very Marxist. It gave its dedi-
cated students a blend of Marxist education and discussion (especially of Capital) with
a rigorous grounding in culture that emphasized the classical era, the Renaissance,
and modern European literature and thought, as well as Russian traditions. The ap-
proach of the faculty, however, was heavily influenced by the writings of the early
Marx, precisely those on which Lukács had worked during his first Moscow stay at
the start of the 1930s. He and Lifshits became faculty members at IFLI and central
figures in attempting to work out a Marxist, humanist literary and philosophical
position after the “deluge” of the cultural revolution. In so doing, they particularly
advanced the Renaissance as an historical precedent for the new age (Lifshits made
the most visible contribution to this reevaluation), picturing it as a time of “beauty”
and “humanism,” values for which they could find ample endorsement in the early
Marx. And their students were responsive; the lectures there on the Renaissance
were always packed.4
The Moscow Discussion on the Novel: Despitism and Thankism
Lukács’s enhanced status as an authoritative formulator of Soviet literary theory

was most strikingly evident in a major discussion on the novel held in the literary
section of the Institute of Philosophy of the Communist Academy on 20 and 28 De-
cember 1934 and 3 January 1935. All the major names in literary theory were gathered
ostensibly to critique Lukács’s article on the novel commissioned for the Literaturnaia
entsiklopediia—but in effect to endorse it.5 The definition of socialist realism given in
the official speeches at the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, held in Au-
gust 1934, but five months earlier, was, as mentioned, somewhat vague. Gorky in his
address had stressed the role of “folktales, myths, and legends,” the “folklore of the
toiling people,” as model genres for the new tradition, adding that “myth creation
was au fond realistic.”6 But in practice the backbone of socialist realism was the novel,
and hence Lukács’s account of it was particularly significant.
Lukács’s discussion paper and the ensuing exchanges were published in Liter-
aturnyi kritik in 1935.7 This discussion reveals how much, in effect, Lukács and his
Moscow group inscribed their theory and history of the novel into the Marxist-Le-
ninist model of societal progress while at the same time according socialist realism a
transnational European context.
Lukács in his account of the novel and its provenance closely follows “classical
German philosophy” and primarily Hegel, who, he says, though limited in that he
was an “idealist” rather than a “realist,” nevertheless “posed the question of the novel
more deeply and more correctly than in all the bourgeois theories,” orienting his
findings around a contrast between the classical epic and the novel. Lukács contin-
ues: “According to Hegel, the epic poems of Homer . . . have as their basis the crude
and primitive unity of the individual and society” (2: 214–15). But with the division
of labor, as “social contradictions” emerged in bourgeois society, the theme of the
novel became, in contradistinction to the theme of the epic that is struggle against
external enemies or nature, “struggle within society” (2: 215; emphasis in the original).
Lukács adduces several stages in the development of the novel, starting with Rabelais
and Miguel de Cervantes (2: 217–19), but his high point is the age of what for him
were the great realists: Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott, Goethe, and Balzac. For
some, a major goal was to be “the historian of private life,” but overall they sought
to “assimilate the hero into bourgeois society” (2: 216). They failed to achieve such
wholeness because of the social contradictions brought about by capitalism, but some
of them produced truly great realist novels nevertheless: “Their realism comes from
. . . fearlessness in exposing contradictions” (2: 216).
Lukács posits a decline in the novel after the 1848 revolution with the subse-
quent period of reaction. Thereafter, in one lamentable trend the hero was reduced
to being an “average person,” a statistical norm, so that the action lost its epic charac-
ter and analysis and description took the place of narrative; here his prime example
is Émile Zola (2: 219), who had already been attacked by him in 1934 for getting
bogged down with “contingencies” and hence failing to “heroize,” “romanticize” (a
Zhdanov term).8 Alternatively, writers of this later period began to indulge in an ex-
aggerated subjectivism, a trend that led to the “final disintegration of the novel form
in the imperialist era (Proust, Joyce)” (2: 219). With a little casuistry Lukács is able to
include as high realists the Russian novelists of the late nineteenth century (such as
Tolstoy), as he argues that in Russia 1905 was essentially what 1848 was in Europe (2:
217). With the rise of the proletariat, however, a group with strong internal cohesion,
it became possible again to create a “positive hero” in the image of the “conscious
worker” (2: 219, “the proletariat destroys the objective causes for the degradation of
man”). As a consequence the novel can “make the most fundamental changes to its
nature (vidoizmeniat’sia), reform itself (perestraivat’sia) in its basics and move toward
a rapprochement with the epic.” Its heroes more and more acquire the features of
epic heroes (2: 219). But this does not involve “an artificial revival of the formal or
thematic elements of the old epic (its mythology, etc.) . . . but arises from the classless
society” (2: 219). Lukács’s conclusion is that since some “survivals” of the capitalist
mentality persist in the consciousness, the socialist realist novel must as yet remain
“linked with the great bourgeois realist novel. A critical appropriation (usvoenie) and
reworking of this heritage therefore plays an extraordinarily important role in re-
solving the problem of form for the current stage in the development of the socialist
realist novel” (2: 220).
Two features of Lukács’s article need to be highlighted here. First, Lukács has
adduced a genealogy for socialist realist literature that begins in ancient Greece and
continues through Western Europe in the modern period but finds its apotheosis in a
phenomenon generated in Soviet Russia—the socialist realist novel. In fact, despite
the class-induced limitations of the “bourgeois” novel Lukács nevertheless insists
that it must be “appropriated and reworked” in order for socialist realism to truly
attain its status as the acme of literary evolution. We have here a scenario for the
Soviet product to become, as Lifshits made explicit in the discussion, “world cul-
ture” incarnate (Lifshits, 3: 240). Second, and as several of the discussants pointed
out, by taking as the starting point of his trajectory of literary evolution Homer’s
epics, Lukács is fully in line with Gorky’s position at the First Congress of the Union
of Soviet Writers when he said that socialist realism should be based on the “folk-
lore of the toiling people”; the words folk creativity are capitalized in one discussant’s
contribution, in case we might miss them.9 Behind Lukács’s account of the novel,
then, stands a kind of ideal epic, a less “primitive” and mythologized version of the
classical epic of Homer, and this version of epic functions as a gold standard against
which the fluctuations of the novel itself are measured. Its telos is to recover that epic
wholeness, which Lukács sees as possible only in a unified, classless society. But his
account of the original (Homeric) epic as voice of a unified society is, as Dimitry
Mirsky pointed out in the discussion, idealized in that Greek society had slaves and
hence could not be seen as classless and harmonious (2: 222).
Thus Lukács, in presenting a somewhat simplified model of the novel’s evolu-
tion, has essentially discarded a lot of historical detail that might undermine its neat
concordance with the three-stage Marxist-Leninist model of historical development
that culminates in a higher stage of unity when the contradictions have been over-
come. Many of the speakers faulted Lukács for not bringing into his account the
considerable pre-bourgeois presence of the novel or for not differentiating among
the several subgenres, in other words for the lack of complexity in his model. Per-
everzev, Lukács’s main critic, spoke not only of medieval and Renaissance examples,
but also of the Greek novel (2: 230). Lukács’s future interlocutor, Bakhtin, explored
such Greek precedents in some detail in his writings of the late 1930s.
In promoting his scheme of the evolution of the novel Lukács had to resort to
a certain amount of casuistry, especially in admitting canonical European writers
of the nineteenth century with dubious class identities to the status of forbears of
socialist realism. The greatness of certain novelists in his heroic age of realism (prior
to 1948) was, he argues, achieved despite their own (class-driven) desires and volition
(2: 216). In particular, “the greatness of Balzac and his central position in the develop-
ment of the novel is based precisely on the fact that in his images he created the direct
opposite of what he consciously planned (zadumannomu)” (2: 218).
Lifshits and Lukács proved to be men of the hour as “despitists” (voprekisty),
that is, as theoreticians who argued that in the case of a literary genius (and here for
Lukács, Balzac, a monarchist, was the prime example) a writer is liable to produce
a telling critique of his society despite his political position or class identity. The de-
spitists were opposed to the “thankists” (blagodaristy) who believed that a truthful
depiction of reality was possible only thanks to the author’s (correct) worldview. The
despitist position enabled Lifshits, Lukács, and their associates to promote a large
number of “bourgeois” European and Russian authors in a substantially revised
canon of “great literature.” Lukács, with his insistence on despitism, was effectively
attacking what was called “vulgar sociology,” the direct linking of class and literary
content, an approach most associated with Pereverzev, a participant in the debate.
As the discussion of Lukács’s article evolved, it increasingly became an occasion for
attacking Pereverzev and his “sociological” school, which, allegedly, had the temer-
ity to emphasize the empirical nature of class (“vulgar empiricism,” Fokht, 3: 235)
and, worse, downplayed the leading role of the “proletariat” in cultural evolution—
an accusation that led Usievich, an editor at Literaturnyi kritik, and others to label
Pereverzev “Menshevik.” By Pereverzev’s second speech he had become subdued
and apologetic, his erstwhile followers denying their connection to him (3: 236–37).
Though it was not until 1936 that his school was completely routed, this discussion
in the Communist Academy led to his replacement by Lukács and his associates as
Marxist literary theorists, but it also swept aside the provincialism of RAPP-era lit-
erary policies, effectively expanding the “proletarian” horizon to embrace Hegel,
classical German aesthetics, and the West European literary canon.
Narration vs. Description, the Assault

on Expressionism, Disputes about the Lyric
The libertarian trends exhibited in the fight against vulgar sociologism, not least
during the Moscow discussion on the novel, were counterbalanced in the second half
of the 1930s by a more restrictive literary canon, as evidenced in the parallel cam-
paigns against formalism and expressionism and an often-noted distinctive turn to-
ward Russian cultural nationalism. At the same time, the latter half of the 1930s also
saw public resistance to established norms of socialist realism. The controversies, as
we have seen, were largely focused in debates about genre. In addition to the novel,
entire modes of prose writing, and also the lyric, became intensely debated issues.
In the discussion about the novel, a common defense against the carping at
Lukács’s omissions was to expostulate against the notion that any particular coun-
tervailing example—a mere “fact,” a “contingency” (Kemenov, 3: 241–42; Lifshits,
3: 248)—could controvert any generalization drawn from the writings of Marx, En-
gels, and Lenin (and, Lifshits and Lukács added in their closing statements, Stalin).
At the heart of Lukács’s writings in these years was the binary of particularity and
universality, a problematic one for Marxist-Leninist theory, and one closely related
to the alternative constructed by “fact” and “contingency.” Of the many articles

Lukács published at the time, the key one in this regard was his essay, “Rasskaz ili
opisanie” (Narration or Description?), which appeared both in German in Interna-
tionale Literatur and in Russian in Literaturnyi kritik.10 In this essay, which in many
respects represents a reformulation of a position he had presented several times be-
fore, and particularly in his Berlin essay “Reportage oder Gestaltung?” (Reportage
or Portrayal? [1932]), Lukács is ostensibly describing what happens in the European
novel of the nineteenth century, but in effect he is prescribing what should happen
in the socialist realist novel of the twentieth century. Lukács counterpoises the two
kinds of representation identified in his title but valorizes them (narration as positive,
description as negative) and uses, as paradigms for the two approaches, the different
ways Tolstoy and Zola describe a horse race (in Anna Karenina and Nana, respec-
tively); he also uses Balzac as a positive example. Lukács’s particular focus is the use
of detail in these two scenes: he insists that while in Zola the specifics of the horse
race have, virtually, independent status, in Anna Karenina, his positive example, Tol-
stoy introduces ample detail but, in deploying it, subordinates the detail to his overall
plot scheme.
Lukács does not actually use the word detail in this essay so much as “the contin-
gent” (sluchainost’ in the Russian version, das Zufällige in the German). In other words,
he condemns the use of gratuitous facts and particularity and calls instead for the
hegemony in composition of some overarching narrative (“fabula,” “rasskaz”; “Rass-
kaz ili opisanie,” 65), insisting that all details have a discursive function. To Lukács,
the problem with overemphasis on detail (and doubtless the reason why he chose to
use the word contingency for it) is that it is precisely contingent and needs to be raised
to the level of the essential, of “necessity” (neobkhodimost’ in Russian, Notwendigkeit
in German). Moreover, necessity to him, as a Marxist, meant in effect the Marxist-
Leninist account of history. As he put it: “A chance [sluchainaia] feature, a chance
similarity, a chance meeting should become an unmediated expression of important
social interrelations [sootnoshenii]” (48).
In “Rasskaz ili opisanie” Lukács argues that novels should feature culmination
points, moments in the narrative that result in a shift from the old to the new. In this
way, details of the setting and characters would be connected in a narrative of ac-
tion and praxis. Events would take place in what he called an “epic” world of action
and movement. In fact, his ultimate condemnation of sheer “description” is that it
functions as a “writer’s surrogate for lost epic meaning [znachimosti]” (“Rasskaz ili
opisanie,” 55).
Once again Lukács is careful in this essay to draw a distinction between the
sort of “pure epic” that one finds in Homer and the kind of epic one finds in the
modern era. However, in advancing epic as the superior form for modern literature,
he fudges the distinction between epic and novel, identifying epic particularly with
the element that Engels emphasized in his accounts of realism, the typical: “Epic art,
and also, naturally, the art of the novel . . . amounts to the ability to bring out typical
features of human significance from the social life of the given epoch” (“Rasskaz ili
opisanie,” 55).
The year 1936, when Lukács published “Rasskaz ili opisanie,” was no innocent
time. It was also the year of the first show trial. The germanophone intellectuals
were not untouched by the Soviet campaign; in 1936 a group of them gathered in
Moscow for a round of recriminations, recantations, and self-justifications (the tran-
script has been published in the resonantly titled Die Säuberung).11 But, more germane
here, 1936 was also the year of the antiformalist campaign, which essentially attacked
all modernist trends.12 In 1936–1938 some of the leading intellectuals of the antifascist
emigration were embroiled in the so-called expressionism debate, to some extent a
parallel campaign within the leftist antifascist emigration to the Soviet antiformalist
campaign.13 Lukács became a leader of the charge against the expressionists with ar-
ticles published on the pages of Moscow-based émigré periodicals such as Das Wort.
One should not necessarily see Lukács’s position here as Stalinist, however. This
Popular Front period was a time when intellectuals from all over Europe were react-
ing against the cult of singularity and contingency that had characterized so much
avant-garde and modernist work in the 1920s (such as we find in Dadaism, surreal-
ism, and stream of consciousness fiction). Many came to reject such approaches as
jejune and self-indulgent in the face of the world crisis. In their stead, they were
gravitating back toward the grand, often realistic, narrative.
Countering this trend was a growing valorization of the lyric at the end of the
1930s. The campaign for “the lyric” was directed, effectively, at dismantling some
of the more rigid and crude aspects of socialist realism. The campaign was centered
in Literaturnyi kritik, in Literaturnaia gazeta, and at IFLI. Usievich was, together with
Lifshits, one of the most vociferous advocates of what was called “the lyric.”14 Her
article, “V zashchitu politicheskoi poezii” (In Defense of Political Poetry), published
in the May 1937 volume of Literaturnyi kritik, was one of the most controversial and
central articles in this debate. She argues against the simplistic kind of poetry that
effectively only translates the political platform directly into verse. “Paradoxical as
it might sound,” Usievich insists in this article, “in Mayakovsky’s cries about love
unrequited there was more social content than in many lamentations on political
themes written by the minor epigones of populist poetry.” Directly political poems
are often “prosaic and impersonal,” she contends; they often comprise no more than
“hastily rhymed slogans,” but the worker of today is too sophisticated for this, he
“himself insists on his right to experience the most varied human feelings, including
love.” “Man is not a machine set up exclusively to ‘produce steel’ and to express lyri-
cally his love for the factory work bench, ‘My darling work bench, I don’t want to go
home’.” Such verse is not “genuine.” Poets need to be “sincere.”15
The long debate on the lyric and the political in literature, which ensued over
the remaining years of the 1930s, generated dozens of articles (including a few more
by Usievch).16 Such key terms emerged in the discourse as “the authentic” (podlinnyi),
“sincerity” (iskrennost’), and “the lyric” (lirika).17 These qualifications were invoked
in the cause of dismantling the facile standard narrative of the production novel, the
backbone of the Soviet cultural repertoire, in which the love plot was always subor-
dinated to the twin overarching plot that chronicled the hero’s fulfillment of the plan
and his political development.18
It was not only an older generation of critics like Lifshits and Usievich who were
proselytizers for a “genuine” lyric. A conspicuous feature of this campaign in the late
1930s was the extent to which it was taken up by a new generation of writers (pri-
marily poets), including Konstantin Simonov, Margarita Aliger, and Pavel Kogan.19
Many of these new young poets had in the mid- to late 1930s studied in either IFLI or
the Literary Institute (Simonov had been at both, Aliger had studied at the Literary
Institute, and Pavel Kogan at IFLI).
Efforts to reinstate a “genuine” lyric in culture recurrently met authoritative
opposition that had its own powerful lobby. The detractors suggested (not without
a point) that the argument advanced by Usievich and others for less crudely politi-
cized poetry (which was made in terms of the Soviet public having become more
sophisticated and therefore needing a different kind of literature) was very much
like the points made by the recently arrested Bukharin in his address on poetry at
the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934.20 Advocates of the lyric
tried to enlist even Byron, a writer propelled into prominence recently in the anti-
fascist movement because he could be construed as a fighter for liberation analogous
to those fighting in the Spanish Civil War; Alexander Fadeev, a rising star as a leader
of the Union of Soviet Writers, was a particular advocate of Byron.21 Unlike Fadeev,
however, Lukács attacked Byron in his Historical Novel, advancing Walter Scott as a
counter model.22 Lukács’s advocacy of the historical novel over poetry dovetailed
somewhat with the Russian nationalist position promoted at that time on the official
platform. In fact, in the same issue of Literaturnaia gazeta that announced the Ribben-
tropp Pact (26 August 1939), there appeared a major editorial on the historical novel,
“Istoriia i literatura” (History and Literature), that asserted: “A huge role has been
played, and must be played, in inculcating Soviet patriotism by the Soviet historical
novel, novella, dramatic work, [and] film about the past of our country.”23
By the end of the 1930s the stance Lukács and Lifshits had taken as despitists
(voprekisty) was coming under increasing attack. A memorandum dated 10 February
1940, “Ob antipartiinoi gruppirovke v sovetskoi kritike” (On the Anti-Party Fac-
tion in Soviet Criticism), was presented to the secretaries of the Central Committee
by Fadeev and Valerii Kirpotin, accusing Literaturnyi kritik of “working from false
non-Marxist premises” so that “in their characterizations of Balzac, Shakespeare,
Tolstoy, and other writers any element of class characterization is lost.” At the end
of 1940 the journal was closed.24 Lukács was arrested in 1941, though actually he was
held only briefly and for reasons having to do with his role in the Hungarian Com-
munist Party rather than with his role in formulating a Marxist theory of literature.
For the rest of the war years he largely confined himself to producing antifascist
polemics, laying bare the intellectual genealogy of Nazism.
Unbeknownst to Lukács, and far from the limelight of the Soviet cultural in-
stitutions, Mikhail Bakhtin spent the 1930s working on genre theory as a vehicle for
his philosophy of culture. The entire decade was marked by uncertainty for Bakhtin:
for part of it he was a political exile in Kazakhstan, spending the remainder of the
1930s as an unrehabilitated convict who was not allowed to work or reside in either
Moscow or St. Petersburg (but would make several semilegal trips to the capital, try-
ing to pursue his scholarly interests).
Genre in Bakhtin’s Early Career
The corpus of Bakhtin’s texts on the novel from the 1930s and the early 1940s
poses two distinct challenges. The first one is textological. With the exception of
the book on Rabelais, an important source for understanding Bakhtin’s theory of
genre and the novel whose genesis has by now been well explored, all other mate-
rials have a textological history that is more difficult to disentangle.25 At the time
of publication they were carved out from a vast mass of book manuscripts, drafts,
papers, and notes and edited—often with the active involvement of Sergei Bocha-
rov and the late Vadim Kozhinov (Bakhtin’s younger friends and later executors of
his estate)—to form the texts that are currently known as “Discourse in the Novel”
(written largely in 1934–1936); “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”
(written 1937–1938, but with the two concluding passages added only in 1973);
“From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” (1940); “Epic and Novel” (1941); and
the text “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism” (writ-
ten around 1936–1937).26 The second challenge is interpretative: how to make sense
of these texts, taking into account both their immediate context and addressees on
the Soviet scene and their relevance for cultural and literary theory today. One could
endeavor to accomplish this interpretative task by charting Bakhtin’s evolution as a
thinker and the place of genre in his theoretical concerns, which he sought to for-
mulate in dialogue with his contemporaries, notably Lukács. We thus begin by trac-
ing the changing significance of genre in Bakhtin’s writings and by outlining the
dynamic relationship between epic and novel in his texts of the 1930s: from their
juxtaposition in the essays on the novel (we analyze this trend in more detail in the
next section) to their intended synthesis in the book on Rabelais (which we briefly
examine in the current section). We then sketch Bakhtin’s theory of the novel and
the valorization of the novelistic by exploring Bakhtin’s more profound transition
from aesthetics and ethics to philosophy of culture, reflected in his disagreement
with another of his interlocutors, Gustav Shpet, and in the move during the 1930s
from polyphony to heteroglossia. Finally, we attempt a concise characterization of
Bakhtin’s style of theorizing and a brief examination of his legacy in literary and
cultural theory.
During the first decade after his debut article, published in 1919, for Bakhtin
genre was a category lacking in theoretical relevance. Genre was supplanted in his
early writings by a broader notion of form. Bakhtin’s central text on aesthetics, “The
Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art,” introduces a sharp dualism
into his ideas about form, which cannot be found in the more integrated and ethi-
cal approach to form in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.”27 This dualism is
predicated on the differentiation between aesthetic activity as such and the work of
art. Aesthetic activity (and aesthetic contemplation) are always “directed toward a
work” (“Problem of Content, Material, and Form,” 267). The work of art, then, is
only an external materialization of the intentionality of aesthetic activity (and con-
templation). Process and result are thus divorced from one another, and the work
of art is thought implicitly inferior to the activity that generates it. The division is
reinforced by the use of two different terms, architectonics and composition, of which
the first denotes the structure of the content of aesthetic activity per se, whereas the
second serves to address the structure of the work of art as the actualization of that
activity (267). Hence Bakhtin’s discontent with “material aesthetics”: “There is in the
works of material aesthetics an inescapable and constant confusion of architectonic
and compositional forms, so that the former are never clarified in principle or de-
fined with precision, and are undervalued” (268).
The outcome of this division is surprising for those wont to see in Bakhtin the
great theoretician of genre and the novel: genre is reduced to an external composi-
tional form (“Problem of Content, Material, and Form,” 269). Unlike architectonic
forms, which are “forms of the inner and bodily value of aesthetic man,” compo-
sitional forms have an “implemental” character and are “subject to a purely tech-
nical evaluation: to what extent have they adequately fulfilled their architectonic
task” (270). Drama, for example, is a compositional form, while the “architectonic
forms of consummation” are the tragic and the comic (269). The novel does not enjoy
higher position either: “The novel is a purely compositional form of the organization
of verbal masses; through it, the architectonic form of the artistic consummation of
a historical or social event is realized in the aesthetic object. That architectonic form
is a variety of the form of epic consummation” (269; translation modified, italics in the
original).
We can observe in this passage a dramatic devaluation of genre, and, conse-
quently, a refusal to draw a clear line of demarcation between the novel and the epic.
Like Lukács, who in his Theory of the Novel considers the novel a distinct but nonethe-
less weak link in the great chain of the epic tradition, Bakhtin seeks to accommodate
the novelistic within the epic. Following his dismissal of genre as a secondary com-
positional category, he goes even further than Lukács in this direction by demon-
strating a complete lack of interest in the generic specifics of the novel.
A clear consequence of this disinterest in genre is that throughout Bakhtin’s
early intellectual career the epic and the novel, rather than being contrasted, are rec-
onciled as narrative forms of the epic tradition. This subsumption of the novel un-
der the umbrella notion of the epic can be argued to have been the result—at least
in part—of Bakhtin’s serious acquaintance with the work of Friedrich Schlegel.
Although the impact of the German romantics remained strong in Bakhtin’s later
work, not least in the essays on the novel of the 1930s and the early 1940s, the overall
tenor and the substance of the discussion changed, especially as Lukács and Lifshits
gradually emerged as the most significant players on the Moscow scene of literary
theory, and the realization of the key importance of genre in debates on culture and
ideology grew in the mid-1930s.
Even before the 1930s discussion, Lukács had insisted that epic and novel be
viewed in opposition and dialectical sublation. The novel cancels the epic in the age
of capitalism and becomes the representative genre of what Lukács, borrowing from
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, called in his Theory of the Novel the epoch of “absolute sinful-
ness”; with the destruction of the capitalist mode of production and the transition
to communism, however, the epic overthrows the novel and is fully restored in its
rights.
It is against this understanding of the two forms that Bakhtin—who was fol-
lowing Lukács’s articles in Literaturnyi kritik and his paper at the Moscow discus-
sion—sought to emancipate himself as a theorist of the novel in the 1930s.28 While in
his essays Bakhtin succeeded in overturning the balance of epic and novel in favor of
the novel, he nonetheless remained caught in Lukács’s (Hegelian) framework of op-
position between these two genres. Lukács’s envisaged outcome was reconciliation
and an ultimate victory for the epic, into which the modern novel would eventually
flow. Bakhtin’s essays on the novel and the book on Rabelais, both written largely
during the 1930s (with work on the Rabelais book continuing into the mid-1960s),
articulate, however, two recognizably dissimilar positions: the essays insist on the
incompatibility between epic and novel, valorizing the novelistic at the expense of
the epic (as we shall see in the next section), while the book on Rabelais charts a
gradual rapprochement and synthesis of the two. In carnival, the epic reverberates in
humanity’s boundless memory “of cosmic perturbations in the distant past,” while
the novelistic lives in the grotesque fluctuation and removal of distance and in the
irreverent and joyful celebration of resilience through laughter.29 Like the epic, car-
nival is about the maintaining of traditional practices, but in an open and charitably
insecure, “novelistic” way. The book on Rabelais seems to be the point where, on
reconciling and synthesizing culture and life in the acts of the human body, rework-
ing and redrawing the boundaries of cultural taboos, and establishing a symbiosis be-
tween the epic and the novelistic, Bakhtin sponsors a new sense of tradition inscribed
in the irreverent life of folk (community) culture.
This celebration of the people reopens the vexing question about the political
implications of Bakhtin’s pronouncements on the epic and the novelistic, on com-
munitarian and individual culture, and on their desired synthesis. For decades
now, scholars in Russia and the West have been entangled in severe polemics about
Bakhtin’s work in the 1930s—were his texts an inadvertent endorsement of Stalin’s
totalitarian doctrine of culture or, on the contrary, a utopian project that spelled
resistance to the regime?30 There is no simple answer to this question. Bakhtin’s work
was sending in the same breath the ambiguous—and probably precisely because
of that rich and historically viable—message of utopia and nostalgia. Bakhtin em-
braced and wholeheartedly asserted the genre of the novel as a vehicle of modernity
that recognizes no sacrosanct dogma or canon and that reflects upon current Soviet
reality as but a link in a chain of historical developments that cannot be arrested or
exhausted, not even by the revolution. On the other hand, his veneration of carni-
val in the Rabelais book was a manifest acceptance, indeed a nostalgic approval, of
practices characteristic of community life that were now called upon to mitigate the
effects of brutal modernization visible in the 1930s. Bakhtin’s embrace of the power
of the collective was undoubtedly consonant with the official line of the gradual col-
lectivization of all important aspects of life in Soviet Russia. His book appears, then,
to have been very much part and parcel of the emerging official endorsement of the
great “epic novel,” a hybrid genre that Soviet literary theory, as we have seen, sought
to revive and promote into a significant ingredient of its new literary canon in the
1930s. In a sense, Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais has to be read as part of the same pro-
cess that made possible two of the indisputable classics of the Soviet times—Sholok-
hov’s epic novels Tikhii Don (And Quiet Flows the Don, 1928–1940) and Podniataia tselina
(Virgin Soil Upturned, 1932–1960).31
The Valorization of the Novel: From Aesthetics

and Ethics to Philosophy of Culture
The new centrality of genre and the novel in the 1930s was a sign of a more
profound and considerable shift in Bakhtin’s theoretical agenda. The Moscow discus-
sion on the novel was undoubtedly an important catalyst, but the change reflected
Bakhtin’s own evolution as a thinker and his transition from aesthetics and ethics
to philosophy of culture, for which genre theory served as a powerful vehicle. A
comparison with a less prominent interlocutor amongst Bakhtin’s contemporaries—
Gustav Shpet—would allow us insight into the dynamics of this evolution.
Bakhtin and Shpet shared something fundamental: they were both exceptions
on the Russian intellectual scene, in that in their mature writings they were nei-
ther religious nor Marxist thinkers. At the same time, Shpet’s extensive notes on
the novel from 1924 bring into sharp relief the differences between his and Bakhtin’s
approaches. The notes, which remained unpublished until 2007, were perhaps part
of Shpet’s larger (also unpublished) work titled “Literaturovedenie” (Literary Stud-
ies), announced in 1925 as one of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences’ (GAKhN)
ongoing projects.32
Shpet here relies to a great extent on authors, notably Hegel, Erwin Rohde,
and Lukács, who later feature prominently (explicitly or implicitly) in Bakhtin’s own
writings on the novel. Shpet borrows from Hegel and Lukács, as does Bakhtin, the
conceptual framework that juxtaposes epic and novel (Iskusstvo kak vid znaniia, 57–
58). But while in the 1930s Bakhtin overturns Lukács’s scheme and emancipates the
novel, transforming it from an underdog of literary history into a celebrated écriture
and from a purely literary into a wider cultural form, Shpet abides by the old opposi-
tion and validates the role of the novel as a “negative” genre. For Shpet, the novel is
marked by a string of fatal absences. It lacks “composition,” “plan,” and, most im-
portantly, “inner form” (57). In Shpet’s usage “inner form” relates to the potential
of art to produce serious, nonarbitrary versions of reality. The lack of inner form
therefore stands, more broadly, for a lack of necessity and compelling direction in the
work of art. The novel is thus no more than a “degradation” of the epic (63). The epic
offers access to an idea (in Plato’s sense), whereas the novel furnishes only doxa (66).
The novel, with its arbitrary inventions, is the result of the disintegration of myth
(84). It therefore has no plot “in the strict sense” of the word, only a “theme” that
deals not with the “construction of an idea” (what plot should really do), but simply
with the “empiric commonality of the motif” (79).33 Lagging behind not just the epic
but also Greek tragedy, the novel knows no catastrophe, only irresolvable conflict
and antinomy (67). In accord with his condescending evaluation of Russian philoso-
phy, Shpet interprets the whole of Russian literature as a “novel,” for there has been,
for him, no sense of epic reality in it (79); even War and Peace is called not an epic, but
an ironic, and therefore, “romantic” novel, romantic being the damning label attached
to any narrative permeated by arbitrariness. We thus begin to understand why in
the Aesthetic Fragments, as well as in his notes on the novel, Shpet gestures toward the
novel as a mere “rhetorical” form: the epic is about an “organic embodiment of the
idea,” the novel is all about “an analysis of opportunities” (81), about the multitude
of equally valid free wills and the choices the individual faces after leaving the epic
cosmos. The novel is not about incarnatio, it is only about inventio and elocutio (81), the
skills involved in unfolding and charting the ephemeral and accidental private world
of opportunities without conclusion, of journeys without destiny.
It is against this background that Bakhtin’s utter dissatisfaction with Shpet’s
denigration of the novel becomes clear.34 As we have seen, in the first half of the
1920s Bakhtin himself considered the novel solely a “compositional form.” But in
the 1930s he was already prepared to assign the novel greater value and significance.
Not unlike Shpet, Bakhtin begins from the premise of negativity: the novel does not
have a canon of its own; it is possessed of no constant features that are supposed to
generate the stability and cohesion marking most other genres. He reinterprets this
negativity, however, as strength: the novel knows no ossification, its energy of self-
fashioning and reinvention is unlimited, its versatility accommodates and processes
vast masses of previously submerged and neglected discourses. In brief, the novel is
anything but a merely “rhetorical form” in the pejorative sense Shpet gives this term
in the Aesthetic Fragments, in his notes on the novel, and in The Inner Form of the Word;
nor is it a “purely compositional form,” in the equally denigratory sense in which
Bakhtin thought of it in the early 1920s. For Shpet, the novel signals impasse; it holds
no prospect: “When a genuine flourishing of art occurs, the novel has no future”
(Iskusstvo kak vid znaniia, 84).35 The novel, unlike poetry, is a genre for the masses; it
corresponds to their “average moral aspirations” (88). Bakhtin, in contrast, extols in
the 1930s the democratic charge of the novel and dreams of a literature (and indeed
culture) colonized by the novelistic.
Shpet’s work on the novel called for a return to aesthetics as the proper home
of literary studies. Thus Shpet, along with his colleagues and disciples at GAKhN,
appeared to swim against the formalist currents of the 1920s, denying literary the-
ory the right to exist outside the realm of aesthetics and the philosophy of art. This
preference for discussing the verbal work of art, including the novel, in the frame-
work of aesthetics actually parallels, as we have seen, Bakhtin’s early interest in cat-
egories such as form, author, hero, and dialogue (and his early disinterest in genre)
from the point of view of aesthetics rather than from a perspective grounded spe-
cifically in literary theory. But while in the latter half of the 1920s Shpet continues
to discuss literature in a fashion informed by, and committed to, aesthetics and a
neo-Humboldtian philosophy of language, Bakhtin’s theoretical discourse gradually
breaks away from aesthetics and evolves toward philosophy of culture. It is from this
vantage point that Bakhtin begins to address in the 1930s various aspects of genre
theory and historical poetics, two areas that remained alien to Shpet, as his notes on
the novel confirm. Throughout the 1930s, Bakhtin writes as philosopher of culture
rather than as a thinker drawing his agenda from aesthetics. His entire conceptual
apparatus during that time stands under the auspicious sign of grand narratives about
the inner dynamics of cultural evolution, of which the novel proves a confident and
forceful agent (and epitome). If Shpet and Bakhtin do share some common ground it
is in their departure from literary theory as an autonomous and self-sufficient field—
and mode—of enquiry: from that point, Shpet moved backward to aesthetics, while
Bakhtin set out on a journey forward, to the ill-defined but enormously exciting
terrain of cultural history and the philosophy of cultural forms. His preoccupation
with genre came as a result of this profound interest in the philosophy and history
of cultural forms. It was this innovative shift forward to philosophy of culture that
secured the propitious ground on which during the 1930s Bakhtin erected his own
theoretical edifice, synthesizing different intellectual traditions and reworking and
creatively expanding concepts stemming from a range of disciplines.
Let us exemplify this shift from aesthetics (and ethics) to philosophy of cul-
ture—and the corresponding abandonment of interest in the individual writer and
moral evaluation—by briefly tracing Bakhtin’s move from polyphony to heteroglos-
sia as underlying features of the novel. Back in 1929, in the first version of the Dos-
toevsky book, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative
Work), “polyphony” was a term Bakhtin used almost exclusively to address the per-
sonal achievement of a particularly talented author rather than the product of a set of
social and cultural conditions. There is, however, a hint in the book that polyphony
ought to be explained as more than the gift of an extraordinary writer. This line
of reasoning was adopted by Bakhtin from Otto Kaus’s book Dostojewski und sein
Schicksal (Dostoevsky and His Fate, 1923), which attempted an explanation of Dos-
toevsky that drew on the divide between community and society (well established
by then in German sociology) and the transition from the former to the latter. In
Bakhtin’s words, paraphrasing Kaus: “Those worlds, those planes—social, cultural,
and ideological—which collide in Dostoevsky’s work were each self-sufficient, or-
ganically sealed and stable; each made sense internally as an isolated unit. . . . Capital-
ism destroyed the isolation of these worlds, broke down the seclusion and the inner
ideological self-sufficiency of these social spheres.”36
Kaus, and after him Bakhtin, equates crisis and modernity and conceives of
capitalism as a critical state of society marked by the healthy yet unsettling process of
a mutual opening up of various fields of life, which brings along a multitude of pre-
viously concealed horizons and voices. Bakhtin was particularly eager to stress the
propitiousness of the Russian circumstances: “The polyphonic novel could indeed
have been realized only in the capitalist era. The most favorable soil for it was more-
over precisely in Russia, where capitalism set in almost catastrophically, and where
it came upon an untouched multitude of diverse worlds and social groups, whose
individual isolation had not been weakened by the gradual encroachment of capi-
talism in the West. . . . In this way the objective preconditions were created for the
multileveledness and multivoicedness of the polyphonic novel” (Problemy tvorchestva
Dostoevskogo, 27).
Despite these attempts to argue the case sociologically, Bakhtin’s earlier work
still regards polyphony almost exclusively as an artistic phenomenon that fore-
grounds the singular achievement of Dostoevsky as an innovative writer. There is
no necessary connection at this stage between polyphony and the genre of the novel.
The novel as genre is not intrinsically polyphonic; Bakhtin merely asserted that Dos-
toevsky’s novel was compellingly innovative, in the sense of being, like no other
novel before, polyphonic. The unprecedented nature of Dosteovsky’s achievement,
which was placing him above and beyond tradition, was something of a common-
place in European Dostoevsky criticism; suffice it to point to the Dostoevsky inter-
pretations of Moeller van den Bruck or Lukács. For Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, in
particular, Dostoevsky was the last novelist and the first herald of the “new-old” epic
form. As a matter of fact, Bakhtin’s radical praise of the novelty of Dostoevsky was
doing little more than to reaffirm—in positive terms—Leo Tolstoy’s assertion that
the Russians could not write novels in the sense in which this genre was understood
in Europe.
In the 1930s, however, the notion of polyphony is gradually ousted by that of
heteroglossia. Bakhtin understands heteroglossia as a phenomenon independent of
the author’s individual artistic attainment. It is rather a state of affairs in which lan-
guage is no longer used holistically but as a range of partial sociolects. While po-
lyphony encapsulates a mixture of aesthetic but also moral overtones—to listen to
the other, not to place oneself above him or her—heteroglossia disowns this poten-
tial warmth of the moral expectation. Instead, it promotes a more neutral view of
language and the novel, one that makes no moral demands. In promoting the term
heteroglossia and analyzing the wor(l)d of the peasant who speaks different sociolects
in different circumstances, Bakhtin behaves as a sociologist who wishes to offer an
accurate description of the language situation—and not as a humanist determined to
retrieve voices that may otherwise be hushed and lost in the cacophony of modern-
ization. It is only now, in the 1930s, that Bakhtin produces a necessary link between
heteroglossia and the novel: the novel is considered the preeminent, if not the sole,
embodiment of heteroglossia, the artistic form that is best suited to capture and ac-
commodate the often disparate languages and voices available in society.
Bakhtin’s Style of Theorizing and His Legacy

in Literary and Cultural Theory
Preoccupied foremost with philosophy of culture, Bakhtin’s proper realm as

thinker was the in-between territory that is circumscribed by no particular disci-
pline and that he inhabited with such nonnegotiable sovereignty. It is in this space
between the disciplines that he crafted his own metaphors that enabled him to move
freely between different levels of argumentation and address issues located above and
beyond particular fields of knowledge. Often elusive, but always extremely stimu-
lating, Bakhtin lifts the categories he employs above the conceptual constraints of
their home disciplines and instills in them new life by obliterating their previous
conceptual identity. One brief example, the way he formulates the idea of dialogue,
should do. We hear in Bakhtin’s use of dialogue a linguistic substratum, which can
probably be attributed to Lev Iakubinskii and a host of other early Soviet linguists,
and yet Bakhtin’s specific interpretation of this category is so much wider, applicable
to entire narratives and whole domains of culture, that focusing exclusively on its
linguistic origins, even when these are attestable, would not explain the power and
fascination of Bakhtin’s dialogism. By way of illustration we could evoke here Jan
Mukařovský’s important essay “Dialogue and Monologue,” written in 1940.37 Ter-
minologically, Mukařovský’s text is much more disciplined and rigorous, and yet in
scope and inventiveness it lags behind Bakhtin’s version of dialogue. Mukařovský
(who knew and was highly appreciative of some of Voloshinov’s writings) works
within a narrowly linguistic juxtaposition of dialogue and monologue; Bakhtin
transcends this limitation, he refreshes our understanding of dialogue by inviting
us to hear the dialogue within a single uttered word, or the dialogue embodied in
voices that convey conflicting outlooks and perspectives on the world, or indeed dia-
logue as the foundation stone for a wide-ranging typology of cultural forms. This
transformation that subjects the term to inner growth (sometimes at the expense of
exactitude), a transformation whereby the term expands its scope of relevance to the
point of turning into a broader metaphor, is the most important feature informing
Bakhtin’s prose, the hallmark of his writings, especially those of the 1930s. It is this
transformative energy that sets him apart from his likely, or even demonstrable, an-
tecedents hailing from various specializations, be they linguistic, sociological, theo-
logical, or art historical for that matter. It is not difficult, for example, to demonstrate
how several of Bakhtin’s concepts—architectonics, space, gothic realism—were
derived, at least to a significant degree, from the German art-historical tradition.38
This, however, would tell us very little about the significant transformation of these
concepts when thrown into the melting pot of Bakhtin’s argumentation. Bakhtin’s
originality as thinker is actually the originality of the great synthesizer who took at
liberty from various specialized discourses—linguistics, art history, theology—and
then reshaped, extended, and augmented the scope of the respective concepts. The
question invites itself: what was the ground that enabled him to do so, especially in
the 1930s, the time when he produced his landmark essays on the novel? As already
suggested in the section analyzing his theory of the novel, he appears to have done so
by accomplishing a transition, indeed an evolution, from ethics and aesthetics in his
early writings to philosophy of culture in his mature works.
The place of Bakhtin’s writings of the 1930s on the larger scene of literary and
cultural theory becomes particularly visible if one traces the posthumous appropria-
tion of his work. Its early discovery in the West, particularly in the Anglophone
world, was accompanied by the seemingly scandalous labeling of Bakhtin as for-
malist and structuralist. The process lasted for so long (a good twenty-five years39)
and affected so many mainstream intellectual contexts (the American, partly the
German, and also the French, although there the appropriation of Bakhtin in the
context of structuralism flowed imperceptibly into a poststructuralist and psycho-

analytic Bakhtin, mainly in the work of Julia Kristeva40), that it appears to be utterly
improbable for these two designations, formalist and structuralist, to have been just
resilient misnomers. Needless to say, there is a most regrettable degree of simplifica-
tion involved in calling Bakhtin a formalist or a structuralist; it might even appear
to be plain wrong to employ these appellations with reference to him. And yet there
is, after all, a grain of truth in all this. In the history of ideas, there are sometimes
undercurrent affinities at work that do not manifest themselves on the surface. Of
course Bakhtin was not a formalist, nor was he a structuralist, in the sense that he
did not partake of these specific practices of interpreting literature.41 But he partook
of something much more important: the general episteme, the regime of enquiry
that bracketed out the subject and the traditional notion of individual agency. This is
what he had in common with the formalists and the structuralists; he didn’t use their
instruments, their tools of analysis, but he shared some of their basic epistemological
premises, while opposing, admittedly, others. Before we seek to differentiate him
from both formalism and structuralism, precisely on the level of basic epistemologi-
cal premises, let us dwell a little bit longer on the fundamental proximity between
Bakhtin and these two influential streams.
The entire intellectual evolution of Bakhtin can be described as a struggle
against psychologism and an ever more powerful negation of subjectivity (in its clas-
sic identitarian version). He admitted to Vadim Kozhinov that Edmund Husserl and
Max Scheler played a vital role in his reeducation into a thinker who mistrusts psy-
chologism.42 Beginning with a celebration of Dostoevsky as a unique and inimitable
writer of singular achievement, Bakhtin ended up in the 1930s (in his essays on the
novel) and in 1963 (in the reworked version of his Dostoevsky book) focusing on the
impersonal memory of genre, leaving little room for creativity as such and examin-
ing instead the inherent laws of poetics (note the change in the title of the 1963 book,
Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo). Bakhtin’s entire work and intellectual agenda, indeed
the most important questions he sought to answer, are engaged in a battle against
traditionally conceived, stable subjectivity: from the question of the body (that we
gradually cease to possess and be in control of, as the book on Rabelais maintains) to
the question of language (which, as the essays on the novel would have it, reaches us
through established generic patterns and is never quite our own—as it has always al-
ready been in someone else’s mouth). The fortunes of the novel embody this rejection
of classic subjectivity in full measure: the individual writer is virtually irrelevant,
he or she is no more than an instrument through which the genre materializes itself,
no more than a mouthpiece that enunciates the calls of generic memory. Bakhtin,
in other words, despite his apparent attraction to canonical figures such as Goethe,
Dostoevsky, and Rabelais would ideally have liked to be able to write a history of
literature without names. (The formula, “history without names,” was derived from
the work of art historian Heinrich Wölfflin and had drawn approval from the Rus-
sian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum and also from Pavel Medvedev, who, together with
Matvei Kagan, was the most important transmitter of art-historical and art-theoret-
ical knowledge in the Bakhtin Circle.)43
On the other hand, it seems important to recall the features that differentiate
Bakhtin from formalism and structuralism. Bakhtin’s fundamental disagreement
with the former is over the formalists’ lack of interest in meaning. But Bakhtin does
not construe meaning as a stable category that inheres in the text and is then mo-
bilized from time to time to serve an ideological agenda. Nor is he really a thinker
in the hermeneutic tradition, despite all protestations to the contrary and despite
all semblances. Bakhtin is not excited about involving the work of art in a circle
of questions and answers where the parts and the whole participate in a process of
mutual disclosure and do so from a particular historical perspective that eventually
fuses with that of the critic’s interrogating mind. His idea of meaning is inspiringly
monumental: it is cold and distant in its celebration of “great time” as the true home
of meaning; at the same time it is reassuring and inviting, in that it addresses the un-
certainties of that which lies ahead with composure and a triumphant declaration of
openness and acceptance of a “future without me.”44 Regardless of this withdrawal
of the individual, meaning, in a quasi-Nietzschean move, would inevitably experi-
ence the festival of its own “return.”
Unlike structuralism, Bakhtin is interested in the inner dynamics of meaning
revealed in the transitions between different discursive genres and types. The change
is sometimes context dependent; sometimes it is linked to the flow of time and is
measured on the scale of centuries and entire epochs; yet most frequently this inner
dynamics is generated by the alternation of preset discursive possibilities: monologue
and dialogue, grotesque and classic, official and popular—as was also the case with
Bakhtin’s predecessors in the art-historical tradition, Wölfflin, who constructed the
opposition between classic and baroque, or Max Dvořak and Wilhelm Worringer
with their juxtaposition of naturalist and abstract art. Bakhtin’s history of discur-
sive genres in his essays on the novel of the 1930s operates on such a vast scale that
sometimes the historical dimension in it gets entirely dissolved, and what the reader
ends up with is a typology rather than a diachronic account. The conflicts implicit in
these typologies are often of epic proportions; Bakhtin enacts in his works a discur-
sive typomachia (between monologue and dialogue, grotesque and classic, official
and popular, to recall once again the outposts that delineate his discursive universe)
of an intensity and scope rarely seen before him. His narrative is grand not just in
Jean-François Lyotard’s sense, but also in the more immediate sense of breathtaking
solemnity and the wide-open vistas revealed in his texts.
If Bakhtin’s labeling as formalist and structuralist teaches us something about
the ways in which his thought was integrated and his reputation made outside the
Soviet Union during the 1960s and the 1970s, we also need to ask how Bakhtin’s
work was able to negotiate the transition to postmodernism and poststructuralism
that began to be acutely felt already in the 1970s and occupied center stage until about
the close of the twentieth century. For all his virtues, he would not have been able to
stay afloat on the market of ideas if he was perceived solely as a traditional grand nar-
rative type of thinker whose work was shaped and peaked during the 1930s.
Bakhtin’s intellectual brand, that which he did better than most, was the gradual
forging of a theoretical platform informed by what could be called humanism with-
out subjectivity (or at least without subjectivity understood in the classic identitarian
sense). In the mature and late writings we find an odd Bakhtinian humanism, decen-
tered, seeking and celebrating alterity rather than otherness (in Kristeva’s distinc-
tion), and revolving not around the individual but around the generic abilities of the
human species to resist and endure in the face of natural cataclysms and in the face
of ideological monopoly over truth. Bakhtin is probably the single most gifted and
persuasive exponent in the twentieth century of that particular strain of humanism
without belief in the individual human being at its core, a distant cosmic love for
humanity as the great survivor and the producer of abiding and recurring meanings
that celebrate their eventual homecoming in the bosom of great time. In the Rabelais
book, written for the most part in the 1930s, this new decentered humanism takes on
the form of a seemingly more solidified cult of the people, but even there it rests on
an ever changing, protean existence of collectivities that transgresses the boundar-
ies between bodies and between style registers. This new brand of decentered hu-
manism without subjectivity seems to have been Bakhtin’s greatest breakthrough
as thinker during the 1930s and the source of his longevity on the intellectual scene,
where his texts continue to teach proximity without empathy, optimism without
promise or closure.
Some of the features of Bakhtin’s methodology and style of theorizing discussed
here—especially his predilection for a history of literature and culture “without
names,” his preoccupation with genre and generic memory, as well as his reevalu-
ation of the significance of folklore and popular culture—were shared by wider
methodological formations in the 1930s, most notably by the adherents of “semantic
paleontology” (semanticheskaia paleontologiia). Itself a relatively small group of academ-
ics who shared admiration for linguist Nikolai Marr’s “new theory of language” and
for his methodology of cultural analysis, this formation in turn had a considerable
impact on Bakhtin and some of his contemporaries. The presence of semantic pale-
ontology in literary studies and its importance for the methodological debates of the
1930s has never before been examined systematically. We attempt such an examina-
tion in the following sections.
The “New Theory of Language” and

the Manifesto Volume on Tristan and Isolde
The exponents of semantic paleontology came of age as scholars and thinkers in

the course of the 1920s and produced their most significant work in the 1930s; by that
time Marr had reached the apogee of his public influence (in 1930 he was accorded
the honor of addressing the Sixteenth Party Congress and soon afterward joined the
party as its only member among the academicians elected to the Academy of Sci-
ences before 1917).45
Unlike “bourgeois,” purely “formal” linguistics (the vast body of primarily
historical and comparative research that Marr brushed aside as sterile “Indo-Eu-
ropeanistics”), the new theory prioritized the exploration of glottogenesis and the
study of the transformation of core semantic elements at different stages of the so-
cioeconomically conditioned evolution of language. The “new theory” proclaimed

that the study of language should be conducted not “abstractly,” but in close con-
nection with the study of material culture. Archeology and ethnography became
indispensable allies of linguistics, furnishing evidence of the social and economic
functions of language and the changes it underwent as societies moved through suc-
cessive stages based on different modes of production. In the summarizing words of
a contemporary folklorist (and a somewhat skeptical commentator), Marr’s method
was grounded in paleontology; belief in stage-like transformation, or stadialism
(stadial’nost’); and semantics, “stage-like transformation being the principle of his
theory, paleontology—its tool, semantics—its material.”46
“Semantic paleontology” was an expression authorized by Marr himself;
he used it in his 1931 article “K semanticheskoi paleontologii v iazykakh neiafe-
ticheskikh system” (On Semantic Paleontology in the Languages of the Non-Ja-
phetic Systems), a text that reads as a compendium of his views on language.47 In
a nutshell, semantic paleontology was considered a method that enables scholars to
make their way into the depths of glottogenesis; crucial here was the need to study
precisely semantics, and precisely in a paleontological fashion, so that meanings that
had crystallized at earlier stages (“deposits” [otlozheniia], in Marr’s parlance) could
be uncovered: “Semantics has allowed us, step by step, through the paleontology of
speech, to get to the process of organization of the linguistic material, to penetrate
it.”48 Informing this paleontological quest was an assumption of homogeneity. Not
only do languages evolve inexorably from a state of multitude and diversity to one
of unity (eventually flowing into a single world language), but also right from the
start the process of glottogenesis had highlighted underlying typological similarities
between the various languages of communities that were at the same stage of socio-
economic development. Instead of thinking in terms of language families based on
race and ethnicity (in the words of one of Marr’s followers, “from the point of view
of Japhetic theory, ethnos is the outcome rather than the starting point of histori-
cal development” ),49 Marr was abolishing this vital mainstay of “traditional” (Indo-
European) linguistics by denying the existence of a protolanguage. The unity Marr
stipulated sprang not from belonging to a common family of languages (although
initially he had used Japhetic as a designation for one such language group) but from
being located at the same stage of socioeconomic evolution (Japhetic thus gradually
became a label for a particularly important foundation stage that all languages went
through). Since for Marr language and thought were inseparable, the commonality
between languages was in the final analysis based on the commonality of ideas, at-
titudes, and sentiments accessible to humanity, and in need of being articulated, at
various points of its social and economic progression.
Semantic paleontology was furnishing proof of this commonality by identify-
ing the building blocks that supposedly constructed the semantic universe of man-
kind. These building blocks, regardless of the potentially endless transformations
and combinations, presented a finite number according to Marr. Initially he believed
there were twelve such elements, later reducing that number to nine, seven, and end-
ing up with four (the notorious sal, ber, yon, rosh, replaced on occasion—not without
pressure from some of Marr’s skeptical associates—by the more sensible sequence
A, B, C, D).50 Confronted with the question of how exactly he had arrived at this
number, Marr would typically provide metaphysical explanations: the four elements
reflected the four parts or directions of the world: “certain things need no proof;
they can be demonstrated.”51 Nor was Marr any wiser when attempting to explain
why—if language morphology were indeed conditioned by the respective socioeco-
nomic stage and mode of production, with the expectation that all languages used by
communities occupying that particular stage would display the same type of mor-
phology—“the feudal of the West spoke a flective language, while that of the East an
agglutinative one.”52
Marr himself almost never applied his doctrine to the study of modern litera-
ture.53 A rare exception is his speech at the celebration of the fortieth anniversary
of Gorky’s literary career. Along with a number of platitudes, Marr offered here a
stage-like account of the evolution of literary genres, referring to poetry as an earlier
mode of writing and insisting on prose being the product of a later stage, when the
“technique of thinking in images is supplanted, actually improved when it comes
to precision, by the technique of thinking through concepts.”54 Earlier attempts to
advance the new theory in the area of literary studies had been associated above all
with classics and folklore and were initiated in the mid-1920s when Boris Bogaevskii,
a historian of the ancient world, organized a circle in his home with the participation
of several Orientalists and historians, united by the intention to study Homer in the
light of Marr’s Japhetic theory.55 Despite Bogaevskii’s ambition to found a “truly
historical, that is, materialist poetics,” grounded in Japhetidology and applicable to any
work of literature, including Goethe’s Faust, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Puskin’s po-
ems, it was only in 1932 that a collaborative study, edited by Marr and discussing
the multiple transformations of Tristan and Isolde from prehistoric times to feudal-
ism, consolidated the new methodology.56 Significantly, the volume’s title evoked
an earlier article by Marr but deliberately reversed the perspective to emphasize the
paleontological descent: thus Marr’s “Ishtar’: Ot bogini matriarkhal’noi Afrevrazii
do geroini liubvi feodal’noi Evropy” (Ishtar’: From the Goddess of Matriarchal Af-
roeurasia to the Love Heroine of Feudal Europe) became Tristan i Isol’da: Ot geroini
liubvi feodal’noi Evropy do bogini matriarkhal’noi Afrevrazii (Tristan and Isolde: From the
Love Heroine of Feudal Europe to the Goddess of Matriarchal Afroeurasia).57
The volume on Tristan and Isolde effectively played the role of a collective
manifesto for the scholars who were intent on studying literature by employing the
method of semantic paleontology. The book attracted participation from twelve
scholars and incorporated essays researched and written in 1929–1931. It enjoyed a
thorough and benevolent review in the West and even made its way into Stalin’s per-
sonal library.58 Two of these scholars, Olga Freidenberg (1890–1955) and Izrail Frank-
Kamenetskii (1880–1937), embraced semantic paleontology in a way that essayed to
assess its philosophical foundations and to inscribe it in the wider landscape of Soviet
literary and cultural theory.59
Methodological Distinctions: Against Russian

Formalism and Vulgar Sociologism
As a method of literary studies, semantic paleontology saw its principal op-

ponent in Russian formalism. Although at the Leningrad discussion on the formal
method, having seen the sleight of hand applied against the formalists by the chair
of the meeting, Freidenberg publicly voted in their favor, no other school of literary
theory was attacked in her and Frank-Kamenetskii’s writings with such consistency
and intensity.60 This might come as a surprise, given that by the early 1930s Rus-
sian formalism had already been defunct for a couple of years and on the wane for
much longer. Freidenberg criticized the formalists not simply for neglecting content
or for their lack of interest in the ideas literature embodies or promotes. In Poetika
siuzheta i zhanra (Poetics of Plot and Genre), Freidenberg’s only book published in her
lifetime, she launched a covert assault on Viktor Shklovsky for his attempt to de-
vise a “theory of prose” (Freidenberg refers to Shklovsky solely by evoking the title
of his eponymous book, without even putting it in quotation marks) and on Yuri
Tynianov, whose doctrine of “literary evolution” is evoked in Freidenberg’s remark
that the formalists had turned poetics into an application of “Darwin to literature.”61
Elsewhere, Freidenberg polemicizes with Boris Eikhenbaum (without naming him
explicitly), questioning the principles behind his 1924 book on Mikhail Lermontov
(a polemic with the same book, openly naming Eikhenbaum, can also be found in
Frank-Kamenetskii).62 Freidenberg’s chief objection, however, was much more radi-
cal than these instances would suggest: she was deeply unhappy with formalism’s ne-
glect not as much of particular ideas articulated in the work of literature, but rather
with formalism’s disinterest in uncovering the very laws of thinking (myshleniia) that
informed the creativity of humankind since its very first steps. Formalism’s atten-
tion was arrested by form, which made for a static approach to literature. Unlike
the formalists, the paleontologists, Freidenberg insists, conceive of literature not as a
“ready” (gotovogo) and always already given phenomenon, but as the specific product
of a multistage transformation, at the heart of which there lies a change in outlook
conditioned by the economic base.63
Admittedly, both formalism and semantic paleontology agreed on individual
authors and their “inventions” having no significance in the grand scenarios of liter-
ary and cultural evolution. To this extent, semantic paleontology, just as Marxism,
formalism, and psychoanalysis, partook of the larger paradigm of literary history
“without names” (to recall Wölfflin’s art-historical demand) that dominated the So-
viet 1920s and 1930s. Yet Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii were arguably the most
radical exponents of this trend. Not only was literary history to be “without names,”
but it also had to be more than historical, because the historical method itself would
not do in describing the mechanisms of cultural change. Unlike the formalists, who
assumed literariness to be an ever-present feature and thus limited the applicability
of the historical method solely to studying the processes whereby nonliterary mate-
rial enters the established literary system (or, conversely, parts of that system exit it or
settle on its margins), the semantic paleontologists went much farther in insisting that
literariness itself should be subjected to fundamental scrutiny that goes far deeper
than merely tracing its diachronic undulations. In order to signal their radical depar-
ture, the semantic paleontologists proclaimed that the historical approach should be
reserved for phenomena within and of the literary system, whereas literariness—the
fundamental quality that makes literature what it is—should be studied genetically.
In Freidenberg’s words: “To the ready-made, finalized literary phenomenon one had
to react by posing the question of the origins of literature itself.”64 If history was thus
too much for the formalists, it was too little for the semantic paleontologists.
The genetic approach, unlike the historical, questioned the very core of lit-
erature by enquiring into what was there before literature, and how did literature
come to be. The answers of the semantic paleontologists differed in detail but not
in substance. Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii believed that the growth of cul-
ture could be traced with reference to three key stages: myth, folklore, and then lit-
erature, each corresponding to qualitatively different socioeconomic formations and
modes of production. Early on in the protracted prehistory of humanity, in “pre-
class” society (Freidenberg cautiously toes the official line that increasingly insisted
on communism being the pinnacle of history and the only embodiment of “class-
less” society, with the formation preceding slaveholding society being referred to
as “pre-class” rather than “classless”), myth was the only ideological superstructure,
the only available conveyor of a wider world picture.65 Later on, with the transition
to class society, but at a stage that was still marked by a relatively primitive develop-
ment of the forces of production, folklore emerged as a typical by-product of this
transition: it still preserved the cosmological elements of myth but these were now
often transformed into narratives about the (mis)fortune of individuals. Folklore was
thus the ideological superstructure of the stage of transition from pre-class to class
society, while literature was expressly seen as the (relatively late) “product of class
society.”66 In Frank-Kamenetskii’s scheme, this general sequence was preserved but
somewhat qualified by the introduction of matriarchy, patriarchy, and feudalism
as the main stages of superstructural development. On Frank-Kamenetskii’s read-
ing, matriarchy was the age of myth, patriarchy saw the first noticeable rise in so-
cial stratification and, with it, the rise of the mixed form of the epic that combined
the cosmological and the privately human, followed by feudalism, in the course of
which the deities of the previous stages were supplanted by “real personae,” giving
rise to “quasi-everyday” plots (“quasi,” because underneath the surface these plots
often remained bound to myth and its large-scale vision of the natural cycle).67
Two features differentiated this model from the staple and no doubt rather prim-
itive sociological account of the succession of various base-conditioned modes of cre-
ativity. To start with, the model advanced by Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii
allowed for some complexity embedded in continuity: myth did not go away with
the arrival of folklore, nor did folklore disappear with the advent of literature. It is
this coexistence of superstructural layers drawn from different socioeconomic stages
that is emphasized in Freidenberg’s definition of folklore: “I mean by folklore the
pre-class ‘production of ideas,’ [still] functioning in the system of class Weltanschau-
ung.”68 Literature—“before coming into its own” (prezhde, chem stat’ soboi)—had
been evolving in close contact with folklore. All through to the nineteenth century,
when the age of industrial capitalism set in, literature would borrow its plots either
directly from folklore (by processing popular legends, as did Giovanni Boccaccio,
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and Shakespeare)69 or from other literary works; only
following the nineteenth-century revolution in the organization of production and
the corresponding revolution of consciousness did writers break with tradition, be-
ginning to draw their plots from the newspapers, from daily occurrences (bytovomu
proisshestviiu), or from their own power of imagination and invention.70
That Freidenberg should focus on the nineteenth century as “the last frontier
of the ready-made plot and the beginning of the freely invented one” was not en-
tirely surprising.71 Nineteenth-century Western European literature, particularly
the French novel, was accorded paramount attention by Soviet sociological criticism
during the 1930s; Balzac, as we have seen earlier in this chapter, was attracting huge
controversy amid the polemics between voprekisty and blagodaristy; Stendhal and
Zola also loomed large in these debates, from which the Soviet version of “critical
realism” was to crystallize during that decade. Yet Freidenberg employed the nine-
teenth century simply to mark the chronological endpoint of what she thought had
been a considerably longer process. Much more important than the endpoint was the
extensive transformation leading up to it. The semantic paleontologists’ true interest
and curiosity were claimed by the remote realm of prehistory, antiquity, and feudal-
ism, where myth and folklore were the principal discursive formations and where lit-
erature, understood in the modern (prestructuralist) sense of autonomy of the author
and supremacy of the new and original, did not exist.
The second feature that set apart semantic paleontology from vulgar sociolo-
gism—despite the shared belief that literature is a superstructural phenomenon condi-
tioned historically by the base—was Marr’s, Freidenberg’s, and Frank-Kamenetskii’s
insistence that the dependence of literature on the mode of production and the wider
forms of sociality can only be established by tracing the historical transformations
of thinking mirrored in the origins of language and linguistic change. No theory of
cultural evolution was possible without embedding its hypotheses in, and endorsing
them through, the study of glottogenesis and the evolution of language.
To do this, the findings of semantic paleontology had to be supplemented by
what Frank-Kamenetskii called “paleontological ‘morphology’,” that is, the study
of how plot emerged in addition to the formation of primeval semantic “bundles.”
Frank-Kamenetskii, along with Marr, believed that once these bundles, or clusters,
were established (each reflecting a potentially very wide circle of interconnected
meanings, such as “love,” “death,” and “resurrection,” or “sky,” “water,” “light,”
“fire,” “vegetation,” “winter,” and “ice,” to name but a few), plot only began to de-
velop after the verb had severed itself from the noun, assisted by the already formed
pronouns. As man’s active impact on nature grew with the help of new techniques
and tools of labor, gradually the conflict between the “subject and object of action”
came to the fore, which then resulted in a distinction between the passive and ac-
tive voice of the verb. Before this distinction was available, creativity lived on “the
borderline between semantic identity and plot construction,” where the function of
the protagonist was expressed not through action but through his changing condi-
tions (as in the “alternation of life and death in the myth of the dying and rising
god”).72 Finally, while at the very early stages there was most likely no grammatical
differentiation between first, second, and third person—grammatically they were
all expressed through the third person pronoun, believed to have ascended from the
name of the totem (in this grammatical identity Frank-Kamenetskii thought to have
found the “paleontological source” of the Trinitarian nature of God)73—with the
gradual evolvement of grammatical distinction the nucleus of everyday plot began
to emerge. Thus the staple motif of adultery, where three distinct protagonists are
needed to enact the plot scheme, serves Frank-Kamenetskii as narrative evidence of a
more advanced stage of grammatical differentiation within language.
Drawing the Boundaries of Modernity: From

Image-Based to Conceptual Cognition
All of this rested, of course, on an unshaken belief in the evolution of mind from
a primitive, prelogical state to a rational, logical modus operandi. Harking back to
work on myth, language, and the genesis of concepts by Ludwig Noiré and Lucien
Lévy-Bruhl (and by Alexander Potebnya, closer to home), Frank-Kamenetskii, who
had also seriously engaged with the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, asserted the central
role of metaphor as a “cognitive category which foreshadowed the logical concepts
in the thinking based on images,” thus clearing the way to theoretical schemes in-
forming the “scientific cognition” of reality.74 Metaphor was seen to be genetically
linked to mythological images; for Frank-Kamenetskii, both are tools of “knowing
the concrete through the concrete,” in contradistinction to theoretical cognition that
relies on formal-logical abstraction, thus “artificially severing the link between the
general and the singular.”75 Even though myth was considered an earlier stage of
cultural evolution, preceding poetry (“poetry” was often used by the semantic pa-
leontologists as a generic term for “literature”), poetic metaphor developed in close
contact with, and out of, myth. This “genetic link to myth” was, however, not sup-
posed to “discredit poetic metaphor, just as the undeniable connection of astronomy
with astrology or of chemistry with alchemy cannot cast a shadow on these areas of
knowledge.”76 There was no value judgment involved in describing the transition
from one stage of cultural evolution to the next; rather, the mechanism of transi-
tion revealed a recurring regularity whereby what functioned as content at an earlier
stage would become form at the next one. Frank-Kamenetskii repeatedly uses this
formulation with reference to myth and literature.77 A good example of how this
rule is applied in practice is furnished in his long (and at the time of his death unfin-
ished) work “K genezisu legendy o Romeo i Iulii” (On the Genesis of the Legend of
Romeo and Juliet):
In myth, we find an image-borne perception of nature in terms borrowed from
[the realm of] social relations. Poetry, orientated [as it is] toward depicting the
life of society, uses the phenomena of nature for an image-borne representation
of man in [the framework of] human relationships. And if in myth the separation
of the lovers (gods) is a metaphor of winter as nature’s death, whereas marriage
is a metaphor of vegetation and fecundity, [then] in poetry we find the reverse
correlation: here winter serves as a metaphor of separation and death, and
vegetation . . . as an emblem of marriage, love, or woman as the embodiment of
love magic.78
Thus what used to be content at the mythological stage (the cycle of seasons
in nature) becomes form at the stage of literature: nature and the change of seasons
now function as a metaphor of human relations. No doubt under pressure from the
prevalent paradigm of Soviet literary studies in the 1930s, this transition is seen, both
by Frank-Kamenetskii and Freidenberg, as containing the early germs of realism,
testifying to the emerging ability of literature to portray and analyze human rela-
tionships.79 Realism processed the lingering deposits of myth through various acts
of “rationalization” (ratsionalizatsiia), which enhanced the plausibility of the inherited
plots.80 Thus, for example, instead of dying and rising again and again as part of
the mythical cycle, with the transition to realism the protagonists had to limit their
deaths to a single event, saturating the plot with a string of deceptive demises.
Although metaphor was credited by the semantic paleontologists with per-
forming the role of a bridge between image-based and conceptual cognition, thus
holding these two aspects of culture in equilibrium, the stage approach issued in
Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii asserts rationality as an indispensable and non-
negotiable feature of modernity. With the spread of industrial capitalism in the
nineteenth century, Freidenberg averred, plot left behind its period of prehistoric
anonymity. All this points to a contradiction at the heart of semantic paleontology,
never quite resolved, between continuity (for example, the passion for identifying
recurring semantic bundles and motifs) and leap, rupture, and discontinuity (Fre-
idenberg’s thinking of literature as a qualitatively new superstructure that at some
point is bound to sever the umbilical cord that attaches it to folklore). In contraven-
tion to her belief in enduring “semantic deposits,” but in accord with her relentless
stadialism, folklore, despite being praised for its mediating role between myth and
literature, was eventually castigated by Freidenberg as a relic of the past that had
to be eradicated, along with any survivals of religion. In her paper at the discus-
sion on folklore in Leningrad in June 1931, she was at her most militant, demanding
that folklore be actively destroyed—a rather uncomfortable statement, both in tone
and in substance, from an otherwise sophisticated thinker.81 Thus although semantic
paleontology had undertaken a persistent quest into the depths of time, establishing
primordial semantic bundles and tracing their transformations at successive stages of
history, it maintained a less than flexible distinction between modernity and premo-
dernity, the former sustaining and nurturing rationality and conceptual thinking,
the latter—despite its huge power of generating archetypal images and motifs—per-
petuating a mode of thinking grounded in a picture of the world stigmatized as “dif-
fuse,” undifferentiated, and therefore deprived of real social potency. The boundaries
of modernity were thus drawn rather rigidly.
Even some of the Marxist sympathizers of semantic paleontology felt that this
rigid dichotomy should be revised, not necessarily in order to do justice to premod-
ern thinking but to chart the persistence of “irrationalism” throughout human his-
tory. Ieremeia Ioffe, the principal exponent of a new, more radical—in some aspects
cruder, in others perhaps more imaginative—sociological aesthetics in the 1930s (like
the semantic paleontologists, Ioffe lived and worked in Leningrad), endeavored to re-
visit Marr’s stadialism in light of what he judged to be a much more fundamental (and
thus conceptually more effective) divide: that between socioeconomic formations
based on exploitation and those that precluded it. Here the nineteenth century ceased
to be the crucial demarcation line that separated industrial capitalism (Freidenberg’s
synonym for modernity) from an allegedly amorphous, primitive, and prelogical
culture. In his 1937 book Sinteticheskoe izuchenie iskusstva i zvukovoe kino (The Synthetic
Study of Art and Sound Cinema), Ioffe argued that the bourgeoisie, hard as it tried
and despite its bold revolutionary acts, was never able to cut off its links to feudalism,
for the bourgeoisie remained after all a class committed to exploitation. This funda-
mental affinity with feudalism was reawakened once capitalism moved away from
its early, revolutionary period and entered the crisis-ridden imperialist stage: “The
curve of capitalist thinking goes back to its origins.”82 In other words, the humanist
thought of early capitalism that had liberated man from the “irrational fetters of cos-
mogony, from kin and guild constraints” (Sinteticheskoe izuchenie iskusstva i zvukovoe
kino, 18) was later supplanted by a positivist (in essence, secondarily cosmological)
picture of the world, in which man was once again denigrated to a cog in the larger
wheel of the universe (and the markets).83 While praising Marr and his associates
for detecting a repertoire of recurring “semantic bundles” (using the same term—
puchok—that is also employed by the semantic paleontologists), Ioffe accounts for
this recurrence differently. The reason for it he locates in the “immobile forms” of
bourgeois thought—forms that go back to feudalism, then disappear in the “cultural
underground” during the “progressive” phase of capitalism, only to resurface in the
age of its “dissolution” (20).84 These “immobile forms” are ultimately conditioned
by the fact that feudalism and capitalism present a continuum, sharing as they do the
nature of formations based on exploitation. Ioffe further charges the semantic pale-
ontologists with failing to recognize that the recurrence of these semantic bundles is
not a matter of plain variation: rather, at each stage of development we have to deal
with complex transformations, “a split and fight of the elements of one and the same
semantic bundle, their distribution onto incommensurable series” (46).85 This incom-
mensurability reflects the contradictory nature of class-based thinking. Contrary
to Freidenberg, Ioffe believes that irrationality and prelogical thinking do not go
away with the arrival of advanced capitalism; they survive the industrial revolution,
because irrationality is the very nature of any thinking grounded in exploitation.
(Ioffe’s critique of irrationality that extends to encompass the “fascist worldview”
[408] is no doubt part and parcel of the larger leftist trend of the later 1930s seeking
to uncover the intellectual genealogy of Nazism in what Lukács termed the process
of “destruction of reason.”) Ioffe thus concludes that “the resilience of the semantic
series, the resilience of irrational semantic bundles, the[ir] stability flows from the
conservative nature of the forms of consciousness of class society” (46), which do not
easily alter their substantially contradictory character, even in periods marked by
seemingly radical technological progress.86
The Impact of Semantic Paleontology on

Literary Studies in the 1930s and Beyond
Ioffe’s serious—critical but not unsympathetic—engagement with semantic

paleontology remained, on the whole, an isolated occurrence. This was indicative
of the new method failing to gain official approval as a leading paradigm of literary
studies in the 1930s. At least on the surface, it didn’t seem to attract sufficient atten-
tion and to make the public impact its founders would have hoped for. In one of sev-
eral books to appear in the 1930s, solidifying the Marr cult and canonizing his “new
theory of language,” Sergei Bykovskii devoted an entire chapter to exploring “the
significance of Marr’s scientific theory for the fields of science immediately related
to linguistics,” and while focusing on archaeology, ethnography, and anthropology,
he remained completely silent on issues of literary history and theory.87 Not even in
folkloristics did semantic paleontology enjoy overwhelming success. Freidenberg’s
hostility toward folklore as a relic of the past—a logical conclusion of the theory of
stadialism—flew in the face of ever more prominent (and tactically much smarter
than her forthrightness) efforts to revive and manipulate folklore for political pur-
poses during the 1930s.88 If anything, semantic paleontology inhibited this process,
and this is why even in the study of folklore the method failed to gain the wide cur-
rency one might have been led to expect at the time.89
Freidenberg herself had doubts about the immediate relevance of semantic pale-
ontology for literary studies, even as she praised its sweeping methodological ambi-
tion: “Marr’s paleontological analysis has emerged as truly revolutionary; [it is] the
most characteristic aspect of the entire new teaching on language, with the small-
est number of genuine followers and the largest number of opponents.”90 Her own
books did not generate much public attention; Poetika siuzheta i zhanra received one
negative review (resembling a lampoon more than a scholarly evaluation) and a one-
page dismissive and ironic note by a reviewer who had already dedicated a flippant
page to her edited volume Antichnye teorii iazyka i stilia (Ancient Theories of Language
and Style).91
Only the volume on Tristan and Isolde sparked a brief but significant newspa-
per polemic. In Leningrad, Anna Beskina and Lev Tsyrlin, both at the time PhD
students at the Institute for the Comparative Study of the Literatures and Languages
of the West and East (ILIAZV) (and both strongly impressed by a paper Freidenberg
had delivered there in 193192), appealed to their more senior colleagues, insisting that
“literary studies must finally take notice of the existence of Japhetidology; it’s better
to do that later than never.”93 Beskina and Tsyrlin identified two important contri-
butions of semantic paleontology to Soviet literary theory and scholarship. To start
with, it significantly broadened the horizons of Soviet literary studies by extending
the legitimate domain of literary history beyond the “narrow platform of European
nineteenth-century literature,” vital though discussions of the nineteenth century
may have been in establishing the concept of “critical realism.”94 Second, unlike tra-
ditional historical poetics, semantic paleontology understood images to be predomi-
nantly a cognitive category; as such, they were a specific, historically conditioned
“form of expression of conceptual thinking.”95 To these contributions articulated by
Beskina and Tsyrlin, we have to add a third one. Perhaps most importantly, semantic
paleontology annulled the divorce between literary studies and linguistics that was
so characteristic for the earlier stages of Marxist literary theory. Indeed, one could
perceive in the work of Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii an—at the time ur-
gent—appeal to put language back on the agenda of Left literary studies. In a sense,
their work was a mirror image of what formalism had done: asserting the centrality
of language, yet not as the carrier of immutable “literariness” but rather as the em-
bodiment of socioeconomic change that in turn brings along changes in worldview
that are to be examined by looking carefully at the multitude of semantic deposits
over the longue durée of prehistory and history proper.
It was precisely this radical remarriage of linguistics and literature and the pri-
ority accorded to semantics that proved highly suspect in the eyes of those defending
a more orthodox literary sociology. David Tamarchenko, another contributor to the
Leningrad exchanges around the collective volume on Tristan and Isolde, charged
the doctrine of stadialism with inattention to the Leninist theory of reflection. By
this he meant that semantic paleontology tended to deduce the stadial nature and so-
cioeconomic aspects of plot from the data of semantics, obtained through linguistic
analysis. If for the stages of prehistory this seemed a permissible operation, it fell short
of methodological rigor when it came to understanding the more recent stages of
development. Marx, Tamarchenko reminded Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii,
had called for the forms of ideological life to be derived from the socioeconomic rela-
tions that governed reality; instead, the semantic paleontologists appeared to distill
the essence of socioeconomic reality from the semantic material of myth, folklore,
and literature. The centrality of semantics was thus turning the principle of reflec-
tion on its head; Marr’s followers strove to comprehend socioeconomic reality from
the superstructural forms it was supposed to have conditioned in the first place.96
Freidenberg was aware of this potential rift with Marxism. In an unpublished
(and, judging by the full text, apparently unfinished) paper drafted in 1931, titled
“Nuzhna li iafetidologiia literaturovedeniiu?” (Do Literary Studies Need Japheti-
dology?), and thus displaying the synonymic and frequently interchangeable use of
“Japhetidology” (derived from Marr’s linguistic doctrine), “semantic paleontology,”
and “genetic method,” she questioned the tactical suitability of the term: “it seems a
claim to methodological independence is concealed in it . . . this devastating termi-
nology seems to exist only to enrage the Marxists and to beat the Japhetidologists.”97
While negotiating the boundaries between her own para-Marxist cultural the-
ory and orthodox sociologism, Freidenberg was to face criticism from some of her
pupils for methodological rather than ideological reasons. In an article surveying the
history of the “genetic method,” written decades after semantic paleontology had
left the stage of Soviet literary theory, Sofia Poliakova charged Marr’s followers with
reducing cultural history to a “gigantic tautology” (gigantskuiu tavtologiiu). While in
hot pursuit of primeval clusters of meaning, Poliakova maintained, Freidenberg pro-
duced a semantic universe in which everything resembled and echoed everything
else: “We are thus in the kingdom of sameness clad in difference.”98 In 1979–1980,
Freidenberg became once again the target of criticism, this time by a group of young
classicists at Leningrad University who believed her work to be lacking in method-
ological rigor and philological exactitude. Freidenberg was aligned with Iurii Lot-
man, Vladimir Toporov, Sergei Averintsev, and Aleksei Losev, who were all thought
by these budding scholars to be representatives of a new—structuralist—orthodoxy
in philology, which, because it was perceived by many as a form of opposition to
the regime, was felt to be beyond criticism. Seeking to rectify this undemocratic
situation, the students organized small workshops in which they questioned the
methodological untouchability of structuralism and semiotics (of which Freiden-
berg was considered a predecessor sui generis, by Toporov and to some extent by Lot-
man, whose notion of “explosion” (vzryv) as a mechanism of cultural and historical
change undoubtedly drew on her idea of the fitful birth of qualitatively new cultural
forms).99 The discussions (except for the one on Averintsev, which was not recorded)
were later published in the samizdat journal Metrodor.100
However contested and feeble in its public impact on the methodology of liter-
ary studies, semantic paleontology exercised considerable subterraneous influence.
Viktor Zhirmunsky’s work in the 1930s (and for years to come) rested on the prem-
ises of Marr’s comparative stadialism, where, in Zhirmunsky’s words, “we can and
must compare analogous literary phenomena that emerge at the same stages of the
social-historical process, regardless of any immediate influence amongst them.”101
Similarly, Zhirmunsky lent his unequivocal approval to “paleontological analysis” as
an instrument for charting the transformations of community culture.102 At roughly
the same time, traces of comparative stadialism can also be found in Zhiurmunsky’s
Herder monograph, written in the 1930s but first published only in 1959: “Thus
behind the national specificity of folk poetry, its universal features are revealed to
Herder as a particular stage in the development of poetic thought, equally manda-
tory, from a historical point of view, for the ‘classic’ and the modern European peo-
ples, as well as for the primitive ones that have not been touched by the influence of
European civilization.”103 Mikhail Bakhtin’s rediscovery of Rabelais, folklore, and
popular culture was no doubt stimulated by Freidenberg’s own work.104 Her under-
standing of parody as a converted form of deification and veneration, her sensitivity
for the coexistence of the serious and the comic, and her belief that the Greek novel
was itself a variant of the epic were shared by Bakhtin in his insistence that the pre-
history of the novel as genre be examined anew. It is this attention to antiquity and
the premodern discursive forms of the novelistic that set Bakhtin apart from Lukács,
the other major theorist of the novel in the 1930s, who elected to focus solely on its
history since the eighteenth century. Moreover, Bakhtin’s entire Rabelais project,
as well as his writings on the theory of the novel, were shot through with the same
mistrust of ready, fixed, and petrified cultural forms that we have located in Freiden
berg’s statement: “To the ready-made, finalized literary phenomenon one had to re-
act by posing the question of the origins of literature itself.” Despite his attention to
great canonical writers (Dostoevsky, Goethe, Rabelais), Bakhtin, as we have seen,
remained—not only in the 1930s but into the 1960s, when his Rabelais book and the
revised Dostoevsky monograph were published—an ardent believer in a history of
literature without names, in which (just as in Freidenberg’s and Frank-Kamenetskii’s
work) genre and its memory, deposited in anonymous plots and ambivalent semantic
clusters, played a much more significant role than any one individual writer. Bakhtin
referred approvingly to Marr and Ivan Meshchaninov in his writings on the prehis-
tory of the novelistic genre; he preserved his respectful attitude to Marr’s work into
the 1950s (as a lecture he gave in 1958 at Saransk demonstrates), long after Marr’s de-
thronement by Stalin in 1950.105 Thus, one may conclude, the true impact of semantic
paleontology on literary studies during the 1930s (and beyond) was much more sub-
stantial than the lack of formal public backing and recognition would suggest.

The rich and divergent debates of the Soviet 1930s afford insight into the un-
derlying importance of genre and genre memory—in their complex relationship to
method and ideology—for a literary theory that now wanted to claim the wider
significance of a theory of culture. Theorizing genre amounted to tentatively draw-
ing and redrawing the boundaries of modernity, thus also reflecting upon the im-
portance of continuity and rupture and the incorporation or rejection of premodern
cultural forms in the face of the new agenda of socialism in one country. The dis-
cussions on the viability of the epic in the new Soviet conditions; on the seemingly
inexhaustible and continuous life of the novelistic; on whether the novel should be
considered an artistic form of modernity par excellence or a vehicle that transmits
premodern cultural energies and transports them right into the heart of the new so-
cial and political project; on how cultural forms evolve and what are the mechanisms
of the transformations they undergo; on the status and relevance of semantic clusters
that had been surviving multiple transitions from myth to folklore to literature; on
the radical historicity of literariness and the need to consider it from a genetic per-
spective—all these disputes, shaped by Marxist (Lukács, Lifshits, and their associates
around Literaturnyi kritik), para-Marxist (Olga Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii),
and non-Marxist (Mikhail Bakhtin) trends alike, were formulating and deliberating
one substantive issue: how should culture, and literature as part of it, relate to the
challenges flowing from the accelerated accession to modernity during the Soviet
1930s? The political and intellectual stakes of articulating answers to this question
were high, and so was the degree of sophistication among the best participants in
these discussions, who—perhaps surprisingly for a regime we are wont to think of as
ideologically monolithic—were turning their backs on vulgar sociologism and were
exploring a range of theoretical alternatives within and beyond Marxism.
 RUSSIAN ÉMIGRÉ LITERARY
7
CRITICISM AND THEORY BETWEEN
THE WORLD WARS
GALIN TIHANOV
Setting the Agenda
Writing the history of Russian émigré literary criticism and theory between the
First and Second World Wars confronts us with a set of challenges. To begin with,
we still know relatively little about the ways in which émigré writing began, over
time, to interact with the various host cultures and what implications this interaction
had for how émigré literature and criticism related to cultural and political processes
in Soviet Russia. Earlier historians of Russian émigré culture, notably Mark Raeff,
believed that “Russian literature in emigration remained as isolated from Western
literatures as it had been in prerevolutionary Russia, perhaps even more so.”1 More
recent research, foremost by Leonid Livak, has persuasively demonstrated the inten-
sive appropriation of French culture and, more widely, the European modernist novel
by the Paris émigrés, as well as their participation in French cultural life, not least as
regular reviewers and critics writing for French periodicals (Yuliya Sazonova, Gleb
Struve, Vladimir Veidle).2 To give a sense of this integrationist drive, one could turn
to evidence from the rich stock of émigré memoirs. In his recollections of a some-
what scandalous flavor, Polia Eliseiskie (Elysian Fields, 1983), Vasily Yanovsky relates
an episode at a Paris publishing house where he and his fellow-émigré writer Iurii
Fel’zen were paying a visit in order to enquire with Gabriel Marcel about the fate
144
RUSSIAN ÉMIGRÉ LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY BET WEEN THE WORLD WARS  145
of their manuscripts. In Marcel’s office, they stumbled upon Sirin (Vladimir Nabo-
kov) who was already leaving, having tried to draw Marcel’s attention to his novel
Otchaianie (Despair), in the hope that it might be published in French.3 Generational
change was an important factor in this reorientation of the creative energy of émigré
literature; even more significant, however, appears to have been the multicultural
dynamism of European metropolitan cities, such as Berlin (which had hosted the first
outburst of émigré creativity in the late 1910s and the early 1920s when Russian writ-
ers and artists became an integral part of the European avant-garde) and Paris (where
Russian writers of both the younger and the older generation became involved in a
Franco-Russian literary dialogue, particularly from the mid-1920s onward).4 With
this new approach to émigré writing in mind, I focus in this chapter—among other
key issues—on how a freshly formed European modernist canon (above all Proust’s
writing) was contributing to attempts by a younger generation of émigré writers
and critics in Paris to rearrange the Russian literary canon of the nineteenth century.
The second difficulty stems from the fact that we still know very little about
what specific impact émigré literature and criticism actually had in Soviet Russia
and the Soviet Union. This is a vastly under-researched area, and here we can only
begin to state, with some urgency, the need to explore it. The dynamics of this im-
pact differed. It was stronger in the early 1920s while the regime of travel—and that
of loyalty—was still more relaxed, and the differentiation between living abroad and
being an émigré was still not set in stone.5 As early as April 1921, the All-Russian
Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) decreed that 20 copies of all leading émigré
newspapers should be subscribed, so as to be available to party policy makers and
highly positioned administrators in Soviet Russia; an estimated 160 to 200 copies of
the journal Volia Rossii (not unsympathetic toward developments in Soviet Russia)
were bought by the Soviet authorities.6 Control over the import of émigré literature
did not commence until 1923.7 In this period, the competition with the émigré liter-
ary press was taken very seriously, as the case of establishing Krasnaia nov’ in 1921 as
the first Soviet “thick” literary journal—a tacit response to the foundation of Sovre-
mennye zapiski in Paris in 1920—demonstrates.8 The impact of émigré culture was
still perceptible in the mid- to late 1920s, when surveys of Russian émigré literature
kept appearing in some of the major periodicals, even though reviews of individual
works of émigré literature and criticism were less common.9 Through the prism of
Soviet literary criticism of the 1920s, émigré writing was increasingly interpreted as
flight from symbolism, toward realism. The “high standard” of this resilient émigré
realism was set by Ivan Bunin, who in the eyes of his Soviet critics (above all the
prominent Pereval critic Dmitrii Gorbov) was both an example of commitment to
realism and proof of the terminal decline of bourgeois writing. Measured by Bunin’s
standard, the younger generation of émigré writers was often accused of succumb-
ing to less desirable versions of realism—excessive attention to the everyday aspects
of life (bytovizm)—or to old-style “symbolist abstraction.”10 This attention to émigré
writing and the polemics of émigré criticism faded away after the 1920s (although
major émigré newspapers, such as Pavel Milyukov’s Poslednye novosti, continued to
claim the attention of the Soviet political elite11), not to reappear again in full measure
146  GALIN TIHANOV
until the late 1960s. Significantly, by 1930 references to émigré criticism had begun
to function as little more than a weapon in settling domestic scores; Demyan Bednyi,
for example, was harnessing in Na literaturnom postu distorted arguments drawn from
émigré literary criticism to denounce the prose writers close to Pereval.12
The third difficulty flows from another knowledge deficit: we are yet to gain a
more accurate picture of how literary criticism worked in the émigré environment:
who wrote literary criticism, what were its institutions, mechanisms, and status? An
insight—perhaps somewhat biased but nevertheless welcome—into this multitude
of questions is afforded in a series of articles, “O kritike i kritikakh” (On Criticism
and the Critics), published in April–May 1931 in the Berlin newspaper Rul’ by the
prominent Prague-based émigré Alfred Bem. Bem draws attention to the following
features of émigré criticism:
– It was concentrated in the newspapers rather than the journals; the book review
acquired “permanent residence” in the newspaper, as did the literary feuilleton
(no doubt a somewhat partisan diagnosis by Bem, himself a prominent news-
paper critic; as we will see, journals played an indispensable role in the major
debates of émigré criticism).
– Literary criticism in emigration was no longer in the hands of professional
critics: except for Iulii Aikhenval’d (Berlin; Aikhenval’d had passed away in
1928), Pyotr Pil’skii (Riga), and Marc Slonim and Bem himself (both at Prague),
most of the prominent literary critics were actually writers, predominantly po-
ets (such as the two antagonists and most significant critics on the Paris scene,
Vladislav Khodasevich and Georgii Adamovich, along with many others).
– Émigré literary journals relied on a thin editorial core sharing the same political
views, while the writers and critics were appended to it as a periphery, without
an expectation of loyalty to the journal’s political agenda (we will see later that
Mikhail Osorgin contradicted Bem’s judgement on this point). This meant that
the literary sections of the journals lacked “proper guidance” (nadlezhashchego
rukovodstva); literary critics were left to their own devices, feeling free to express
their own taste and views but deprived of the homogeneity that would guaran-
tee the assertion of a “literary trend” (literaturnom napravlenii).13
Bem’s diagnosis of the adverse conditions in which émigré literary criticism
operated emphasized the often ephemeral status of publications in the periodicals.
As a matter of fact, only three interwar émigrés managed to publish books of criti-
cal essays and reviews written in emigration (not counting the genre of the criti-
cal monograph: for example, Vladimir Veidle’s short book on Khodasevich [Paris,
1928], Konstantin Mochul’skii’s book on Gogol [Paris, 1934], or Kirill Zaitsev’s
monograph on Bunin [Berlin, 1934]).14 Bem himself was hoping to collect his “Let-
ters on Literature” in a book but inclement economic conditions stood in the way.
This could serve as an explanation, at least in part, of the desire of émigré critics
to anchor their own efforts in the work of their predecessors, spinning out a lon-
ger tradition and constructing a superior canon of Russian literary criticism. In a
unique collection published in Shanghai in 1941, suitably titled Shedevry russkoi lite
raturnoi kritiki (Masterpieces of Russian Literary Criticism), the editor Kirill Zaitsev
justified his decision to include solely essays written in the nineteenth century by the
need to foreground that which had stood the test of time and steer clear of partisan,
and thus also short-lived, criticism. To enhance the promise of longevity, Zaitsev
selected pieces written not by “professional critics”—whose bias and subjectivity
were as a rule too strong to sponsor a judgment of lasting value—but by intellectuals
who combined the work of critics with that of writers, philosophers, and histori-
ans; the anthology thus republished essays by Pushkin, Belinsky, Gogol, Zhukovsky,
Turgenev, Grigor’ev, Khomyakov, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Leont’ev, Klyuchevsky,
Rozanov, and Vladimir Solovyov.15
The fourth difficulty has to do with the fact that émigré literary criticism and
literary theory, while linked of necessity, did not display the same dynamics and
followed dissimilar trajectories. While literary criticism felt increasingly commit-
ted to, but also constrained by, the need to engage with events in the Soviet Union
and take a clear stance, theory was more free from this expectation and thus also in
possession of a larger space and more flexibility to articulate its own agenda. Exile,
rather than acting as an impeding factor, was right at the heart of developments in
literary theory in the interwar period; it was part and parcel of a renewed cultural
cosmopolitanism that transcended local encapsulation and monoglossia.16 For a num-
ber of years the activities of the Russian formalists were taking place in a climate
of enhanced mobility and exchange of ideas between the metropolitan and émigré
streams of Russian culture. The most gifted ambassadors of the formalists abroad
were Viktor Shklovsky, during the time he spent as an émigré in Berlin, and Roman
Jakobson, while in Czechoslovakia (where he arrived as a Soviet citizen, deciding
eventually not to return to Moscow).17 Jakobson is a particularly important example,
as his subsequent cooperation with Pyotr Bogatyrev (another Soviet scholar who re-
sided in Prague for nearly two decades—and for about two years also in Münster—
but remained a Soviet citizen, maintaining close cooperation with his colleagues in
the Soviet Union and returning in the end to Moscow in December 193818) and with
the Vienna-based émigré scholar Nikolai Trubetzkoy, as well as his connections with
Yuri Tynianov (who stayed in Russia but was involved in the work of his Prague
colleagues19), were all crucial in attempts to revive the Society for the Study of Po-
etic Language (Opoyaz) in the Soviet Union. These attempts, while unsuccessful,
yielded an important document in the history of literary theory, a brief set of theses
titled “Problemy izucheniia literatury i iazyka” (Problems in the Study of Literature
and Language), written in Prague jointly by Jakobson and Tynianov and signaling
the urgent need to revise the supremacy of “pure synchronism” and to promote an
analysis of the “correlation between the literary series and other historical series.”20
Thus the work of Russian formalism in its concluding stages and later the formation
and flourishing of the Prague Linguistic Circle became possible through intellectual
exchanges that benefited from the crossing of national boundaries, often under the
duress of exile. The work of the Prague Linguistic Circle, in particular, proceeded
in the situation of a veritable polyglossia, which rendered narrow nationalistic con-
cerns anachronistic; Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, and Bogatyrev were each writing in at
least two or three languages at the time (Russian, German, Czech). Their careers
invite us to consider the enormous importance of exile and emigration for the birth
of modern literary theory in Eastern and Central Europe. Exile and emigration were
the extreme embodiment of heterotopia triggered by drastic historical changes that
brought about the traumas of dislocation but also, as part of this, the productive in-
security of having to face and make use of more than one language and culture.21
The work of Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, and Bogatyrev came to embody the potential
of what Edward Said was to term later “travelling theory”: “The point of theory
is . . . to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in
a sense in exile.”22 The possibility to “estrange” (to borrow Shklovsky’s term) the
sanctified naturalness of one’s own literature by analyzing it in another language or
by refracting it through the prism of another culture seems to have been a factor of
paramount significance not just in the evolution of Russian formalism and its con-
tinuation and modification in the structuralist functionalism of the Prague Linguis-
tic Circle, but—more importantly—for the emergence of modern literary theory
in the interwar period as a whole. Appropriating literature theoretically meant after
all being able to transcend its (and one’s own) national embeddedness by electing to
position oneself as an outsider contemplating the validity of it laws beyond a merely
national framework. In Prague, in particular, one could observe in a nutshell the
stupendous diversity of approaches marking émigré literary scholarship between the
world wars. Along with Jakobson’s postformalism and Bogatyrev’s early function-
alist structuralism (developed, recent Russian research would claim, independently
of Malinovsky’s23), we can also see the unfolding of fruitful historico-philological
research (centered around the Dostoevsky Seminar, 1925–1933, founded by Alfred
Bem24) and psychoanalytic literary scholarship, the main exponent of which was
Nikolai Osipov (1877–1934) who had made Freud’s acquaintance in Vienna in 1910
and had propagated his ideas in Russia, before emigrating in 1919 and arriving in
Czechoslovakia in 1921.25 To this one should add the Prague wing of Eurasianism
led by Pyotr Savitsky who had set himself the task of establishing “Eurasian literary
studies” (evraziiskoe literaturovedenie), in which Russian literary history, both before
and after 1917, was to be reexamined from the point of view of its potential to assert
Russia’s special geopolitical and cultural status. Savitsky acknowledged his failure
in this task, but he did succeed in persuading a number of followers in Prague (Kon-
stantin Chkheidze, Leontii Kopetskii, G. I. Rubanov) to embrace Eurasianism as an
interpretative prism through which to follow the Soviet literary scene of the 1920s–
1930s.26 Importantly, Prague was a place where some of these currents intersected,
most noticeably in Jakobson’s attempt to lend legitimacy to Eurasian linguistics (en-
couraged in part by Savitsky), in Savitsky’s efforts to found a linguistic geography
with structuralist ambitions, and in Bogatyrev’s (later abandoned) idea of a specifi-
cally Eurasian Russian folkloristics.27
The peaceful coexistence of approaches practiced in Prague should not, how-
ever, obscure the larger dissimilarities in the inner dynamics of émigré theory and
criticism. Jakobson, who participated in both discourses, was rather exceptional in
a landscape where these two discursive formations remained estranged in their co-
habitation. To illustrate this point, let me deal briefly with the divergent positions of
Jakobson and Vladislav Khodasevich, undoubtedly two of the most distinguished
émigré commentators on literature, and draw attention to the prevalent hostility to-
ward Russian formalism among émigré literary critics.
Jakobson’s large-scale project of literary theory, in which notions such as the
differentiation and competition between literature and the series of everyday life
(byt), the fundamental distinction between metaphor and metonymy, and the sys-
temic nature of the evolution of literature and its generic repertoire played a central
role, can be seen at work in his émigré texts that merge literary criticism and theory,
notably in his “O pokolenii, rastrativshem svoikh poetov” (On a Generation That
Squandered Its Poets), written in May–June 1930 and published in 1931, and in an ar-
ticle on Pasternak, written in a Bulgarian Black Sea resort in 1935 and published the
same year in Slavische Rundschau (“Randbemerkungen zur Prosa des Dichters Pas-
ternak”).28 While elaborating on his theoretical principles embraced and developed
in the late 1910s and during the 1920s, these texts are also a remarkable testimony to
Jakobson’s prowess as a literary critic. They are marked by sustained loyalty to futur-
ism and especially to Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky; the poetry of
the latter, in particular, functions as an implicit model to which Jakobson remains
beholden in these and several other articles of the 1920s and 1930s. By contrast, Kho-
dasevich who (unlike Jakobson) had not directly participated in the debates on the-
ory immediately before and after 1917 and had been writing exclusively within the
discursive space of literary criticism, failed to recognize Mayakovsky’s gift and stat-
ure. Characteristically, he also sought to reject the innovative theoretical charge of
Russian formalism (and was equally dismissive of psychoanalytic literary studies).29
There is, of course, more to all this than Khodasevich’s personal refusal of
Mayakovsky’s poetry or his disagreement with formalism. Not only Khodasev-
ich but almost the whole of émigré literary criticism remained remarkably con-
servative in its reaction to formalism, Georgii Adamovich being another strong
exponent of the ironic attitude to formalism. Adamovich shared this stance with
Nabokov, even though he failed to appreciate the latter’s prose. Personal tastes thus
proved immaterial, as did the critic’s ability or inability to spot individual talent.30
Among the émigré critics, the activist symbiosis between formalism and the Left
Front of the Arts (LEF) seems to have been appreciated solely by the left-wing of the
Eurasians, whose political orientation facilitated a more sympathetic treatment of
formalism. On Mayakovsky’s death in 1930 Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky, probably
the most intelligent of the left-leaning émigré critics, wrote an important article,
“Two Deaths, 1837–1930,” which appeared in a volume copublished with Jakob-
son.31 Mirsky borrowed here several elements from Shklovsky’s theoretical appa-
ratus (the concepts of “canonization” and “device”) to drive home the message of
Mayakovsky’s significance as a poet. Similarly, Mirsky published in the newspa-
per Evraziia a review of the first volume of Khlebnikov’s Collected Works, where he
praised Tynianov’s introduction to the volume.32 Another left Eurasian to welcome
formalism, somewhat more lukewarmly, was Emiliia Litauer, herself a former stu-
dent of Shklovsky’s.33
The trajectories of émigré literary theory and criticism were thus undoubtedly
entangled yet far from identical; each had its own dynamics of promoting or reject-
ing the new methodological principles worked out since the start of World War I.
Since Jakobson’s, Bogatyrev’s, and Shklovsky’s work in literary theory is much bet-
ter known, both in Russia and in the West, in what follows I concentrate on literary
criticism as an inherently polemical discourse, tracing the pivotal points of debate in
emigration and examining their articulations and significance (the latter being argu-
ably more immediate than literary theory’s dramatic yet chronologically deferred
impact).34
Major Polemics
Émigré literary life, not unlike Soviet cultural intercourse, was largely sustained
by discussions, some shorter, others more prolonged; some not exceeding the impor-
tance of a storm in a teacup, others of a more lasting impact.35 Here we can only
dwell on the most momentous debates in émigré literary criticism: the exchanges
on the role of criticism; the polemic on “young literature,” in effect a polemic on the
future of émigré writing; and the important ongoing discussions on the canon. We
have to leave out other discussions that, while focusing on issues that merit consider-
ation, did not always enjoy strong enough resonance to warrant inclusion.36
Until recently, many of these polemics have been seen through the prism of per-
sonal rivalry and disagreement, notably between Adamovich and Khodasevich, ar-
guably the two most influential émigré literary critics on the Paris scene.37 While this
remains a valid approach, and one that captures in vivid detail the literary life of the
emigration, here we seek to understand these debates in a way that is not restricted to
the predilections and idiosyncrasies of individuals but reconstructs instead the larger
playfield and the positions available within it.38
The Debate on the Role of Literary Criticism
A decade after the October Revolution of 1917, Russian émigré literature was
beginning to reflect upon the lost hope of restoring the previous political and cul-
tural conditions; the focus now was on the mission of émigré culture—what was to
be achieved, and how, by those considering themselves, in Nina Berberova’s famous
words (often wrongly ascribed to Zinaida Gippius), ambassadors of, rather than exiles
from, Russian literature (“My ne v izgnanii, my v poslanii”).39 The 1928 discussion
on literary criticism weighed the pros and cons for the existence of objective criti-
cism and pondered its tasks in the new context. There had been pronouncements on
criticism even before that discussion, but these had failed to coalesce into a sustained
conversation.40 The discussion of 1928 was launched with a newspaper contribution
by Mikhail Osorgin, writer, critic, and bibliophile. The elephant in the room had for
a long time been the question of where actually the future of Russian literature lay:
in Paris, Berlin, Prague, and Shanghai, or in the Soviet Union, with critics of differ-
ent persuasion (such as the left-leaning Mirsky and Slonim or the politically more
conservative Adamovich) already asserting Moscow as the true center of Russian lit-
erature. Literary criticism was seen as subordinate to this agenda. Osorgin’s view was
not optimistic: he saw émigré criticism as ensnared by political dogma and the inter-
personal ties of émigré literati, enjoying little freedom in a business dominated by the
orders of established circles of friends or by a tacit prohibition to write about Soviet
literature in an unprejudiced manner. For Osorgin, the dense networks of émigré
literary intercourse meant that critics were deprived of the opportunity to pass in-
dependent judgment; nor were they—pace Bem’s verdict adduced above—at liberty
to speak against the political creed of the periodical for which they wrote. Instead
of advancing the cause of literature, criticism had become a “family affair.”41 Osor-
gin thus denied the very possibility of objective criticism in emigration. Agreeing
with Osorgin, Georgii Adamovich (writing in Poslednie Novosti under the pseudonym
Sisyphus) and Zinaida Gippius (who preferred the male pseudonym Anton Krainii)
believed that the émigré cultural environment placed special restrictions on objectiv-
ity: instead of offering independent verdict on the works of their contemporaries,
many critics were engaged in heaping praise on their friends, and even neighbors.42
In his next contribution to the discussion, Adamovich (now writing with his
real name) formulated a different argument, asking the fundamental question about
the role of literary criticism. While tacitly acknowledging the difficulty of sustain-
ing objective judgment in the closely knit texture of émigré literary life, Adamovich
highlighted creativity as the central aspect of criticism. To him, the evaluative act
was secondary to the ability of constructing a world of one’s own in the process of
commenting on the author’s work. Critics were writers, Adamovich insisted, and
their primary responsibility was to write about what is “most important,” “about
life” itself, utilizing the work to be reviewed as pretext and a legitimate springboard
for an act of co-creativity.43 Although usually in disagreement with Adamovich, in
his contribution to the discussion Khodasevich welcomed this emphasis on the cre-
ative nature of criticism, relegating the evaluation (otsenki) of literature to an acci-
dental and certainly not indispensable business. It was this line of construing literary
criticism as an autonomous act of creativity, asserted by critics as different in their
aesthetic platforms and approaches as Adamovich and Khodasevich, that elicited a
fresh response from Osorgin. The work of the reviewer, Osorgin maintained, should
not be held in contempt, necessary as it might be to acknowledge the creative nature
of criticism. In terms of significance, evaluation was in his eyes an act on a par with
interpretation. The social effect of a literary review, its usefulness for vast numbers of
readers, could not be overestimated.44
This seemingly trivial polemic on literary criticism was representative of deeper
anxieties about the destiny of émigré culture: how was it to reach its recipients, who
was the real addressee of émigré literature at a time when, in the words of writer
Georgii Ivanov, it was increasingly dogged by suspicions of having been left “with-
out a reader”?45 The highlighting of criticism as a co-creative act, whose value was
independent of the need to evaluate literature aesthetically, was a symptom of a
growing sense of crisis: the metabolism of literary production had been disturbed by
the loss of clarity over the target audience of émigré litrature and criticism. Repeat-
edly drawing attention to the painfully closed—and oppressively intimate—mode
of literary exchange and to the relatively small scale of the émigré literary scene (all
of which forced critics to abandon objectivity) amounted to articulating a profound
sense of isolation and insecurity. The debate over the role of criticism thus mirrored
wider debates about the fate of émigré writing at a time when it had become obvious
that the Soviet regime was there to stay.
The Polemic on “Young Literature”
By the early 1930s, the question of continuity and the need to foster a “replace-
ment” (smena) for the older generation of writers was prominently on the agenda.
“Young” was not necessarily a designation of age; rather, it referred to all those who
had launched their literary careers in emigration rather than in Russia. This new
generation, despite some age disparity, was constituted by the shared experience of
having to find a different stock of themes, without relying as much on reminiscences
about the prerevolutionary past. Although some of the differences between “fathers”
and “children” had already been clearly stated a decade after the October Revolu-
tion, notably in an article by Mikhail Tsetlin, it was only in the early 1930s that the
polemic began in earnest.46 In 1932–1933 the Paris journal Chisla featured two articles
articulating the views of the younger generation: Vladimir Varshavskii’s “O geroe
molodoi literatury” (On the Hero of Young Literature, 1932, no. 6) and Iurii Tera-
piano’s “Chelovek 30-kh godov” (The Man of the 1930s, 1933, nos. 7–8). Pessimistic
in tone, both articles insisted on the unique experience of a cohort of writers shaped
outside Russia and later—in the 1950s—labeled by Varshavskii “the unnoticed gen-
eration,” an appellation designed to suggest superfluity, irrelevance, and marginal-
ity.47 Terapiano maintained in his contribution that for the new “man of the 1930s”
the “line of inner life” (liniia vnutrennei zhizni) had become much more significant
and expressive of his true condition, gradually supplanting the “exterior human be-
ing” (cheloveka vneshnego) and entailing sensations of “solitude and void” (odinochestva
i pustoty), characteristic of these younger generations of émigré literati who found
themselves in a world that had withdrawn the support of the home tradition without
offering them domestication in the new (French) culture.48
This fascination with “inner life” was considered morbid by others. Christian-
Socialist in its orientation (with strong statist, almost totalitarian, preferences), the
journal Novyi grad championed an activist position that envisaged novel forms of
collectivity, declaring war on “self-indulgent” interiority. Fyodor Stepun, a phi-
losopher and publicist who had earned for himself the controversial reputation of
a “pro-Soviet” émigré, contributed an article to the debate that outlined what he
hoped would become the mission of the young émigré literature. Under the sug-
gestive title “Porevoliutsionnoe soznanie i zadacha emigrantskoi literatury” (Post-
revolutionary Consciousness and the Task of Émigré Literature), Stepun evoked the
powerful example of nineteenth-century Polish émigré literature, which served as a
morally constructive force, raising national consciousness and keeping alive the ideal
of a strong and forward-looking Polish culture.49 He required nothing less of the
young generation of émigré literati. Tracing their faults to Lev Shestov’s ostensibly
pernicious influence, Stepun saw in Varshavskii’s and Terapiano’s essays an unaccept-
able splitting of the human being into a spiritual “thing-in-itself” (veshch’ v sebe) and
a range of less important, “derivative reflections” (proizvodnye otrazheniia) of that es-
sence (“Porevoliutsionnoe soznanie,” 23). Far from being emphasized, cultivated, or
nursed as part of the human condition, loneliness—the reality of which was mate-
rial and undeniable, plaguing the lives of thousands of émigrés—had to be fought.
Going into the recesses of one’s inner self was no exit strategy: émigré isolation re-
quired a move forward—not into the “crowd” (itself a form of solitude) but into the
“common cause” of the emigration. “Only in such—we wouldn’t be afraid of saying
this—heroic mood,” Stepun concluded, “is it possible for the young émigré writer to
find himself and his own path of creativity” (24).50 Not only did Stepun’s appeal for
heroism presuppose homogeneity and a conserved notion of cultural identity, worse
than that, it identified forces that were allegedly out to destroy “the Russianness of
the young writers that the émigré cause needed” (24).51 Stepun was perturbed by
the fact that the names of James Joyce, André Gide, and particularly Marcel Proust
occurred more often in the conversations of the younger Russian émigrés than the
“greatest Russian names.” (From the vantage point of the “émigré children” [emi-
grantskikh detei], Gide had indeed been declared by Vladimir Varshavskii to be “closer
and more comprehensible than any of the contemporary Russian writers.”52) In Ste-
pun’s eyes, those of the young generation who tried to write à la Proust (pod Prusta)
had adopted a streak of “analytical psychologism alien to Russian art.” The “non-
Russianness” of this “young literature” was evident in the abandonment of the “spir-
itual leadership” that Russian literature traditionally exercised over both the writer
and the reader. Paris literary criticism, Stepun charged, was “sustained by taste, not
by faith” (25).53
It was to these accusations of passivity and lack of a moral compass that the rep-
resentatives of “young literature” responded, sometimes even without mentioning
directly Stepun, in a number of articles throughout 1936, which in turn triggered
further objections and qualifications.54 The 1936 (concluding) leg of the polemic be-
gan with an article by prose writer Gaito Gazdanov, “O molodoi emigrantskoi liter-
ature” (On the Young Émigré Literature).55 Gazdanov spoke with some authority, as
he had already made a successful debut as a novelist with his acclaimed Vecher u Kler
(An Evening with Claire, 1930). His account of the achievements of the young genera-
tion was rather somber; in his view, since 1920 not a single great writer had made his
appearance on the stage of émigré literature, the sole exception being Nabokov. The
rest of the “production” of the young émigré writers he disparagingly called “litera-
ture” in the same sense in which one talks about “the literature on the beet” or “the
literature on internal combustion engines” (“O molodoi emigrantskoi litrature,” 404).
But this diagnosis didn’t mean that Stepun was right: to Gazdanov, Stepun’s criticism
was operating with “by now completely archaic concepts dating back to the start of
the century” (405). The real reason for the problems faced by “young literature” Gaz-
danov saw in the “minuscule size of the readership” (nichtozhnoe kolichestvo chitatelei),
itself the result of the pressures on former members of the intelligentsia to assume
social roles and positions that lowered their cultural standards (as Gazdanov noted,
former lawyers, physicians, engineers, and journalists were becoming manual work-
ers and taxi drivers in their droves—a transition he was well placed to comment on,
for he was earning his living at the time precisely as a Paris taxi driver). But even
that was only part of the truth about the unenviable state of “young literature.” The
deeper explanation of its plight lay in the destruction of the “harmonious schemes”
and “outlooks” brought about by the “horrible events” of the revolution and the civil
war. Deprived of their mainstays, the young Paris writers had lost access to “inner
moral knowledge” (406), this all-important precondition for creating genuine works
of art. Although Gazdanov considered Stepun’s call for “heroism” old-fashioned and
wanting in the new environment, he, too, remained trapped in the opposition be-
tween Russian and non-Russian (European) literature, insisting on the importance
of “inner” moral orientation: the lack of “inner moral knowledge” does “not mean
that writers cease writing; but the most important thing we demand from literature,
not in the European but in the Russian understanding of it, is removed from it and
makes it uninteresting and pale” (407).56 Gazdanov thus warned against expectations
that émigré writers should be able to create literature in the sense of the word that
one assumes when talking about the “writings of Blok, Belyi, and Gorky.” The im-
possibility to deliver on such expectations was conditioned by the younger genera-
tion of émigrés “not being able to believe in some new truth while also being unable
to completely negate the world it lives in” (408); 57 all this meant the generation was
“doomed” (obrecheno).
In the next issue of Sovremennye zapiski, Mark Aldanov intervened with an ar-
ticle titled “O polozhenii emigrantskoi literatury” (On the Situation of Émigré Lit-
erature). Like Stepun, Aldanov adduced the constructive example of Polish émigré
literature; but he judged the situation of the Russian literati abroad to be radically
different and saw the reasons for the difficulties they experienced exclusively in
the poverty of the emigration. Even more than Gazdanov, Aldanov believed that
poverty had deprived the émigré writers, particularly the younger generation, of
a cultured audience and had also forced them to take up jobs that over time proved
incompatible with the demands of a literary career. The sales of prose and poetry,
often not exceeding three hundred copies, would not support a thriving émigré
literature. Powerful patronage was entertained by Aldanov as a solution but then
quickly declared “unrealistic” and abandoned.58 Referring to another text by Stepun
(without mentioning him by name), Aldanov averred that Stepun had exaggerated
the role of interpersonal communication as a condition for the well-being of émigré
literature. Stepun had lamented the disconnect between individual writers, claiming
that literature does not arise simply from a number of writers finding themselves
in the same place at the same time. Echoing the discussion on the tasks of literary
criticism, where the size and cohesion of the émigré community were considered a
major impediment to objectivity, Aldanov maintained that autonomy and isolation

were not absolute evils: after all, he argued, Dostoevsky had never met Tolstoy (“O
polozhenii emigrantskoi literatury,” 406).
The same issue of Sovremennye zapiski also carried an essay by Varshavskii, “O
proze ‘mladshikh’ emigrantskikh pisatelei” (On the Prose of the ‘Younger’ Émigré
Writers).59 Note the deliberate ambiguity of the title: the Russian mladshikh means
both “younger” but also “junior,” also in a qualitative and hierarchical sense. Var-
shavskii was speaking as a representative of this younger literature, feeling it could
no longer follow the aesthetic and social tenets of the older generation of established
émigré writers who saw the preservation and amplification of the idealized image of
pre-1917 Russia as their principal mission. Varshavskii took up the main argument
of his 1932 article “O geroe molodoi literatury” and asserted once again, this time
with explicit reference to Nabokov’s 1935 novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (Invitation to a
Beheading), the split of modern man into an exterior layer of objectifications (eksterior-
izirovannogo v ob”ektivnom mire “ia”) and an “authentic and genuine being that cannot
be defined by any ‘passport’ designations” (“O proze ‘mladshikh’ emigrantskikh pis-
atelei,” 413).60 Observing Paris life, the young émigré writers were confronted with
a reality where people “lived only in the socialized segment of their ‘I’” (413), that
exterior segment of the self, the realm of normality, success, and well-being with
which the young émigrés could not—and positively refused to—identify.61 At the
same time Varshavskii realized the risk attached to this solipsistic trend: forgetting
that the celebration of the self ought to be wedded—if only as an ideal—to a celebra-
tion of the “personality of the other, of each person, of all people” (414), as in “the
great past of Russian literature.”62
Gazdanov’s position, which was soon taken to be representative of the anxieties
of the younger generation, was severely criticized by both Adamovich and Osorgin
who considered pessimism a “legitimate” (zakonen) but ultimately counterproduc-
tive attitude.63 Osorgin’s criticism grew even more unrelenting in an article pub-
lished following the appearance of Varshavskii’s second intervention in the debate.
The very title, “O ‘dushevnoi opustoshennosti’” (On the “Desolation of the Soul”),
suggested Osorgin’s distance from the younger literati’s self-understanding as a gen-
eration shaped exclusively by the experience of solitude and deprivation.64 While
the financial situation of émigré literature remained indeed precarious, the malaise
of isolation seemed unduly overemphasized. Admittedly, the émigrés did not have a
home of their own, but from their Paris vantage point they had “the whole world at
their disposal,” and it was difficult to accept that these creative resources should yield
nothing but “inner void and the assertion of one’s ‘solitude.’”65 Attacking the young
generation’s infatuation with Proust, Osorgin went as far as calling the state of inner
desolation a “private matter” (iavlenie chastnoe): after all, other (read: the better) prose
writers of the younger generation displayed in their works affinity with “the world
struggle for genuine humanism.” In brief, Osorgin called on the exponents of exis-
tential angst to “stop wallowing in self pity.”66
Last in this discussion spoke Vladislav Khodasevich, who since the mid-1920s
had increasingly been expending his energy on literary criticism and at the time
of contributing to the debate was the chief literary commentator of the influential
newspaper Vozrozhdenie. While agreeing with Aldanov that the adverse economic
conditions were indeed a major impediment, causing as they did a chronic decline
in the number of educated readers, he took issue with Aldanov’s over-simplistic
contrast between the situation in the Soviet Union and in emigration, according to
which Soviet literature enjoyed a wide audience and state protection but no freedom,
whereas the émigré writers had freedom but no readership and no economic secu-
rity. In émigré literature, orders from society (sotsial’nyi zakaz) do not exist in the
political sense; in the Soviet Union such orders determine literary life in considerable
measure. In the émigré environment, however, Khodasevich—against Aldanov’s
optimism—detected another type of social order. Safe from political social orders,
émigré literature was exposed to, and often also driven by, aesthetic and intellectual
orders. One demands from émigré writers that their “works be ideologically and
artistically simple and outdated.”67 Khodasevich diagnosed émigré literature as suf-
fering from submission to the imperatives of what, in today’s terms, we can term
the nostalgia industry, an ideological and aesthetic enterprise catering, according to
Khodasevich, to the prevalent mass audience of philistine, low-brow, moderately
educated expatriates. Thirst for the old and familiar meant that the literary youth
disappeared from the purview of this audience; it created discomfort by its very
freshness and unfamiliarity of themes, devices, and “even by its previously unknown
names” (“Pered kontsom,” 181).68 There may well be no censorship and political sanc-
tions in the émigré environment, but a book that stands above the comprehension of
this audience, Khodasevich warned, would not be printed or sold; its author would
be submitted to a “silent, decorous” sanction “called hunger” (182). In Russia, litera-
ture had been naturally stratified, with different genres and writers reaching differ-
ent social layers and classes; in emigration, literature has become “‘classless’ in the
most bitter-ironic sense”: it reaches only “individuals dotted across the vast space
of our dispersion” (182).69 Thus the freedom of émigré literature Aldanov had so ar-
dently praised proved merely a “freedom to cry in the desert” (183).70
Disputes over the Canon
The polemics on “young literature” betrayed a very clear sense of generational

change and shifting notions of literary value. The new cohort of writers whose foun-
dation years were spent largely outside Russia had unorthodox answers to the ques-
tions about the social mission of literature and its loyalty to tradition. An ongoing
polemic reexamining the central axis of the Russian poetry canon of the nineteenth
century and juxtaposing Pushkin and Lermontov was a salient feature of this re-
thinking of literary reputations that accompanied the rise of the new generation on
the Paris literary scene.
The location—Paris—is significant here, for the emerging Lermontov cult was
indeed confined to Montparnasse and was part and parcel of what was quickly be-
coming known as the “Paris note” (parizhskaia nota) in émigré poetry.71 It was not
by accident that Paris was the center of this new cult. In the early 1920s Berlin had
offered propitious ground for the collaboration of Russian and German avant-garde
artists who were members of the international constructivist movement. Since the
latter half of the 1920s, with the relocation of the capital of Russian émigré cultural
life to France and Paris, following the inflation hike and the collapse of book pub-
lishing in Germany, many of the younger Russian literati were actively pursuing
their interest in writers and styles that were shaping the modernist literary landscape,
foremost Proust and Joyce. For these younger literati, French and, more widely, Eu-
ropean literary life was gaining increasing significance; it was often more germane
to their own artistic preoccupations than the time-honored, petrified catalogue of
Russian masterpieces, with the totemic veneration of Pushkin at its core. While the
émigré Pushkiniana was flourishing in quantitative terms, a new sense of priorities
was emerging.72 Georgii Adamovich was the patron of this revisionist drive, which
in the eyes of the established émigré writers who had launched their careers before
1917 appeared to be little less than an unforgivable infidelity to the ideals and the
values of the past.
Lermontov was the unsung hero of the poets of the “Paris note,” a choice partly
conditioned by the desire to counterbalance the religious and moralistic tenor at the
heart of the literary hierarchy erected and guarded by the older generation. In 1899
philosopher Vladimir Solovyov had delivered a public lecture on Lermontov, post-
humously published as an article, in which he acknowledged Lermontov’s genius but
implied that this was rather a Western genius of utter concentration on one’s own
subjectivity and thus an exception in the history of Russian letters.73 Lermontov,
even when he spoke of someone else, ultimately spoke of himself; Pushkin, on the
other hand, “even when he speaks of himself, seems to be speaking of someone else”
(Lermontov, 335), demonstrating a gift of openness to the world.74 As if this would
not have sufficed to cast a shadow on Lermontov, Solovyov reproached him for not
being strong enough in fighting his “demon of pride” and for failing to embrace
“humility” (344). Genius he no doubt was, but he took this extraordinary gift of God
as a right and privilege—not as a duty to serve (340).75 Adamovich and his fellow
literati of the younger generation discerned in Solovyov’s verdict the rigor of public
expectations they no longer felt called upon to satisfy. To them, literature had ceased
to be a moral watchtower and had become a “human document” (chelovecheskii doku-
ment), a phrase often employed by Adamovich and borrowed by him from Edmond
de Goncourt who had used it in the mid-1870s to signal naturalism’s loyalty to, and
appreciation of, the details of everyday life (“document humain”).
On the divisive Lermontov issue, Adamovich and his followers found them-
selves closer to another established position in Russian literary criticism, that of
Dmitry Merezhkovsky who in his article “M. Iu. Lermontov: Poet sverkhchelo
vechestva” (M. Iu. Lermontov: A Poet of Supermankind), first published in 1909,
had declared Lermontov’s daring a virtue rather than a sin. Merezhkovsky asserted
the polar distinction between Pushkin and Lermontov (he had similarly asserted an
influential if somewhat crude opposition between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy76) that
was to resurface in the writings of the younger émigrés almost thirty years later:
“Pushkin is the diurnal, Lermontov the nocturnal luminary of Russian poetry, the
whole of which oscillates between them as between the two poles of contempla-
tion and action” (Pushkin’s poetry positing, for Merezhkovsky, the pole of inac-
tion and contemplation).77 “Why did Lermontov draw closer to us? Why do we all
of the sudden want to talk about him?”78 asked Merezhkovsky. A similar sense of
Lermontov having drawn closer to their concerns was informing the attempts of
the younger generation of Paris émigrés to reorganize the canon of Russian litera-
ture: in the opening editorial of Novyi korabl’, a journal of the young generation, in
which Merezhkovsky and Gippius nonetheless played a dominant part, Pushkin was
conspicuously missing from the list of names (Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Lermontov
among them—but also Vladimir Solovyov) supplying the young literati with a link
between the past and the future.79
The leading critic of the “young,” Georgii Adamovich, had begun praising Ler
montov even earlier. As part of his “Literaturnye besedy” (Literary Conversations)
in Zveno, he questioned the healthiness of a situation in which “the Pushkin canon of
clear, firm, male, ‘sunny’ attitude to life seemed the only one,” rendering Lermontov
“provincial, old-fashioned, and ever so slightly ridiculous with his melancholy.”80
Adamovich’s objection was informed not only by Merezhkovsky but also by Roza-
nov’s judgement from his 1898 essay “‘Vechno pechal’naia duel’’” (An Eternally Sad
Duel): “by the structure of his spirit he [Pushkin] is facing the past, not the future”;
Pushkin was an autumnal “echo”; “he gave us the ‘resonance’ of universal beauty in
its fading accords.” In contrast to Pushkin’s “autumnal feel,” Lermontov introduced
to Russian literature the “current of ‘vernal’ prophecy.”81 In a later article, “Push-
kin and Lermontov” (1914), Vasilii Rozanov, not unlike Merezhkovsky, constructed
an antithesis between Pushkin as a poet of “harmony” (lad), “accord” (soglas’ia),
and “happiness” (schast’ia), “the head of world-wide safeguarding” (glava mirovogo
okhraneniia), and Lermontov who was suggested to be an example of motion, dyna-
mism, and of a realization that “the world had ‘sprung and run away’” (mir ‘vskochil
i ubezhal’), not to be captured or conserved in simple and transparent words.82 In a
brief article on Lermontov of 1916, Rozanov brings to a head this simmering con-
trast: “Pushkin was all-encompassing, but old—‘former’ . . . Lermontov was totally
new, unexpected, ‘unforetold.’”83 Adamovich was thus not entirely original when
concluding: “in our poetry, Pushkin faces the past, Lermontov looks forward.”84 In a
review discussing Boris Pasternak’s narrative poem “Lieutenant Schmidt,” Adamov-
ich formulated his distance from Pushkin, concluding: “It seems the world is indeed
more complex and richer than Pushkin imagined it to be.” The new generations of
Russian writers, both in Russia and abroad, thus had to realize that following Push-
kin (an act that did not amount to following the “line of greatest resistance”) might
well prevent them from learning to speak in a voice of their own.85
It was this perceived relinquishing of Pushkin’s legacy that occasioned a retort
from Khodasevich, in which he raised the stakes of the polemic, demonizing Ad-
amovich (Khodasevich’s article was suggestively titled “Besy” [The Demons]) for
his alleged lack of patriotism displayed in his questioning of Pushkin’s standing.86 A
counterresponse followed swiftly, in which Adamovich emphasized the futility of
calls for a return to Pushkin.87 The contrast between Pushkin and Lermontov was
further elaborated in Adamovich’s articles “Lermontov” and “Pushkin i Lermon-

tov,” both of 1931.88 Interestingly, Adamovich now maintained that this opposition
had also gained relevance in the Soviet Union, where a division seemed to be under
way between those orientated toward Pushkin and those drawing their example and
inspiration from Lermontov; the Soviet Lermontov vogue even took on proportions
that called forth “irritation and puzzlement” among “literature’s guardians.”89 Ler-
montov’s crucial advantage over Pushkin was seen and couched by Adamovich in
terms strikingly reminiscent of Mikhail Bakhtin’s praise of flux and lack of closure.
Thus Lermontov’s “idea of man and the world is not finalized, is in progress, and
not put in equilibrium and order”; this makes him an “ally and partner rather than
a reproachful ideal” (“Pushkin i Lermontov,” 576).90 Formal perfection came at the
price of expunging man from poetry. As a poet, Lermontov was no doubt far less
perfect than Pushkin, but instead of crafting a “porcelain trifle” (Adamovich was
referring to Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades”), Lermontov probed the deeper layers of
the soul, inaccessible to the serene and classically accomplished Pushkin. Adamov-
ich concluded from this juxtaposition that “outward completeness” should not be
privileged over “inner riches,” nor should the “object” be allowed to triumph over
“spirit” (580).91
This line was carried forward in Adamovich’s famous “Kommentarii” (Com-
mentaries), a rubric reserved for him at Chisla (1930–1934), the almanac of the
younger Paris literati (with Merezhkovsky and Gippius’s influence still recognizable,
despite the almanac’s polemic with Gippius,92 and other writers of the older gen-
eration, notably Boris Zaitsev, also valued and published in its pages). The younger
writers around Chisla believed literature to be a field of experimentation and a “hu-
man document” rather than an exercise in correctness, regularity, and formal glitter.
In the very first issue of Chisla, Adamovich suggested that Pushkin had by the time
of his violent death already reached the natural end of his career as a poet; no way
forward was seen (in contrast to Lermontov).93 In his second set of “Kommentarii,”
Adamovich warned that the recent “collapse of the notion of artistic perfection has
affected most markedly our relationship to Pushkin.”94 Without formal perfection,
Adamovich implied, there was very little Pushkin would be able to offer a gener-
ation that reads avidly Proust, Joyce, and Gide, seeking to cultivate and assert its
new sensitivities in a Western cultural metropolis. In a review published in the same
installment of Chisla, Adamovich called upon the young poets of the emigration:
“Gentlemen, sacrifice your classicism and strictness, your purity, your Pushkinism,
write—if only a pair of words—in such a manner as if you had known nothing prior
to them.”95 “Pushkinism” was Adamovich’s shorthand for a fetishlike veneration and
imitation of the poet, without heeding the realities of modern life (Khodasevich was
also skeptical of “Pushkinism” [pushkinizm], but he understood by this merely the
fetishization of Pushkin through scholarship, above all in the Soviet Union).96
These alleged assaults on Pushkin’s authority by Adamovich prompted Alfred
Bem, a distinguished émigré literary critic and scholar based in Prague, to defend
the cult of the poet. In an article titled “Kul’t Pushkina i kolebliushchie trenozhnik”
(The Pushkin Cult and Those Who Shake the Tripod), Bem stigmatized Adamovich
as “the theoretician of this new anti-Pushkin movement,” and Chisla as the almanac
that sheltered it.97 It is important to note that the title of Bem’s text played on Kho-
dasevich’s 1921 article, “Koleblemyi trenozhnik” (The Shaken Tripod), an early ad-
monition of the need to keep alive Pushkin’s lessons at a time when history rendered
his epoch remote and seemingly less relevant. Published while Khodasevich was still
in Soviet Russia, the article evoked the last verse of Pushkin’s poem “Poetu” (To
the Poet), which declared the artist’s freedom to rise above the crowds that harbored
an immature and destructive attitude toward their poets.98 Like Khodasevich, Bem
called upon the new generations of poets to heed rather than refuse Pushkin’s bid-
dings and to rediscover his oeuvre for their own time: “without a cult of the past,
there are no attainments in the future” (“Kul’t Pushkina,” 57).99 Nor was Bem the
only ally of Khodasevich in the Pushkin and Lermontov debate of the mid-1930s:
the subtexts of Nabokov’s novel Dar (The Gift, serialized in 1937–1938 in Sovremennye
zapiski but not published in full until 1952), at the time all but transparent to the émi-
gré artistic community, played on this topical debate, satirizing Adamovich in the
figure of the female literary critic Khristofor Mortus, a composite character whose
male pseudonym concealed real-life features of Zinaida Gippius, Merezhkovsky, and
Nikolai Otsup, the coeditor of Chisla; Adamovich, the circle around Chisla, and their
anti-Pushkin line were also the target of Nabokov’s satire in a short story, “Usta k
ustam.”100
Bem was concerned that the digression from the norms of clarity and simplicity
set by Pushkin was beginning to shape not just Adamovich’s preferences but rather
the outlook and the style of the wider circle of young literati around Chisla, the out-
let Adamovich and his associates used for their “erosive work” (podkop) that, in the
words of Gleb Struve in the Paris newspaper Rossiia i slavianstvo, amounted to an at-
tack on “Russian culture, Russian statehood, Russia’s entire recent history.”101 In re-
sponse to Pis’ma o Lermontove (Letters about Lermontov, 1935), a novel by Iurii Fel’zen
(a pseudonym of Nikolai Freidenshtein, the first part of which signaled his love for
Lermontov102), Bem wrote a sarcastic and apprehensive review titled “Stolichnyi
provintsializm” (Metropolitan Provincialism), accusing Fel’zen not only of follow-
ing Adamovich’s “anti-Pushkin” line, but also of paraphrasing portions of the latter’s
“Kommentarii” in his novel.103
As a matter of fact, metropolitanism (stolichnost’) was to Fel’zen a feature based
not just on space, but equally on history and the experience of time. Provincialism
lived in the folds of “dim, ordinary, difficult to remember,” and eventless years (Pis’ma
o Lermontove, 59). Fel’zen’s protagonist, on the contrary, prided himself on being met-
ropolitan in the sense of having witnessed historic events that raised him above and
beyond provincial mentality. Added to this sensation of having been thrust onto the
stage of history is the protagonist’s affinity for French literature. The names of at
least half a dozen of French writers are strewn all over the novel, but it is Proust’s
that stands out unmistakably. Proust aids Fel’zen’s protagonist in shedding the “con-
straining ‘skin of homogeneity’” (30), that is, the cultural uniformity grounded in a
suffocating and intrusive notion of Russianness. In the eyes of Fel’zen’s protagonist,
Proust’s writing rearranges the entire European literary canon: “If there ever was a
miracle known to us, this is, of course, Proust who has already somehow outshone
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky” (29).104 On balance, Tolstoy fares better than Dostoevsky
in this account and, together with Lermontov and Proust, would be cited as an ex-
ample of “goodness” (dobrota) and of the all-important ability to write “about man in
general” (52). Yet it is Lermontov who appears most often, almost always in Proust’s
company, as an emanation of the new ideals of the younger metropolitan intellec-
tual. Fel’zen constructs an image of Lermontov consonant with that of Volodia, his
introspective and meditative protagonist who shies away from the practical aspects
of life and prefers instead to ponder the depths of human interiority: “Lermontov
was simply a human being and, immersed in himself, he relentlessly thought about
himself and his life” (58).105 Compared with Lermontov’s predilection for contempla-
tion, Pushkin’s prose struck Fel’zen’s protagonist as “flat, dim-grey, and lightweight,”
lacking in “sincere personal tone” (10, 11).106 Lermontov and Proust were thus being
enthroned as the new icons of a generation that considered literature to be, in Bo-
ris Poplavsky’s words, “a private letter sent to an unknown address,” not an instru-
ment of civic and moral edification.107 Refusing to be measured by external success,
even rhyming success with swindle and hence calling Pushkin “somewhat deceitful”
(zhulikovat) (“O misticheskoi atmosfere molodoi literatury,” 309), Poplavsky, just like
Fel’zen after him, endorsed Adamovich’s reshuffling of the canon: “How can one at
all speak of the age of Pushkin. There is only the time of Lermontov” (310).108 Signifi-
cant here is the contrast between “age” (epokha), with its implication of grandeur and
the intimation of limited duration, and “time” (vremia), devoid of greatness but sug-
gesting open-endedness and contemporaneity: the time of Lermontov has arrived,
and he has become a friend and ally of the younger Paris émigré literati.
When Fel’zen claimed the privilege of being the exponent of a metropolitan
worldview, he was asserting at the same time a new allocation of cultural capital
and, as we have seen, a new version of the canon. This was judged to be a twofold af-
front by Bem who, as noted earlier, accused Fel’zen (and by implication Adamovich)
of false metropolitanism (stolichnost’); Fel’zen’s protagonist, he insisted, resembled
a provincial nonentity who had found himself by accident in the capital but had re-
mained impassive and severed from the great historical events of his time. He de-
voured the culture of the capital (Paris) with provincial eagerness and regurgitated
it in an equally provincial, unassimilated, and tiresomely pretentious (pretentsioznoi)
manner.109 The simplicity that marked Lermontov’s style was beyond Fel’zen’s reach;
therefore, his Pis’ma o Lermontove were, ironically, a document merely of undigested,
provincial modernism, and as such could not assert a revision of the canon and of
Pushkin’s place in it. The battles over the canon were thus accompanied by a heated
discussion about what constituted metropolitanism and provincialism in émigré lit-
erature and how the domain of émigré culture was to be reconstituted and divided,
a polemic that lasted throughout the 1930s, reflecting the new artistic sensitivities
cultivated in Paris and the distance that was building up between it and other centers
of émigré literature.110
The last word in this protracted debate seems to have come from Adamovich,
who in 1939, the year of Lermontov’s 125th anniversary, published his strongest
statement yet.111 Adamovich here returns to his idea of Pushkin and Lermontov as
“two poles, two poetic ideals” (“Lermontov,” 841); he makes repeated use of his
tried and tested criterion of evaluation: in terms of poetic quality, Pushkin’s verse
is no doubt better, but in “its aspirations—if not its accomplishments—Lermontov’s
poetry reached farther than Pushkin’s” (843). To the 1930s Paris literati, “Pushkin
remained a god, [while] Lermontov became a friend, in the intimacy of whose pres-
ence everybody would become purer and freer” (843).112 Surveying retrospectively
the scene of Russian émigré literature in Paris, Georgii Fedotov reiterated this un-
derlying opposition: “Pushkin is too lucid and earthly, too much asserting life and
too accomplished in his form. The Parisians, rather, perceive the world as hell and
want to demolish any established forms that are turning into fetters. Lermontov is
closer to them.”113 Lermontov was thus considered a better embodiment of the new
understanding of literature and the public role of the writer: no longer a “national
poet,” but a diasporic voice in a culture subsisting increasingly on adaptation, hy-
bridity, and live interaction with Western literature, art, and philosophy.
The canon wars, particularly those at Chisla, were keenly observed in the So-
viet Union, where Vladimir Ermilov dedicated to them a few cynical passages in
an article welcoming the party decree to liquidate the Russian Association of Pro-
letarian Writers (RAPP) and establish a single Union of Soviet Writers. An embar-
rassing document of vulgar sociologism, Ermilov’s article is written in a style that
could hardly serve as a recommendation for its author’s literary prowess. Using a
disturbingly coarse vocabulary, Ermilov tells his readers that the white-guardist war
over the canon was evidence of the “cannibalism” (kannibal’skoi sushchnosti) of the
bourgeoisie that was now prepared to give up and destroy what was truly valuable
in its own bourgeois and aristocratic past. Writing after the appearance of the first
five issues of Chisla, Ermilov concludes that exactly who would win this skirmish is
immaterial, as the white guard would most certainly “abandon tomorrow Lermon-
tov,” just as it is now turning against Pushkin. The Soviet working class, by contrast,
should not be moved by these wars; it should instead take what is best from each
of the two poets and make it work for the proletarian cause.114 The émigré canon
wars were thus kept at bay, a sign of their potential significance—and that of émi-
gré literary criticism as a whole—at a moment when the battles in Soviet aesthetics
and literary history over the legacy of the nineteenth century were meant to reach a
resolution in the doctrines adopted a couple of years later by the First Congress of the
Union of Soviet Writers.
 LITERARY CRITICISM AND THE
8 INSTITUTION OF LITERATURE IN THE
ERA OF WAR AND LATE STALINISM,
1941–1953
EVGENY DOBRENKO
Literary Criticism and World War II, 1941–1945
The war era can be divided into two periods: pre- and post-1943. In the first
period, party control over literature was noticeably weakened; celebrations of the
party and Stalin were muted, and literary policy, unaccompanied by noisy ideologi-
cal campaigns, personal denunciations, and attacks, became more benign in compar-
ison with the second half of the 1930s. In the initial period of World War II, Soviet
ideology underwent an intensive internal reconstruction, which took the form of the
peculiar coexistence of two distinct ideological models: the old one, under which
the party alienated itself from the ordinary man, and the new, “humanized” ver-
sion. This ideological line had been established toward the end of 1941, its substance
formulated by Central Committee Secretary of Ideology Aleksandr Shcherbakov:
“Our propaganda and agitation must explain through all available means and to the
broadest possible masses of workers the national, patriotic (vsenarodnyi, otechestvennyi)
character of the war against the German invaders.”1 “Party,” earlier the keyword of
such appeals, has here been replaced by “fatherland” (otechestvo) and “Germans.” This
new element of a “humanized” ideology of war appeared in Stalin’s very first public
address to the people after the start of the war: “Brothers and sisters!” This was the
new voice of a state that appealed directly to the masses, bypassing institutional gate-
163
keepers. At the beginning of the war, the old institutional forms of propaganda fell
into acute crisis. The radical break in the voice of the state led inexorably to profound
transformations in all verbal genres—including, naturally, literature.
The very forms of the literary process underwent changes, above all in publish-
ing. The principal “thick” literary journals continued to be issued, but overall their
output was curtailed: they were sharply reduced in page count, frequency of publi-
cation, and print run. In 1941 Molodaia gvardiia, Sibirskie ogni, and Na rubezhe ceased
publication. Also shut down, among others, were 30 dnei (1941), Krasnaia nov’ (1942),
and Internatsional’naia literatura (1943). Literature migrated predominantly to the pages
of newspapers run by the party and the military. These newspapers now published
not only reporting and commentary, but also plays, short stories, novels, and po-
etry—a development that produced a qualitative change in the status of the literary
text. An artistic text published in, say, Pravda, served after all as a tool in establish-
ing the direction of the political line. A clear example of this tendency is Aleksandr
Korneichuk’s play, Front (The Front). Published in Pravda at the most critical mo-
ment of the war, the summer of 1942, this play marked Stalin’s new, tougher ap-
proach to the “military cadres.” The conflict between Ognev and Gorlov reflected a
change that had occurred at the top of the government. This change was made pub-
lic through Korneichuk’s play and through its interpretation in a special “critical”
editorial in the 29 September 1942 issue of Pravda, “O p’ese Aleksandra Korneichuka
Front” (On Aleksandr Korneichuk’s Play The Front).
This situation demands a reexamination of literary criticism in the context of a
broader concept of “war literature,” one that incorporates the totality of war texts,
whose boundaries were effaced during the war years.2 As Ilya Ehrenburg deftly
noted in 1944, “the time has come to stop dividing things by heading and category.”3
Indeed, it is a fine line that separates Aleksei Surkov’s verse from Ehrenburg’s jour-
nalism. The boundary between that journalism and the lead article from Pravda or
Krasnaia zvezda is even blurrier. The line separating such an article from a critical re-
view published in Novyi mir or Oktiabr’ during the war is completely imperceptible.
And there simply is no line separating such a review from examples of party criticism
written by the Department for Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee
(Agitprop) officials.
Those lead articles and editorials in Pravda during the first period of World War
II that discussed literary works were, as a rule, not really about literature.4 Rather,
they were devoted to propagandistic problems, and the utilization of literature in the
context of resolving these problems showed that literature had begun to fulfill the
mission that had been bestowed upon it: in a Pravda editorial on 26 December 1941
it was argued that in wartime “the work of science, technology, literature and art
. . . is needed not less, but perhaps even more, than in peacetime.” In another edito-
rial, Pravda observed that “many poets, though far from all, have found words and
images needed by our people in these terrible days” and demanded that playwrights,
poets, writers, artists, and composers inspire “the people and the Red Army toward
further relentless struggle against the enemy, so that our heroes (bogatyri) might go
LITERARY CRITICISM AND THE INSTITUTION OF LITERATURE, 1941–1953  165
into battle with a thundering, bold and joyous song; so that from every page of the
newspaper the artist, poet, and writer might shoot at the enemy.”5
The chief reason that writers in the war years became, as Ehrenburg put it, “in-
dispensable to the people,” with “millions hanging on their words,” was the rejection
of an earlier ideological narrowness, a rejection that now allowed “writers to help the
people find themselves.”6 The destruction of the earlier institutional forms was the
result of the process of the “humanization” of literature. This process constituted a
new form—one adequate to the reality of wartime—of the influence of literature on
the reader. When Ehrenburg wrote that “the writer is not a person doing a job, but
rather a creator and a teacher,” that “the writer is not a loudspeaker, and behind the
book always stands a living human being,” that “the writer must always, throughout
his life, be responsible for what he has written,” that “the writer who does not com-
prehend his responsibility to the people is but an adolescent,” that “our duty is not to
represent, but to engender representation,” he was taking his cue from the new status
of Soviet literature and from the new internal stimuli to artistic creation.7
This newness showed itself with particular clarity in the course of the argu-
ment, carried on for the full length of the war, about the “longevity” of wartime
literature. On one side was Ehrenburg: “Let the verses written today be forgotten
tomorrow or next year; nobody will forget the events that inspired them. . . . By not
creating high literature during the war, we will save it. . . . Great books about a great
war will be written later. . . . Examining a large canvas, we take several steps back.
An epic demands distance, and this distance is irreconcilable with the rhythm of war.
. . . Yes, we are faced not with immortal volumes, not with marble, but with wax:
the living voice of the writer.8 On the opposite side was a “harsh rebuff” to skeptics
“animated by the question of whether much of the work created during the war will
survive. This question is not only vacuous, but harmful. Soviet writers are not con-
cerned with it. . . . Earlier it was said that writers required the ‘pathos of distance’ in
order to be able to grasp the meaning of great events from afar. Soviet writers proved
that they could reduce this distance to a minimum. They create significant works in
the midst of these very events and in their wake.”9
Viktor Pertsov expressed this position still more harshly: “We are not fertil-
izer—we are the soil that will bring forth bread for the difficult present and the happy
future of our people and of mankind.” Pertsov, objecting to Ehrenburg’s claim that
all works written during the war would be reevaluated and that the writer should
write in newspapers rather than create novels, asserted: “Ehrenburg is mistaken. . . .
Artistic works written for the war, including current agitational poems, will not be
reevaluated. . . . Our patriotic war is the advancement of art, not its decline.”10
When Pertsov claimed in 1945 that “the Russian people’s feat in the Patriotic
War is material for a new epic,” this sentiment flowed logically from his position in
the argument with Ehrenburg in 1943.11 But a similar position was already being for-
mulated at the beginning of the war: “Before our eyes is arising an epic that is fated
to shine in history as a majestic legend of manly courage.”12
With the majority of literary publications having closed or undergone severe re-
ductions in their print space during the war, the institution of literature experienced
a profound structural crisis. Institutionally, Soviet literary criticism had since the
1920s existed at the junction of, on the one hand, party forces that regulated the basic
ideological parameters in the sphere of literature, and, on the other, literary produc-
tion itself, which deviated from those parameters but was brought by criticism into
agreement with them. Criticism was the final link in the chain that transmitted the
will of the party and made public the current political line, which itself could be the
result of hidden political struggle at the top of the government, the will of the leader,
or the logic of bureaucratic decision making. Strange as it may seem, only rarely did
this will reveal itself openly in the past, for example, through resolutions of the Cen-
tral Committee; now, however, the process of transmission of the will of the party
became much more direct and open. Previously socialist realism, invented in Stalin’s
office, would be discussed and substantiated in scores of publications and hundreds
of articles and books; current literary questions would be elaborated through discus-
sions (be it about language or about Joyce); and even such devastating campaigns
as those against formalism or vulgar sociologism would have at their foundation a
shift of ideological trajectories. During the war, however, these campaigns were no
longer accompanied by theoretical arguments, and, beginning in 1943, they took the
form of a series of direct attacks on deviant literary figures.
The radical change in the institutional organization of literature led to the nearly
total abolition of criticism as an intermediary between literature and the state, which
had now directly inserted itself into the very process of literary production, publish-
ing and then evaluating literary texts on the pages of Pravda and Krasnaia zvezda. The
“conspicuous absence of criticism” was at first written about only in passing, until 24
April 1943, when the newspaper Literatura i iskusstvo led with an article entitled “O
khudozhestvennoi kritike” (On Artistic Criticism), which stated: “The spectacle that
criticism presents in our journals brings no cause for joy.”13 This article appeared fol-
lowing the Creative Conference of Moscow Writers and Critics, held by the Union
of Soviet Writers in March 1943. Responding to this event, Pyotr Skosyrev wrote in
an article with the characteristic title “Otveta ne posledovalo (O kritike v nashi dni)”
(No Answer Was Given [On Literary Criticism in Our Day]): “Why have Soviet
critics in wartime allowed themselves to demobilize? Critics have erected a memo-
rial of iron silence to works created during the war. Abandoning criticism would
mean abandoning mature forms of cultural life.”14 The reason for this abandonment,
however, was that the “humanized” model of literature, which dominated the scene
until the middle of 1943, had broken with the previous ideological ritual and, appeal-
ing directly to the reader, had become presumptuous. Neither in the process of its
production nor in its propagation did it have any need of such mediating institutions
as criticism.
After the victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, however, the ideological sit-
uation changed abruptly. As early as 27 February 1943, a lead article in Literatura i
iskusstvo was noting that in wartime the artist’s responsibility to the people was mag-
nified many times, whereas certain facts indicated that some “artists of the word”
(khudozhniki slova) had lowered their sense of responsibility for the quality of artistic
labor.15 Two articles by the Agitprop official Aleksandr Egolin (basically a reworked
memorandum that had been circulated in the Agitprop department of the Central
Committee) marked the resurrection of “party criticism” of the prewar variety:
“Sovetskaia literatura v dni Otechestvennoi voiny” (Soviet Literature in the Days
of the Patriotic War), Propagandist 6 (1944) and “Za vysokuiu ideinost’ sovetskoi lit-
eratury” (For the High Ideological Content of Soviet Literature), Bol’shevik 10–11
(1944). In strident tone, they announced that “nothing of value was created during
the war by Nikolai Aseev, Ilya Sel’vinsky, Vladimir Lugovskoi, Kornei Chukovsky,
or Mikhail Zoshchenko. Furthermore, works written by some of them have re-
vealed their lack of ideological content, their lack of principles, and their creative
impotence.” Zoshchenko had written a “vulgar,” “anti-artistic,” and “cynical”
novella that was “foreign to the feelings and thoughts of his fellow countrymen.”
Aseev wrote “ideologically defective poetry,” in which he “depicts the Soviet rear
guard libelously.” In his poetry, Sel’vinsky “insults the Soviet people” and “dis-
torts the appearance of our motherland,” his “thoughtlessness and irresponsibil-
ity exceed all boundaries,” he “treats the most consequential theme” of patriotism
“vulgarly, thoughtlessly and loosely,” and his poetry about Russia is “no more than
crude hackwork, gibberish that shows that the author has no integrated image of his
motherland . . . [it is] formalist gimmickry . . . phony recitation.” Chukovsky “vul-
garized the theme of the Great Patriotic War,” and much of the same is said about the
stories of Konstantin Paustovsky and Iurii Nagibin, Andrei Platonov’s “Zashchita
Semidvor’ia” (Defense of Semidvor’e), and so on. Subsequently, the same harsh con-
demnation fell upon Konstantin Fedin’s book Gor’kii sredi nas (Gorky among Us) and
Mikhail Isakovskii’s poem “Vragi sozhgli rodnuiu khatu . . . ” (The Enemies Burnt
Down My Native Home . . . ).
All of these works were declared “alien to our Soviet literature. They could
only have been written by those who have forgotten their responsibility before the
people, who have forgotten their duty as writers.”16 Meanwhile, it was declared that
the reason for the appearance of these defective works was the fact that “the ideologi-
cal foundations of the worldview of certain of these writers diverge from the ideo-
logical foundations of the worldview of the people,” and that the task that needs to
be taken up is a redoubling of “ideological work among writers.”17 This wave would
crest in 1946 with the well-known Central Committee resolution “O zhurnalakh
‘Zvezda’ i ‘Leningrad’” (On the Journals Zvezda and Leningrad). In documents filed
under the names of Central Committee secretaries Malenkov, Shcherbakov, and
Zhdanov, Novyi mir, Znamia, Oktiabr’, Zvezda, and the leadership of the Union of
Soviet Writers were condemned. Thus, the decision to issue a special Central Com-
mittee resolution on literary-artistic journals had matured gradually.
At first, however, this question was decided at the level of the secretariat of
the Central Committee. On 2 and 3 December 1943, resolutions were passed “O
kontrole nad literaturno-khudozhestvennymi zhurnalami” (On the Control of
Literary-Artistic Journals) and “O povyshenii otvetstvennosti sekretarei literaturno-
khudozhestvennykh zhurnalov” (On the Elevation of Responsibility of the Secre-
taries of Literary-Artistic Journals). On 22 December 1943, a resolution was passed
on the journal Oktiabr’, and in August 1944 came the Organizational Bureau of the
Central Committee’s (Orgbiuro) resolution on the journal Znamia. All these state-
ments not only led to editorial shake-ups but also pointed toward concrete “ideo-
logical-political mistakes” and “ideological failings” of writers, journals, editors,
and critics (thus articles by Iu. Iuzovskii and Elena Usievich were criticized for their
“propaganda of incorrect views”). Parallel to this, the presidium of the Union of
Soviet Writers passed secret resolutions censuring those authors who had been con-
demned by the Central Committee.
These events followed one after the other; only in the second half of 1944 did
they take on public form in the guise of critical articles. The objects of condemnation
had changed as well. Symptomatic in this sense is an article by Lidiia Poliak in the
September–October 1943 issue of Znamia, “O ‘liricheskom epose’ Velikoi Otechest-
vennoi voiny” (On the “Lyric Epic” of the Great Patriotic War). “The ‘personal’
ceased to sound like something ‘unworthy’ or forbidden in poetry,” asserted Poliak.
She continued:
Soviet poets of our day have been liberated from ascetic shackles, from the metal
chains with which they had bound themselves in the recent past. The Great
Patriotic War has intensified and sharpened the patriotic feelings of the Soviet
man and filled them with new content, and has thereby forever removed the
contradiction between personal, “private” interests and the interests of the na-
tion, the people, the motherland. In the poetry of our day the call to the defense
of the motherland is simultaneously a call to the defense of personal, individual
human happiness. And the vengeance for personal suffering flows together with
vengeance for the suffering of the people.18
A rewriting of the war had begun: the earlier ritualized model was returning
and integrating the “humanized” literature of the first years of the war into itself.
All this entailed a debate about “truth” in the portrayal of war that had already be-
gun in the war years. In an article with the characteristic title “‘Krasivaia’ nepravda
o voine’” (The “Beautiful” Lie about War), which harshly criticized the stories of
Konstantin Paustovsky, Veniamin Kaverin, Lev Kassil’, and Boris Lavrenev, Evge-
niia Knipovich wrote:
Millions of people are fighting at the front. Millions are working at the rear. The
steelworker in the Urals or the section leader of a collective farm in the Caucuses
might never see the Germans or hear the blasts of artillery—and nonetheless they
know the truth of the war. The sons and daughters of the fighting people, at the
front and the rear, all have a common experience, common thoughts, acts, and
desires. This is why we have only one truth of war—a single truth for those who
have been in battle and those who have not. Stalin’s decrees, the reports of the
Soviet Information Bureau, all of our agitation and propaganda are “full of the
essential truth, the truth that beats in our hearts.”19
This was the officially sanctioned “struggle against conflictlessness [beskonfliktnost’]
and the varnishing of reality [lakirovka].” At the end of 1943–1944, almost all journals
had come out against attempts to “embellish” and “romanticize” the difficult days
of war.
In the last months of the war, at the center of the debate about the “truth of
war” was the so-called Leningrad theme. In April 1945 the Leningrad branch of
the Union of Soviet Writers hosted a discussion on the Leningrad theme (this was
preceded by Agitprop’s criticism of Vera Ketlinskaia’s novel V osade [In the Siege]).
Literary criticism was meant to help literature move from the representation of the
suffering and horrors of war to making it epic and heroic in scope. Symptomatic of
this expectation was Pavel Gromov’s speech, worrying that “authors are trying to
arrest the reader’s attention with descriptions of images of hunger and deprivations
that were the Leningraders’ lot,” and were offering “striking pictures of all sorts of
naturalistically drawn details of everyday life in Leningrad. True art has always es-
chewed naturalism.” One must not “chase after everyday verisimilitude,” but rather
“provide a panoramic, generalizing picture of the whole,” since, Gromov asserted,
the reader and viewer were “interested not in the details, however striking they may
be, but in the pathos of the highest emotions of the Leningraders, the passion of the
Soviet soldier, the courage of the Soviet man.” In Gromov’s opinion, Vera Inber had
not understood this interest, having in her Leningradskie dnevniki (Leningrad Diaries)
depicted the horrors of life under the blockade: “What purpose do these clinical
descriptions serve?” wondered Gromov. In his speech at the Tenth Plenum of the
Union of Soviet Writers in May 1945, Aleksandr Prokof’ev spoke in the same con-
demnatory tone about Olga Berggol’ts, who in her Leningradskii dnevnik (Leningrad
Diary) “forced her poetry to resound exclusively with the theme of suffering con-
nected to the countless calamities that befell the citizens of the besieged city.” Thus
the Leningrad theme was transformed from a theme of man’s struggle for life (as it
was treated in the war years) into a “theme of the historical particularity of the new
man, capable of enduring any hardships and deprivations in the name of that which
inspires him: the grand idea of Soviet patriotism.”20
Literary Criticism in the Era of Late Stalinism: From “Kowtowing”

to “Rootless Cosmopolitanism” and Beyond (1945–1953)
It is now apparent that the “Zhdanov era” did not begin in the middle of 1946,
with the famous ideological resolutions of the Central Committee on the journals
Zvezda and Leningrad, the theater repertoire, and the cinema, and then later on music,
the journal Znamia, and so forth. Rather, it began at least three years earlier.21 The
particularity of this epoch, so saturated with ideological campaigns, was determined
by the novelty of the sociopolitical circumstances that dictated the corresponding
forms of ideological and cultural representation. Erected in the first decade after the
World War II and then maintained for a half century, the cult of the “sacred war”
and victory—which would come to replace the cult of the revolution—made the
regime unequivocally legitimate, and in this sense unequivocally “popular.” The re-
gime not only passed the test of stability, but became stronger, and questions of his-
torical priority, whether in the context of a narrower party history or in the context
of the “greater” history of Russia, were now resolved, using Stalinist terminology,
“decisively and irrevocably (okonchatel’no i bespovorotno).” It was in this era that the
degeneration of the earlier Bolshevik ideology into a nationalist one was completed,
together with the formation of the so-called Russian Party, whose struggle against
liberal and official internationalist tendencies largely determined the development of
post-Stalinist and post-Soviet culture.
The Zhdanov era designates an historical period (conventionally lasting until
the death of Andrei Zhdanov in 1948) during which the Central Committee passed a
whole series of resolutions, with Zhdanov, Central Committee secretary responsible
for ideology and culture, being the most active participant in this process. Through
these resolutions Stalin meant to “tame” the intelligentsia, revoke the freedom that
had supposedly been given it during the war, and show a new generation of young
people returned from the war that the experience of independent thought and action
that they had acquired, their fearlessness and contempt for danger, their familiarity
with the West, and so on, were not only no longer in demand, but might even con-
stitute political disloyalty. According to this view, the aim of the “ferocious ideologi-
cal actions” of 1946–1948 was to reintroduce terror into society on the model of the
1930s. In this sense zhdanovshchina signified the demise of certain social expectations
and hopes for the weakening of the regime.
And yet the war had brought no “weakening,” the intelligentsia needed no
“taming” and had displayed no public signs of dissidence (neither, incidentally, did
other sectors of Soviet society after the terror of the 1930s); and as for any “social ex-
pectations and hopes,” these resided almost completely outside the realm of politics.
Ideologically, the new war generation was thoroughly Soviet. Thus arises the ques-
tion of the true aims of the state’s postwar ideological actions.
One peculiarity of Zhdanov’s resolutions lies in the censorship mechanism that,
having been carefully hidden in the 1920s and 1930s, was now essentially revealed. At
base, these are ordinary “censoring” resolutions, such as had earlier been passed in the
hundreds by the Politburo, Orgbiuro, and the Secretariat of the Central Committee
on any of various questions of cultural politics. But now there is just one difference:
earlier these had been closed, secret documents. This is a very important difference; as
archival materials show, in the “kitchen of the Central Committee” still more severe
documents were being cooked up. The resolutions of 1946–1948, as public documents,
are distinguished both from the earlier ones and from those that would never leave
the category of the closed, or purely representative. And the main thing uniting
them, therefore, is that they demonstrate the new function of this sort of document:
they were used both to approve a new procedure for public discussions about culture
and to create a sort of discursive matrix for those discussions. They do not “resolve”
anything precisely because their purpose is not fulfilled by verbal expression, but it
lies in the resolution itself. These are symbolic documents marking the new status
of the state, the sole public function of which now becomes the exhibition of itself.
Actions of this sort are ideal in the capacity of preliminary steps, “ideologi-
cal warm-ups,” or as an instrument of concealing (or screening) the true intentions
of the state. It is precisely in this light that one should view the resolutions of the
Zhdanov era. They stand as a prelude to the campaign of the “struggle against cos-
mopolitanism” (all the way to the “Doctors’ Plot”), which in turn should be seen
in the context of the preparations for a new wave of terror, from which the nation
would be saved only by the death of Stalin.
It was during the war that the decisive “Russification of the Soviet” occurred.22
The resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party “O zhurnalakh
‘Zvezda’ i ‘Leningrad,’” along with Zhdanov’s reports delivered at a meeting of
party activists and at a writers’ conference in Leningrad—reports that interpreted
the text of the resolution and, essentially, provided an all-encompassing formulation
of the ideological doctrine of the late-Stalinist era—initiated the broad ideological
campaign to eradicate the “spirit, aberrant to the Soviet people, of kowtowing to the
bourgeois West.” A lot in this resolution—from the “lack of ideological content” to
“apoliticism” and “bourgeois-aristocratic nature”—comes from the rhetoric of the
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers in the 1920s and early 1930s.23 Kowtow-
ing (nizkopoklonstvo), in contrast, is the sign of a new cultural situation that had begun
to form only in the late 1930s.
Regarding Western culture, Zhdanov asserted that “its foundation is rotten and
putrid,” that “kowtowing to bourgeois culture or [playing the] role of pupils” was
not becoming of “representatives of forward-looking Soviet culture, of Soviet patri-
ots.” Zhdanov asserted that Soviet culture was “many times superior to bourgeois”
culture, and for that reason “has the right to instruct others in the new universal mo-
rality,” that “our people”—and this is key—Russians, are not the same “as they were
before 1917, and our Rus’ is not the same as it was, and our character is not the same.”
Zhdanov also warned that “bourgeois politicians and writers are trying to erect an
iron curtain,” but that “these attempts are doomed to failure,” since we embody “ev-
erything that is best in the history of human civilization and culture,” and for that
reason “leave far behind the greatest examples of the work of olden times.” In short,
Zhdanov wanted to know “how could [the Soviet people and culture] be servile be-
fore all this harmful foreign matter, and assume a passive defensive position!”
Having abandoned the trenches in the second half of 1946, the “soldiers of the
ideological front” still behaved timidly enough and, most significantly, as would be-
come clear about a year later, the “offensive strikes” were aimed in the wrong di-
rection: the struggle against the “lack of ideological content (bezydeinost’)” became
central. For a full year the word bezydeinost’ did not leave the pages of journals and
newspapers. This relative lull at the “ideological front” was broken only at the end
of spring 1947, when the trajectory of struggle decisively altered course. As Konstan-
tin Simonov recalls on 14 May 1947, Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Zhdanov met
with the leadership of the Union of Soviet Writers (Alexander Fadeev, Konstantin
Simonov, and Boris Gorbatov), and acquainted them with a document, the rough
draft of which had been written by Stalin, containing an order to begin a campaign
against members of the intelligentsia who were worshiping the West.24 Thus began
the campaign against kowtowing.
Fadeev’s appearance at the Union of Soviet Writers conference in June 1947
served as a call to arms, as did the report he gave several days later at the Eleventh
Plenum of the executive board of the Union of Soviet Writers, which raised ques-
tions about the “school” of Aleksandr Veselovsky—a school that purportedly con-
tradicted the Russian revolutionary democratic tradition of Vissarion Belinsky,
Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Nikolai Dobrolyubov and that represented the “chief
wellspring of that kowtowing to the West that exists in a certain segment of Russian
literary criticism past and present.”25
Professor Isaac Nusinov’s book Pushkin i mirovaia literatura (Pushkin and World
Literature) was censured for its “prostration before the West” because it asserted
Pushkin’s “nationless universality” and “general humanity,” as well as his “Europe-
anness.”26 Academician Vladimir Shishmarev was condemned for his praise of Vesel-
ovsky, the founder in Russia of comparative literature, “that bourgeois cosmopolitan
direction in literary criticism.” Professor Mikhail Alekseev was attacked for claim-
ing that the English language had played a significant role in the history of the Rus-
sian Enlightenment. Professor Boris Eikhenbaum was condemned for comparing
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to Tolstoy and studying the work of Mikhail Lermontov
in the context of the European Romantic tradition. In his closing remarks, Fadeev,
having noted that at the Institute of World Literature (IMLI), Moscow State Univer-
sity (MGU), and Leningrad State University (LGU), “the heads of all matters of the
literary education of our youth are parrots of Veselovsky, his blind apologists,” called
for a “decisive unmasking of his [Veselovsky’s] antiscientific concepts and a bold at-
tack on the apologists. . . . This will be a long overdue, refreshing breeze in all of our
literary scholarship and in literary education.”27
Fadeev’s report lay at the base of a discussion of Veselovsky that would unfold
on the pages of the journal Oktiabr’, where Valerii Kirpotin, echoing Fadeev’s in-
vective, angrily exposed those who “aimed to disassemble, stone by stone, all the
structures of Russian literature . . . and handed over our legacy, so unusually original
in its goals and its forms, to foreigners.”28 The last issue of Oktiabr’ for 1947 deliv-
ered a “harsh critique” of “Veselovism.” Vladimir Shishmarev called the attempt to
turn Veselovsky into a “kowtowing follower” a “scholarly blunder” and a “political
error,” while Shklovsky proceeded more carefully, asserting that Veselovsky was a
“great scholar” and a “patriot,” but did not possess the correct method. Having called
the author of Istoricheskaia poetika (Historical Poetics) a “blind Sampson,” Shklovsky
nevertheless claimed that the accusations of kowtowing made by Fadeev against
Veselovsky were “clearly founded upon a misunderstanding.” Simultaneously, ar-
ticles began to appear in literally every issue of Literaturnaia gazeta unmasking a series
of “kowtowing followers,” the apologists for Veselovsky: Mikhail Alekseev, Eikhen-
baum, Mark Azadovsky, and Vladimir Propp, who “in veiled form is attempting to
rehabilitate the harmful status of myth scholars and formalists in art.”29
On 15 October 1947 Literaturnaia gazeta reported on a discussion of the ideas of
Veselovsky held in the Department of Literary Theory and History at the Central
Committee Academy of Social Sciences (AON TK VKP[b]), where again accusa-
tions of kowtowing and antipatriotism were sounded against Viktor Zhirmunsky,
Leonid Grossman, Propp, Aleksei Sokolov, and Gennadii Pospelov—the last of
which had “lost any sense of moderation and historical realism” and had claimed that
Veselovsky could not even be compared with Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov,
since they worked more or less in the tradition of journalism, while Veselovsky
represented academic scholarship. Lev Plotkin (who just one-and-a-half years later
would, like Kirpotin, himself be accused of cosmopolitanism), claimed that Vesel-
ovsky’s methodology, these “mechanical comparisons,” “lead to bourgeois cosmo-
politanism, to the idea of a literature with a nationless existence.” “The comparative
method,” wrote Plotkin, “leads to concepts of the development of Russian literature
that are monstrous in their national self-abasement, contemptuous toward the peo-
ple, and absolutely groundless.”30
The discussion of Veselovsky became a sort of touchstone for the “new Soviet
patriotism.” “The debate about Veselovsky is intimately connected with the most
important political problem of our day: the struggle against kowtowing to the bour-
geois West.” Veselovsky’s philosophy was “a bastardized philosophy of the bour-
geoisie in the period of its decline.” In short, “we must finish this off decisively and
irrevocably.”31
The shift from discussion to rout was noticeable in the same discussion in Ok-
tiabr’ that carried in its first issue of 1948 an article by Kirpotin with the ornate title
“O nizkopoklonstve pered kapitalisticheskim Zapadom, ob Aleksandre Veselovs-
kom, o ego posledovateliakh i o samom glavnom” (On Kowtowing to the Capitalist
West, on Alexander Veselovsky, on His Followers, and on What Is Most Important).
What was “most important” was that “Veselovsky inspired Zhirmunsky’s work on
Goethe and Byron in Russia, Leonid Grossman’s comparativist works, and Nus-
inov’s method of studying Pushkin’s global significance.” All of these authors and
their “lackeys” were inclined to “disparage the national value of Russian literature,”
treating it “as merely imitative.” Soon afterward, on 11 March 1948, the Agitprop
newspaper Kul’tura i zhizn’ published an article titled “Protiv burzuaznogo liberal-
izma v literaturovedenii” (Against Bourgeois Liberalism in Literary Studies), which
provided a new stimulus to the campaign. The discussion of Veselovsky in Oktiabr’
was condemned in the article as “unnecessary,” “unprincipled,” “flawed from start to
finish”: “What was needed was not a discussion of Veselovsky per se, but an unmask-
ing of the bourgeois-liberal essence of his philosophy and of the ideological harmful-
ness of the literary apologetics for his reactionary views.” The actual result of the
1948 campaign was the total rout of all Soviet philological scholarship (and not only
in Moscow).32
From issue to issue, literary journals were now publishing materials castigat-
ing cosmopolitanism; the yardstick by which the work of journals was measured
was now above all their participation in the “inculcation of patriotism in the Soviet
people.” “Zvezda has not published a single article unmasking the decadence and de-
terioration of bourgeois literature . . . [or] castigating formalism, apoliticism, and
kowtowing to bourgeois culture,” wrote one critic indignantly.33 Oktiabr’, wrote
Aleksandr Makarov, had allowed the most important questions to fall outside its
field of vision. Even as Novyi mir published articles in issue after issue that castigated
the decadent bourgeois culture of the West, kowtowing, and cosmopolitanism—
here Makarov singled out for special attention Anatolii Tarasenkov’s article “Kos-
mopolity ot literaturovedeniia” (Cosmopolitans of Literary Scholarship, Novyi mir
2 [1948]) and Boris Iakovlev’s “Poet dlia estetov (Zametki o Velimire Khlebnikove
i o formalizme v poezii) (A Poet for Aesthetes [Notes on Velimir Khlebnikov and
Formalism in Poetry], Novyi mir 5 [1948])—Oktiabr’, following its “unprincipled dis-
cussion of Veselovsky,” had not published a single piece “exposing the remnants of
cosmopolitanism and bourgeois liberalism in literary scholarship.”34
The discussion of problems of literary scholarship took on dangerous ideologi-
cal connotations. Thus Tarasenkov, introducing his “analysis” of the works of Nus-
inov, Zhirmunsky, and Propp, wrote: “Contempt for Russia and her great ideas was
a characteristic of the Jesuit Bukharin, and of the outlaw ‘cosmopolitan’ Trotsky.
This is a stern reminder. They show us to what in contemporary political condi-
tions the spirit of kowtowing to Western bourgeois culture and civilization is kin,
and whom it serves. Under the flag of cosmopolitanism today are working the thugs
from the Churchill-Truman gang.”35
Meanwhile, the field of battle against the machinations of the “cosmopolitans”
was broadening. Criticism sought, and found, “characteristic examples of slavish im-
itation and exalted, even selfless worship before the reactionary, formalist aesthetics
of the bourgeois West”—whether it be the Slovar’ poeticheskikh terminov (Dictionary
of Poetic Terms) compiled by Aleksandr Kviatkovskii and edited by Sergei Bondi;
Mysli o rezhissure (Thoughts on Directing) by Vasilii Sakhnovskii, who was labeled
an “epigone of formalism, idealist aesthetics and reactionary historiography”; or a
syllabus for a general history of art for the art schools, the compilers of which (Viktor
Lazarev, Andrei Chegodaev, and Mikhail Alpatov) “belittle and impoverish Rus-
sian masters,” and who, when speaking of Spanish art of the seventeenth century,
for some reason “do not mention the avarice, obtuseness, and political mendacity of
the Spanish aristocracy.”36 Some cases were simply scandalous. Thus a certain Pri-
anishnikov, in one of the editions of the Chkalov Almanac, published his “Notes on
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace,” in which he explains the scene of Kutuzov reading a
novel by the French writer Genlis: this, it turns out, proves that “Tolstoy was a great
artist and patriot. As a true patriot, absolutely devoid of any rhetorical falseness or
pretense, Tolstoy had no fear that reading French novels would diminish Kutuzov’s
greatness.”37
An entire regiment of prose writers, poets, and especially playwrights—who
had created in a short period (1947 through the beginning of 1949) a sizable number
of suitable works, mainly the so-called patriotic plays (Boris Romashov’s Velikaia
sila [Great Force], Aleksandr Shtein’s Sud chesti [Court of Honor], August Iakobson’s
Dva lageria [Two Camps], Sergei Mikhalkov’s Il’ia Golovin, Simonov’s Chuzhaia ten’
[Alien Shadow], Anatolii Surov’s Zelenaia ulitsa [Green Time], the plays of Anatolii
Sofronov, and so on)—stood ready to “resolve the great patriotic theme.” The ascen-
dancy of these plays, in which ideological newspaper articles were transmitted into
the language of dialogues and monologues, brought forth a concealed (not always
coherent) resistance and muted dissatisfaction from various stage directors over the
quality of the literary material they were being offered.
The new wave of the anticosmopolitan campaign that had broken out in Janu-
ary 1949 was brought about by circumstances that had arisen in Stalin’s inner circle
after the unexpected death of Zhdanov in the summer of 1948. Georgii Malenkov
had now become Stalin’s anointed successor. Stalin nevertheless left the head of Ag-
itprop, Dmitrii Shepilov, in place as a counterweight. Fadeev, head of the Union
of Soviet Writers, saw Stalin’s disposition toward Shepilov as a threat to his own
power. Critics, many of whom were Jewish, had enjoyed the backing of Agitprop,
criticizing the highly mediocre works of Sofronov, Surov, and others. These authors
in turn pressured Fadeev to attack the critics, which would have also constituted an
attack upon their patron, Shepilov. The resolution of the January 1949 plenum of the
Union of Soviet Writers was relatively circumspect, referring to a “formalist criti-
cism, foreign to Soviet art,” claiming that a group of critics presented a “formalist
and aestheticist position” and were attempting to “discredit the positive phenom-
ena of Soviet dramaturgy” (Abram Gurvich, Iu. Iuzovskii, Leonid Maliugin, and
those critics “under their thumb”: Aleksandr Borshchagovskii, Grigorii Boiadzhiev,
Iakov Varshavskii; also mentioned were the “appeasers”: Iogann Al’tman and Efim
Kholodov).38 Although there was still some differentiation, the tone of the presenta-
tions by the participants in the plenum was sinister.
Shepilov, who oversaw Literaturnaia gazeta, ensured that the plenum was hardly
mentioned in it, but when on 23 December 1948 Fadeev managed to get Sofronov’s
article “Za dal’neishii rastsvet sovetskoi dramaturgii” (For the Further Flowering of
Soviet Dramaturgy) published in Pravda, which was not subject to Agitprop’s review,
Shepilov redrew the battle lines. On 23 January 1949 he personally sent Stalin a note
filled with political accusations against individual critics and complaints about the
“domination of individuals of Jewish nationality in the artistic unions.” This was the
genesis of an article about cosmopolitan critics, the publication of which in Pravda
would turn out to be the peak of the campaign, which now finally bubbled up to
the surface. A public denunciation of the cosmopolitans was made by Pravda on 28
January 1949 in its lead article, “Ob odnoi antipatrioticheskoi gruppe teatral’nykh
kritikov” (On One Anti-Patriotic Group of Theater Critics).39
From this point on, the campaign took on an openly anti-Semitic tone: “root-
less cosmopolitanism” and “antipatriotism” were linked to the Jewish nationality of
the critics under attack. All of this was occurring against the background of the ar-
rests of members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in January 1949, which in
turn had been preceded by the murder of Solomon Mikhoels in Minsk on 13 January
1948, and the dissolution of the Jewish Theater in Moscow among other things. Dis-
cussions of the “international Zionist conspiracy” leapt from the pages of practically
every publication. In articles—for which Pravda and Bol’shevik supplied the model—
about cosmopolitans (now the term rootless became obligatory), the Russian pseud-
onyms of writers were always revealed: if Efim Kholodov was being discussed, then
beside his name there would certainly stand, in parentheses, “Meerovich,” if Boris
Iakovlev, then in brackets would appear “Khol’tsman,” and so on.
Actively participating in these unprecedented discussions, and branding the
“criminal activities of an antipatriotic group of critics,” were the playwrights Surov,
Boris Romashov, Nikolai Pogodin, Vsevolod Vishnevsky, and Aleksandr Shtein; the
prose writers Arkadii Perventsev, Marietta Shaginyan, and Lev Nikulin; the poet
Nikolai Gribachev; and the critics Vladimir Ermilov and Aleksandr Makarov. The
“cosmopolitan critics” were compelled to acknowledge the existence of a group, or
conspiracy, and of coordinated, premeditated actions.40 The campaign reached its
peak in a series of journalistic profiles that exposed the “hideous physiognomy” of
the “rootless cosmopolitans.” Znamia published materials of this sort in issue after
issue; Zvezda methodically placed several articles in every issue about “so-called lit-
erary scholars”—the Leningraders Zhirmunsky, Boris Tomashevsky, Eikhenbaum,
Azadovsky, Grigorii Gukovsky, Lydia Ginzburg, and others—asserting the “deci-
sive ideological and political rout of bourgeois cosmopolitanism and formalism.”41
Novyi mir, edited by Simonov, participated in the campaign somewhat more calmly,
whereas Fedor Panferov’s Oktiabr’ set out with particular zeal. Having published
in its second issue Vitalii Ozerov’s article “Protiv estetstvuiushchikh kosmopoli-
tov” (Against the Aestheticizing Cosmopolitans), Oktiabr’ devoted the whole of its
third issue to the struggle against the cosmopolitans; articles published here included
Vasilii Ivanov’s “Diversiia kosmopolita Khol’tsmana” (Cosmopolitan Khol’tsman’s
Sabotage), Aleksandr Belik’s “Antipatriot Brovman” (Brovman the Antipatriot), and
Pyotr Izmest’ev’s “Do kontsa razgromim bezrodnykh kosmopolitov!” (Let Us Rout
the Rootless Cosmopolitans to the Finish!), which claimed that among the rootless
cosmopolitans could be found Andrei Platonov, “the bourgeois aesthete who in his
stories has slandered our reality.” The April issue featured an article by Belik and
Nikolai Parsadanov with the title “Ob oshibkakh i izvrashcheniiakh v estetike i lit-
eraturovedenii” (On Errors and Perversions in Aesthetics and Literary Scholarship),
which criticized Mark Rozental’, Boris Bialik, Boris Meilakh, and others.
In the vanguard of the battle was Literaturnaia gazeta, edited by Vladimir Er-
milov. In an article entitled “Estetstvuiushchie klevetniki” (Aestheticizing Slander-
ers), Anatolii Surov wrote about Iuzovskii and Gurvich as people who “belittle great
Russian drama”: Iuzovskii celebrated “that degenerate in art, Meyerhold” and scoffed
at the positive heroes of Soviet drama, while Gurvich “portrayed the process of the
growth and formation of our youthful Soviet dramaturgy as the process of the decay
of drama as an art form” and “ascribed to our people the ancient defect of Asiatic
ignorance and indolence.”42 Another “renegade cosmopolitan,” Boris Dairedzhiev,
“slandered” Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel Kak zakalialas’ stal’ (How the Steel Was Tem-
pered) and declared that “in Tajikistan, contemporary plays such as Platon Krechet
were landing with a thud.” In a word, he was a “leftist loudmouth, alien and harmful
to our people,” a “degenerate,” an “unhinged, gung-ho cosmopolitan who allowed
himself to openly come out against the party line,” an “experienced, consummate
double-dealer” who “persecuted” honest writers.43 Zinovii Papernyi devoted his ar-
ticle to Lev Subotskii, the distinctive “leader of the antipatriotic group of literary
critics.” Paperny reported that his “protagonist” “endeavored to sully our people,
to sling mud at them” by asserting that “the literature of the Great Patriotic War
abounds in purely contrived and unrealistic heroes,” that Boris Polevoy’s Meres’ev
was a “poorly thought out, impoverished image” in contrast to the heroes of Andrei
Platonov.44 Pogodin discussed the cosmopolitans’ “critical sabotage” and “damag-

ing work.”45 In an article entitled “O korniakh kosmopolitizma i estetstva” (On the
Roots of Cosmopolitanism and Aestheticism), Boris Romashov wrote about how
the forefather of the cosmopolitans—Vsevolod Meyerhold—was the “Herostratus
of the Russian theater.”46 The journal Teatr (Theater), whose editorial board had al-
ready been “decisively revamped,” “specialized” in exposing the “cosmopolitans.”47
The circle of supposed cosmopolitans widened, at the expense of literary critics:
Daniil Danin, that “aestheticizing, vindictive critic, . . . whose malicious work was
aimed directly against our people”; Boris Bialik, that “cosmopolitan theorist who
sought to revise socialist realism”; and Fedor Levin, a “consummate arch-cosmopol-
itan and aesthete,” who had criticized before the war Chapaev, Kak zakalialas’ stal’,
Tanker Derbent (The Tanker Derbent), Pedagogicheskia poema (Pedagogical Poem), and Flagi
na bashniakh (Flags on the Turrets), showing “the moral character of a bulldog,” and,
after the war, he “slandered” a book of short stories by Boris Polevoy and sang the
praises of Emmanuil Kazakevich and Boris Pasternak.48 In summary, Levin “came
out against the entire Soviet way of life, against our party and Soviet press.”49
Did these so-called cosmopolitan critics, upon whom such wrath rained down
from above, really say anything seditious? Efim Kholodov, literally half a year before
the Pravda lead article, had written against the “loathsome” ideas of cosmopolitan-
ism, whose presence “in our midst is nothing short of ideological sabotage by the en-
emy.”50 In various ways, Konstantin Rudnitskii, Lev Subotskii, and Iakov Varshavskii
all had loyally supported the party line in glorifying the new novels and plays that
represented the “happy people, happy contemporary heroes of the Soviet land,
whose labor and feats radiate with the great light of the ideas of communism.”51 Thus
the critics who would later be accused of antipatriotism not only did not say any-
thing antipatriotic, but on the contrary, they generally regarded “patriotic drama-
turgy” positively. The anticosmopolitan campaign was the first public anti-Semitic
ideological action, and it is precisely this ethnic criterion that explains the choice of
critics who filled the role of the antipatriots.
Although the campaign abated after the frenzy of 1949, its reverberations can
also be found later.52 Its most important result was the birth in the bowels of the
party-state system of a group of Stalinist anti-Semites for whom internationalist
rhetoric became a convenient ideological cover for plainly fascist views, the so-called
Russian Party, which in the following decade made itself known in the sphere of
culture and literature in particular. Anti-Semitic punitive measures, from the de-
struction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to the Doctors’ Plot and the struggle
against cosmopolitanism, gave prominence to a new crop of “ideological cadres”
(who would have an especially strong influence in the literary world) and facilitated
the institutionalization of a system of purges on the basis of ethnic status.53 All of this
would become familiar in the 1960s and would to a large extent determine the reor-
ganization of literary forces in the Era of Stagnation, boil over into open ideological
warfare during perestroika, and ultimately flow into the so-called red-brown ideol-
ogy in post-Soviet Russia.
Postwar Literary Criticism and Socialist Realist Aesthetics
Like Soviet aesthetic theory, Soviet criticism, as Boris Groys so eloquently put
it, “can be seen as an integral part of socialist realism, and not its meta-description.”54
One could furthermore claim that criticism in socialist realism represents a culture-
generating phenomenon: as an institution and a discourse it self-generates the social-
ist realist text. In this sense postwar criticism presents particular interest, since it is
there that socialist realism expressed itself most consistently: neither in the prewar
period, when it was still being established as the theory and practice of “state art,”
nor in the post-Stalin period, when the basic work of its theoreticians boiled down to
somehow connecting literature, which was gradually departing from the dogma, to
the earlier aesthetic doctrine, did socialist realism reveal itself in such pure form as it
did in the culture of late Stalinism.
The prescriptive character of postwar criticism was firmly established in its
treatment of the problem of aesthetic norms. The normativity of socialist realism
was at this time proclaimed openly: “Our aesthetics,” wrote Boris Meilakh, “must
not fear charges of normativity. The normativity of Soviet aesthetics is founded
. . . upon the most advanced theory—Marxism-Leninism—and upon the artistic
demands of our present socialist day and of our people. . . . [It is] perfectly appropri-
ate in our day . . . to speak of the normativity of our aesthetics . . . [and] about the
refining of our ‘aesthetic code’—the aesthetics of socialist realism.”55 Still more con-
sistent was Iogann Al’tman: “‘A norm?’ we are asked. ‘Yes,’ we answer. The norms of
Marxist-Leninist aesthetics are compulsory for all. . . . This is the method of social-
ist realism, with its concrete demands for art and artistic criticism. This is the great
Bolshevik ideological content, which is obligatory for the Soviet artist and critic. We
believe that for us, this is a compulsory norm.”56
In opposition to normativity stood, for example, Aleksandr Borshchagovskii
and Anatolii Tarasenkov.57 In particular, the latter wrote in the journal Bol’shevik:
“The attempt to turn socialist realism into a collection of literary canons can only
harm the growth of Soviet art. The scholastic attempts of certain critics and liter-
ary scholars to turn the method of socialist realism into some kind of ‘normative
aesthetics’ dictating devices and techniques to writers, to be used now and forever,
are flawed at their very foundation. The method of socialist realism is particularly
sturdy in that, without tying writers down to a catalogue of such devices, it sets their
work on the path of securing the advancement and success of our literature.”58
The struggle of the “proper” (dolzhnyi) against the “improper” (nedolzhnyi) was
central to socialist realism. Its aesthetics operates by means of a set of oppositions
(realism versus romanticism, conflict [konfliktnost’] versus “conflictlessness” [bes-
konfliktnost’], “varnishing of reality” [lakirovka deistvitel’nosti] versus “living truth”
[zhiznennaia pravda], and so on). The balancing of these scales comprises the very sub-
stance of Soviet critical discourse.
The aesthetic consensus arrived at in the 1930s can be reduced to an understand-
ing of socialist realism as the “merging” of realism and romanticism. However, in
the course of the discussion on the pages of Oktiabr’ in 1947–1948, this foundational
premise of socialist realist aesthetics yielded unexpected consequences. In the article

that opened the discussion, “Zadachi literaturnoi kritiki” (The Tasks of Literary
Criticism, Oktiabr’ 7 [1947]), Fadeev insisted on the “split” between realist and ro-
mantic elements in the “old realism” and defined socialist realism as a method that
had restored this broken connection in a qualitatively new synthesis. Boris Bialik’s
apparently innocent appeal to writers to “lift up reality,” make it “poetic” and “lofty,
thus “fusing” realism and romanticism, amounted in effect to questioning and upset-
ting the balance that was asserted by Zhdanov at the First Congress of Soviet Writ-
ers (in which socialist realism reflects “a combination of the most stern and sober
practical work with the loftiest heroism and grandiose perspectives”59).60 The call to
“lift up” and “romanticize” reality made manifest the rupture that actually existed
between reality and that which would come “tomorrow”—if reality needed to be
“lifted up,” then it must itself be insufficiently “romantic.” This thesis was in need of
prompt correction. The task fell to the editor in chief of Literaturnaia gazeta, Vladimir
Ermilov, the Belinsky of socialist realism as this “artistic method” had no theoreti-
cian, before or after him, so well suited to its aesthetics and ethics.
Ermilov’s Literaturnaia gazeta took a line on this issue that was not so much accu-
satory (as had been the case more than once in the past) as methodically recuperative.
In several consecutive issues, Ermilov published his sizable work “Za boevuiu teoriiu
literatury!” (For a Militant Theory of Literature!) in which he asserted the formula
“beauty is our life.” “In our Soviet life,” argued Ermilov, “poetry and romanticism
have become reality itself. We have no conflict between the wondrous and the real,
and this is why our artists seek the source of beauty and romance not apart from
public life and affairs, but within them.”61 Bialik’s thinking was incorrect, Ermilov
asserted, because from it followed the notion that realism, the artistic study of actual
reality, in itself offers nothing affirmative, nothing positive, and therefore negates
entirely the romance of reality, its poetry. Meanwhile, “our actual reality itself, in its
sober, matter-of-fact, quotidian existence, is romantic, it is profoundly poetic in its
internal essence—this is one of the foundational principles in defining the essence of
socialist realism.”62
Ermilov’s concept of the “real romanticism of our socialist reality” removed in
one fell swoop all of the contradictions that were arising. If “among the top pos-
tulates of our aesthetics must be a postulate on poetry and the romanticism of our
real socialist reality,” then “Chernyshevsky’s famous thesis, beauty is life, can be re-
codified for us in our time as a postulate meaning that beauty is our socialist reality,
our victorious movement toward communism.”63 Ermilov’s “militant theory of lit-
erature” reigned until 1952, fueled by the idea, formulated in the second half of the
1930s, that—consistent with the notion of the linear development of humanity from
capitalism to communism— in the phase of socialism “there cannot be not only an-
tagonistic, but also nonantagonistic contradictions,” that even the very “possibility
of contradictions and conflicts is excluded.”64
A new trajectory emerged at the beginning of 1952 when a lead article in Pravda
declared, “we need Gogols and Shchedrins,” and the same paper featured (in its issue
of 7 April) a lead article entitled “Preodolet’ otstavanie dramaturgii” (To Overcome
the Lagging of Dramaturgy). This orientation was affirmed in the keynote address
at the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952 when Malenkov stated: “We need Soviet
Gogols and Shchedrins, who, using the flame of satire, would scorch from our life
all that is negative, rotten, and deadened, everything that holds back our forward
motion.”65 From here was unfurled a broad campaign in criticism, in the course of
which the “theory of conflictlessness,” “varnishing of reality,” and “illustrativeness,”
was rejected amid calls in favor of the “truth of life,” the representation of “con-
flicts,” the rebirth of satire, and so forth.
This turn was being realized throughout all the conventions governing the ide-
ological mechanism. All that was needed was to reanimate and actualize the call to
“merciless self-criticism,” as well as those sections of Zhdanov’s speeches about the
journals Zvezda and Leningrad, in which he spoke about how, “in selecting the best
feelings and qualities of Soviet man, revealing to him his tomorrow, we must at the
same time show our people how they must not be; we must castigate the remnants of
yesterday, the remnants that prevent Soviet people from moving forward.”66
When all this “ideological wealth” had been reanimated, criticism needed to
“see clearly to what an enormous, truly inestimable role our art has been called in
the consolidation of the new, socialist structure, in the routing and annihilation of
the enemies of socialism, in the unmasking of all that hinders the movement toward
communism.”67 In an article with the suggestive title “Otritsatel’nye obrazy i nepri-
mirimost’ pisatelia” (Negative Characters and the Implacability of the Writer), the
critic and literary functionary Boris Riurikov wrote:
Soviet literature has a venerable tradition of showing the positive hero, the
leading champion of his epoch, the inspired fighter for the victory of the
people’s cause. But also included in its most venerable traditions is the tradition
of the unmasking of the enemy. If one does not know how to hate, one cannot
genuinely love, as Gorky taught. And if our society and state unmask and sternly
punish enemies of the people and of our social system, then the same punishment,
the same judgment of the representatives of the old world must be meted out by
Soviet literature.68
The prosecutorial lexicon of the 1930s was quickly returning to literature. The shift
in ideology that had occurred in 1952 was directly related to the changes that had
come to a head at the top of the government: historians are unanimous in their view
that the death of Stalin saved the nation from a new wave of repressions that would
have been as large in scale as those of 1937–1938. All signs of a gathering storm ap-
peared repeatedly in literature. The shift of the ideological trajectory in 1952 directly
reflected this process, and, judging by the scope, breadth, and intensiveness of the
campaign that had begun, it came straight from Stalin.
Here the new line finds a balance: “the heightening of class struggle” and the
demand for “vigilance” does not annul the “beauty of our life.” Thus, in the thick
of the struggle against conflictlessness, Literaturnaia gazeta published a lead article en-
titled “Uchebnik zhizni” (The Textbook of Life), in which was formulated a kind of
counterbalancing tendency: “The Soviet reader—and the Soviet reader is the people
as a whole!—wants to see the image of the Soviet man, the hero of peaceful, con-
structive labor, portrayed in all of his colossal height, in all the wealth and multifac-
etedness of his character and his fate.”69 But in the same issue of the newspaper was
a long article, also by Riurikov, that ended with the threat: “writers who do not see
(or pretend not to see) the reality of the influence of the old, who do not accurately
reflect the vital conflicts, writers who portray life as blue-skied and idyllic, violate
the severe truth of our era—the era of difficult, but beautiful and heroic tasks.”70
The campaign against conflictlessness was not supposed to conclude with any
change in literary policy. It was pursuing political and ideological goals, reorienting
social consciousness into the confrontational mentality of the prewar and wartime
model. Therefore when in January 1953 the engineered threat of a Doctors’ Plot was
publicly floated it was conceived as a prologue to the unfurling of a new wave of re-
pressions but signaled, in fact, the final act of Stalinist terror, the public discourse of
1937 was already fully revived. Literaturnaia gazeta wrote on that occasion:
The literature and art of our nation must help Soviet people develop within
themselves those qualities that are necessary for the recognition of the enemy. . . .
The party teaches Soviet writers that the struggle against the theory of conflict-
lessness is not an end in itself, that the demand to strengthen the depiction of the
struggle of our people . . . is dictated by reality itself. Love for the motherland
is inextricable from hatred for the enemy, and hatred is action! . . . Vigilance
must become an organic quality of every Soviet person. Vigilance, and again
vigilance!71
Or, as Tamara Trifonova put it in Zvezda,
Those who maintain that the depiction of enemy agents, espionage, sabotage, and
so on, cannot serve as material for “high art” are deeply mistaken. Such opinions
are flawed at the root, above all because they incorrectly pose the issue of the
typical. Can we really say that the attempts of those who ignited the war, the at-
tempts of the enemies of our nation to sap the strength of the Soviet Union from
within, are incidental and atypical facts? Of course not. Such attempts express
the essence of the misanthropic bourgeois world and its relationship to the world
of socialism, that is to say, they are completely typical. The regularity of such
phenomena was exhaustively revealed by comrade Stalin in 1937. . . . From this
it becomes clear that to speak of the atypicality of such forms of struggle is to
facilitate the atrophy of vigilance in the very historical epoch in which vigilance
is most needed.72
The problem of the typical became, after Ermilov’s “militant theory of litera-
ture,” socialist realism’s next stage of development: the “calibration” of positive and
negative elements in the depiction of reality began, and all subsequent decades of
socialist realist criticism were at base occupied by a similar process of regulation in
search of a stable norm. A fluctuation in norms, as we have already seen, was impos-
sible in Stalinist culture, and therefore the notion of the typical was understood as
formulated by Malenkov in the Central Committee Report to the Nineteenth Party
Congress: “typicality corresponds to the essence of a given socio-historical phenom-

enon. . . . The typical is the fundamental sphere in which party-mindedness mani-
fests itself in realist art. The problem of typicality is always a political problem.”73
Criticism was given the task of the “revelation of essence” and, on this basis, the
determination of the level of typicality. Before 1952 the problem of the typical was
resolved relatively easily: the good was typical, the bad atypical. In a book on Alek-
sandr Korneichuk, for instance, Mikhail Parkhomenko proceeded from the prem-
ise that everything negative was “a clear exception from our life,” and the negative
features of reality “stand out as monstrous and are becoming exceptional, standing
in contrast to . . . the beautiful, together with the typical.” Following Ermilov’s for-
mula, Parkhomenko argued that the “exception from the advanced” was the “excep-
tion from the typical.”74
At the beginning of 1953, however, Ermilov’s formula looked completely differ-
ent than it had even in 1950:
The artist must portray the struggle of the new against the old not only as a
struggle between the progressive and the reactionary, the moral and the immoral,
the good and the bad, but also as the struggle of the beautiful against the ugly
[urodlivoe]. In art, aesthetic evaluation must be in accord with ethical and political
evaluation. Beauty in our life is the perfection of our communist ideal, the reality
of this ideal. What is beautiful in our life is that in which even today we can
clearly glimpse the features of communism: the face of the new man, developed
in many different ways, his deeds, and his active struggle against the ugly: the
remnants of bourgeois ideology, egoism, individualism, and petty-bourgeois
mentality in our life. The struggle between the beautiful and the ugly therefore
represents the objective law of our life.75
Since this “problem of aesthetic evaluation . . . is directly connected to the concept of
the typical as a fundamental sphere in which party-mindedness becomes manifest in
realistic art,” it followed that the “typical” should be distinguished from the “mass.”76
For “typicality by no means always coincides with massness—singular phenomena
can also be typical—but their typicality consists in the fact that they arise logically in
certain conditions, they are brought about by particular reasons, they are revealed in
the process of their development.”77
As is apparent, the campaign against conflictlessness and varnishing was orga-
nized with strictly utilitarian political goals and was by no means intended to make
literature begin to represent genuine, true-to-life conflicts. But with the death of
Stalin, this regulated process spun out of control. The criticism of conflictlessness
and varnishing began to lose the boundaries and functions that had been inherent to
it within Stalinist culture. In the struggle against conflictlessness, arguments were
hammered out that would be impossible to liquidate with the ease with which they
could have been liquidated a few years earlier. Thus, in 1954 this whole dialectic of
the typical and the mass was flipped. Now it was asserted that, on the contrary, “it is
precisely the attempt to record the truth in its individuality and uniqueness that is the
necessary condition and stimulus of the development of the artist’s personality. . . .
Outside of this can exist only naturalistic hair-splitting and sterile scribbling for the
consumption of literary gourmets.”78
The repudiation of conflictlessness was the beginning of an extended phase of
tacking and calibrating after the death of Stalin, which to a great extent colored the
discussions leading up to the Second Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers. Now
even those who had called for a return to the earlier situation could not ignore the
new circumstances and were compelled to disassociate themselves from conflictless-
ness. “We do not need books about ‘holidays’—cold, monumental, and antiseptic
works in which life is polished to a garish shine. Writers who have staked out a po-
sition promoting the ‘theory of conflictlessness’ have regaled us enough with such
works. We need festive [prazdnichnaia] literature, not literature about ‘holidays,’ and
specifically festive literature that elevates man above minutiae and happenstance,
deliberately selecting and typifying the most important phenomena of life,” wrote
Arkadii El’iashevich.79 These awkward, ambiguous appeals are quite characteristic of
the new situation.
In the absence of the institutional support of Stalinism,80 socialist realism’s vi-
ability came so much into question that in the course of the discussions on the eve of
the Second Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers the organizers were forced to
artificially create the straw man of the “ideal hero” in order to save socialist realist
theory, initiating its painstaking process of reform (which would, incidentally, drag
on over the next three decades). The theory of the “ideal hero,” to which not even
Ermilov had agreed in the 1940s, was successfully defeated, and in this way, social-
ist realism was saved—and would remain on life support until its death in the era of
perestroika.
 LITERARY CRITICISM
9
DURING THE THAW
EVGENY DOBRENKO and ILYA KALININ
Criticism and Literary Policy after Stalin
While the beginning of the post-Stalin era is clearly marked as March 1953, its
end is less clearly defined. Although the political end of the Thaw was announced by
the resolution of the October plenary session of the Central Committee of the Com-
munist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1964 to remove Nikita Khrushchev
from power, in many other respects the Thaw continued for another few years, for
example in the sphere of economy with the Kosygin reforms and in international
relations at least until the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. From the point
of view of cultural history, the Thaw continued at least until the trial of Andrei Sin-
yavsky and Yuli Daniel in the winter of 1966, an event that marked not only the
end of liberalization and social criticism (Daniel was sentenced first and foremost
for writing satire), but also delineated the limits of literary criticism (Sinyavsky was
known above all as a critic writing for Novyi mir and was sentenced, among other
things, for his famous lampoon “Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm” (What Is So-
cialist Realism). Then there was the Fourth Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers
in the spring of 1967, during which a significant number of the most outstanding
writers (more than eighty people) supported Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s call for an end
to censorship. And yet, the last instance was Alexander Tvardovsky leaving the post
184
LITERARY CRITICISM DURING THE THAW  185
of editor in chief of the journal Novyi mir in February 1970. The defeat of Novyi mir,
which had been the center of the liberal intelligentsia, marked the end of the Thaw.
In fact, this moment was the beginning of the “epoch of the 1970s,” later called the
Era of Stagnation (zastoi) and creeping re-Stalinization.
In the field of literature the Thaw, which stood out for previously unseen dyna-
mism, began with literary criticism. Literary criticism established itself during the
very first months after Stalin’s death as an important political and ideological factor;
even before the publication of Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel Ottepel’ (The Thaw) there had
been Olga Berggol’ts article on lyric poetry and Vladimir Pomerantsev’s “Ob iskren-
nosti v literature” (On Sincerity in Literature), both of which had caused a sensa-
tion. Only a year later, Mikhail Lifshits’s pamphlet “Dnevnik Marietty Shaginian”
(The Diary of Marietta Shaginyan), Fedor Abramov’s articles about the varnishing
in “kolkhoz prose,” and Mark Shcheglov’s reviews were published. After the Second
Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in December 1954, the most odious figures
in the union (Anatolii Sofronov and Nikolai Gribachev) were forced out. Instead,
Konstantin Fedin and Nikolai Tikhonov, who were less compromised, were nomi-
nated as leaders. The new rise of liberalization was a result of the events of 1956. In
March, straight after the Twentieth Party Congress, the first volume of the almanac
Literaturnaia Moskva appeared. In August, Daniil Granin’s short story “Sobstvennoe
mnenie” (An Opinion of One’s Own) was published, Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel Ne
khlebom edinym (Not by Bread Alone) featured in the August–October issues of Novyi
mir, and in September Semyon Kirsanov’s poem “Sem’ dnei nedeli” (The Seven Days
of the Week) saw the light of day. However, after the events in Hungary at the end of
October 1956, these authors and their works increasingly came under attack.
Khrushchev’s warning cries during meetings with intellectuals in May 1957 and
then in July 1959, as well as in his speech at the Third Congress of the Union of So-
viet Writers in May 1959, were immediately picked up by the officious critics (Vitalii
Ozerov, Vasilii Novikov, and others), who had divided writers into those who were
“always with the party, always with the people,” that is, those who had “defended
the principles” in 1953–1956 (Vsevolod Kochetov, Aleksei Surkov, Alexander Fadeev,
Galina Nikolaeva, Sofronov, Gribachev, Boris Gorbatov, Konstantin Simonov, and
Boris Polevoy), and those who “stir up” the situation (Ehrenburg, Dudintsev, Ve-
niamin Kaverin, Granin, Vladimir Tendriakov, Konstantin Paustovsky, Aleksandr
Iashin, and Margarita Aliger, among others). The second half of the 1950s saw the
birth of two currents that would define Soviet literature in the decades to come,
namely village prose and war prose. In late 1958 a campaign against Boris Pasternak
began, orchestrated by the government and aimed at his novel Doctor Zhivago, which
had won him the Nobel Prize.1
However, the Twenty-Second Party Congress in October 1961 marked the
starting point of much more decisive de-Stalinization, with the criticism of “Stalin’s
crimes” culminating in the removal of his body from Lenin’s Mausoleum. The year
1962 entered history as the apogee of liberalism, marked by the publication of Alex-
ander Solzhenitsyn’s Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).
At the start of the 1960s, there was also a boom in poetry. Collections by Evgeny
186  EVGENY DOBRENKO AND ILYA K ALININ
Evtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Robert Rozhdestvensky,

Vladimir Sosnora, Boris Kushner, and Aleksandr Mezhirov appeared in close suc-
cession. The surge in critical activity was linked to the publication of Evtushenko’s
poem “Babii Yar” in Literaturnaia gazeta on 19 September 1962 and his “Nasledniki
Stalina” (The Heirs of Stalin) in Literaturnaia gazeta of 21 October 1962. Later in the
year the Tarusskie Stranitsy (Pages from Tarusa) came out, a kind of sequel to the al-
manac Literaturnaia Moskva that had been forced to discontinue. This anthology, and
the discussion it stimulated, pointed out the direction Russian literature would take
over the next quarter of a century.
However, after Khrushchev’s meeting with artists in December 1962 the next
backlash began. In early 1963 Komsomol’skaia Pravda started a two-month campaign
against Evtushenko, following the publication of his autobiography in the West.
Critics participated in such campaigns not only as the executioners of party orders,
but also in their real function as exponents of certain aesthetic positions. For ex-
ample, in the popular “clash between the physicists and the lyricists” the officious
critics sided with the lyricists (the independent-thinking liberal technocrats—the
physicists—were considered lacking in political loyalty), while the liberal critics ac-
tively supported experimental tendencies in art. The genre of the literary manifesto
reemerged for the first time since the 1920s, a result of the new direction literature
itself was taking. Vladimir Turbin’s sensational 1961 book Tovarishch vremia i tova-
rishch isskustvo (Comrade Time and Comrade Art), which translated the “clash be-
tween the physicists and the lyricists” from the language of poetry (Voznesensky,
Evtushenko, and Boris Slutsky) into the language of aesthetics and literary history,
belongs to this genre. The book became the subject of a serious polemic on social is-
sues. It is sufficient to mention the article “Chelovek za bortom” (Man Overboard)
by Sergei Bocharov, Vadim Kozhinov, and Petr Palievskii, in which they claimed
that Turbin’s book, enthusiastically greeted by the “progressive camp” and “filled
with unbridled enthusiasm for the scientific and technical progress of our era, seem-
ingly all geared toward the attainment of exactly the same progress in art and cre-
ative thought, is trying to outline paths for this progress that would lead art to
. . . inevitable devastation”; the author’s attitude to “artistic heritage” was declared
“advanced obscurantism.”2
The young generation of prose writers was the subject of another active criti-
cal debate. The majority of representatives of both officious and socially oriented
criticism expressed their rejection of the youth prose published in the journal Iunost’.
The reason was that the heroes of Vasilii Aksenov and Anatoly Gladilin, among oth-
ers, in their “lack of ideology” (“Bilet, no kuda?” [A ticket, but where to?], Leonard
Lavlinskii asked Aksenov, the author of Zvezdnyi billet [A Ticket to the Stars], from
the pages of Komsomol’skaia Pravda3) and their “divorce from society,” reminded the
Soviet critics of Erich Maria Remarque, while bearing not the slightest resemblance
to Pavel Korchagin (Remarquism was considered unacceptable for a Soviet person).4
The very infrastructure of literature changed during the Thaw years. Begin-
ning in 1955, a host of new journals appeared: Iunost’, Neva, Inostrannaia literatura (re-
placing Internatsional’naia literatura, which had been closed down in 1943), Druzhba
narodov (transformed from an almanac into a monthly journal), Nash Sovremennik

(founded 1956), and Voprosy literatury (founded 1957). The journal Molodaia gvardiia re-
sumed publication in 1956. In 1956 the journals Don (Rostov-on-Don) and Pod”em
(Voronezh) were founded, widening the geographical borders of the new cultural
policy. In 1958 the newspaper Literatura i zhizn’ (subsequently Literaturnaia Rossiia) was
founded, Den’ poezii began to appear, and the publishing house Sovetskaia Rossiia
(Soviet Russia, 1957) was set up alongside many others. The number of literary jour-
nals and publishing houses in the provinces and republics of the Soviet Union rose
sharply.
The makeup of literature changed, too. The rehabilitation and republication
of repressed writers, such as Isaac Babel, Boris Pilnyak, Artem Veselyi, Aleksandr
Voronskii, Pavel Vasil’ev, Boris Kornilov, as well as those never mentioned earlier,
such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Ivan Bunin,
among others, changed the literary landscape. It is significant that these writers were
promoted not so much by critics as by other writers—Ehrenburg, Simonov, Viktor
Nekrasov, Paustovsky, Kaverin, whose introductions to their books basically pro-
tected these writers from ideological attacks. The publication (1960–1965) of Ehren-
burg’s memoirs Liudi, gody, zhizn’ (People, Years, Life) in Novyi mir fundamentally
changed the established perceptions about Soviet cultural and literary life and broad-
ened the international and aesthetic context of Soviet literary history.
Thus a new generation was entering literature, while those who had been de-
leted from literary history during the preceding decades were returning; the writer-
bureaucrats who had flourished during the Stalin years were being pushed back. All
this was accompanied not only by measures organized by the official apparatus, but
also by the formation of a new mechanism for managing literature.
The social and ideological changes triggered by the Thaw found expression in
the literary polemics that flared up regularly. Many of them were reactions to liter-
ary texts that had caused a sensation (Ehrenburg’s Ottepel’, Dudintsev’s Ne khlebom
edinym, Solzhenitsyn’s Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha), literary events (the campaigns
in connection with the publication of the above-mentioned almanac Literaturnaia
Moskva and the collection Tarusskie Stranitsy, the scandalous publication in 1965 of
a volume of the series Literaturnoe nasledstvo dedicated to Vladimir Mayakovsky, and
Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago), and harsh critical statements (the articles of
Pomerantsev, Mark Shcheglov, Mikhail Lifshits, and Fedor Abramov in Novyi mir).
Each of these debates turned into a campaign, with attacks and counterattacks or-
chestrated by the party and literary leaders. There were also attempts at channelling
public polemic into an acceptable direction with the help of so-called literary discus-
sions, which were a common occurrence during the Thaw years. Since the literary
discourse was at the same time also a political discourse, the purpose of these discus-
sions was not so much aesthetic as political and ideological.
The example was set by the so-called precongress debate on the eve of the Sec-
ond Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, which was convened twenty years
after the first congress.5 In this debate two subjects were singled out that were to
become paradigmatic: the “debate on the ideal hero” and the “debate on lyricism.”
The first debate began on 13 July 1954, when Komsomol’skaia Pravda published
a letter by A. Protopopova entitled “Sila polozhitel’nogo primera” (The Strength
of the Positive Example), in which she defended the most odious works of postwar
literature, from Semyon Babaevskii’s Kavaler Zolotoi Zvezdy (Cavalier of the Gold
Star) to Aleksandr Andreev’s Shirokoe techenie (Broad Current), and demanded that
literature create the “ideal hero.” She claimed that “the ideal hero of our days exists
in Soviet reality” and that “the creation of the image of the ideal hero” was “a fun-
damental issue of contemporary Soviet literature.” The article caused a scandal, as
the concept of the ideal hero was taboo in Soviet criticism, which over the last years
had stated that the romantic had become the everyday, that is, the ideal had become
real. Even during the Stalin years, when literature was reflecting exclusively “the
truth of life in its revolutionary development,” the critics had not been able to defend
the ideal hero. Thus the ideal hero was created as an antipode to the articles that
warned against “varnishing reality” (just a few months earlier, in the fourth issue of
Novyi mir for 1954, Fedor Abramov’s sensational article “Liudi kolkhoznoi derevni
v poslevoennoi proze” [The People of the Kolkhoz Village in Postwar Prose] had
denounced this very tendency in prose as varnished and false).
The entire debate took the form of criticizing both extremes, both the “anti-
varnishers” (antilakirovshchiki) and those who called for idealization. As a result, the
authors of “varnished” kolkhoz novels, such as Grigorii Medynskii and Galina
Nikolaeva, had to explain why the ideal hero was bad. It is worth noting that the
“problem of the ideal hero,” which liberal critics had come to see as a synonym of
“varnishing,” remained a topic of debate throughout the Thaw years. Using differ-
ent labels (“the image of our contemporary,” “the simple great man,” the “hero of
our days”), the party-loyal critics continued to ask for “heroic characters,” claim-
ing, even ten years after the Second Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, at the
very end of the Thaw, that “we have still not had a real conversation about the ideal
hero.”6
While the debate on the ideal hero was mainly aimed at the reader, creating a
certain “ideologically restrained” discourse about varnishing, the second debate—
on lyric poetry—raised questions that were of real professional importance to writ-
ers. By the end of the Stalin era, Soviet poetry was gradually turning into rhymed
ideology, consisting of verse production dedicated to the “struggle for peace,” “work
days,” and eulogies to the leader. The main figures of this poetry were, on the one
hand, quasi-civic poets from Simonov to Surkov and Gribachev and, on the other,
the “folkish” poets (poety-pesenniki) from Mikhail Isakovskii and Alexander Tvar
dovsky to Mikhail Matusovskii. The first to address the problems of Soviet poetry,
literally a month after Stalin’s death, was Olga Berggol’ts in her article “Razgovor o
lirike” (A Conversation about Lyric Poetry), in which she rehabilitated the concept
of the “lyric hero,” calling for greater emancipation, subjectivity, and, even before
Vladimir Pomerantsev’s article, sincerity.7 Margarita Aliger continued this debate in
the journal Znamia, and in Literaturnaia gazeta it was Ilya Sel’vinsky who openly criti-
cized the “folkish” poets.8 The polemic reached its peak with Nikolai Gribachev’s
article “‘Violonchelist’ poluchil kanifol’” (The “Chellist” Got Rosin, Literaturnaia
gazeta 126 [21 October 1954]). Berggol’ts retorted with the article “Protiv likvidatsii
liriki” (Against the Annihilation of Lyric Poetry), in which she practically reiterated
the thoughts expressed by Pomerantsev, just that she replaced “sincerity” in relation
to poetry with the no less “dangerous” concept of “lyric self-expression,” which led
to accusations of “subjectivism” and “loss of contact with socialist reality.”9 And yet
a breakthrough had been achieved: the concepts of the lyric hero and self-expression
were reinstated into the language of literary criticism, and it was under their cover
that a new generation of poets stepped onto the literary scene.
At the same time, the “organizers of the literary process” in the Central Com-
mittee’s Department for Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) and on the editorial
boards of the journals continued their efforts to prevent spontaneous critical state-
ments by organizing discussions that would make the “dispute” manageable and
that, by simulating the “identification of the problem” and the formulation of serious
questions, would achieve the required consensus. In 1960 there was a discussion on
the contemporary hero in Voprosy literatury, preceded in 1958–1959 by a discussion
on the distinctive features of the present time in the journal Oktiabr’.10 While the
discussion on modernity in literature dealt mainly with questions of how to “cor-
rectly depict” Soviet everyday life, the discussion of the contemporary in life and
literature was meant to further the formation of a new discourse on the “hero of
Soviet literature.”
The journal Voprosy literatury hosted a debate on realism in the first half of 1958,
initiated by Boris Reizov’s article “O literaturnykh napravleniiakh” (On Literary
Currents), which attempted to soften the rigidity of existing classifications.11 In
drawing the conclusions of the debate, Iakov El’sberg already openly talked about
the need to follow the generalizing schemes that developed during the Stalin era, the
rejection of which was seen as almost akin to political dissent: “Reactionary liter-
ary theory and criticism regard realism as their main enemy. By rejecting realism
they fight against socialist realism; by ignoring the classical realist traditions they re-
nounce the contemporary progressive literature that remains faithful to these tradi-
tions; by trying to confine realism to the archive they clear the way for various kinds
of antirealist modernist tendencies.”12 Although this anti-revisionist position was
consolidated for the next two decades, it must be admitted that the very existence of
such a discussion, as well as the positions that were expressed, encouraged a tentative
revision of the theory of socialist realism.13 Thus at the all-union meeting on ques-
tions of socialist realism, which took place at IMLI on the eve of the Third Congress
of the Union of Soviet Writers in April 1959, the key notions had already been “the
multisidedness of artistic form” and “the creative individuality of the writer” (both
entrenched in the discourse of literary criticism during the following decades). For
the first time now people spoke about the coexistence of different “stylistic currents”
within socialist realism and contended that allegory did not contradict “historical
concreteness.”14 All these topics had been taboo during the Stalin era.
During the Thaw literary criticism became a structure-building element in the
public sphere, which had made a return under Khrushchev, even more so than in
the 1920s, when there had still been political debates and strife between opposing
groups and parties. It was literary criticism that created the public voice. As David
Samoilov remarked, “society, which had been divided by fear, was searching for
unity, was learning the alphabet of openness and trust and normal human language.
It was learning to have a conversation. To communicate. And it managed to learn all
this.” But the acquisition of a voice did not yet mean freedom. It merely indicated
the existence of various positions that were being articulated for the first time after
the decades of silence under Stalin: “Essentially, the forced unity of official ideas that
had existed under Stalin collapsed. New ideas that corresponded to the real interest
of different social groups had to be born. And they were born, on the left as well as
on the right: more clear, real, and open than ever before. Khrushchev filled a break
[zapolnial pauzu]. He was a hen sitting on the eggs of mysterious birds. As soon as the
chicks hatched they began to peck the brood hen.” 15
The Liberal Criticism of Novyi mir
The center of the Thaw in literature was Tvardovsky’s journal Novyi mir, whose
unorthodox position was obvious to both readers and the party authorities in litera-
ture already during his first stint as editor in chief (1950–1954). It was during this time
that Novyi mir published Vasilii Grossman’s novel Za pravoe delo (For the Right Cause,
1952), which changed the outlook on the description of the Great Patriotic War, and
Valentin Ovechkin’s cycle of sketches Raionnye budni (District Routine, 1952), which
marked the beginning of Soviet village prose. At the same time the journal’s sec-
tion for literary criticism made a name for itself when, just after Stalin’s death, it
printed Vladimir Pomerantsev’s article that triggered an intense public polemic and
the condemnation of the authorities, along with the aforementioned articles by Lif-
shits, Shcheglov, and Abramov. Regardless of the broad scope of topics in the critical
articles, they all addressed the fact that Soviet literature had lost such qualities as
the “truthfulness of depiction” and the “sincerity” of the positions expressed. And
although Pomerantsev took care to stress that the demand for sincerity was based on
the striving for “party truth,” he was accused, alongside other critics, of “soiling So-
viet reality” and fighting for a concept of morality independent of time and class.16 In
July 1954 there were party meetings of writers in Moscow and Leningrad, convened
for the express purpose of condemning Novyi mir, which labeled the journal’s criti-
cal section a “morass of nihilism and philistinism.”17 The extended meeting of the
Executive Board of the Union of Soviet Writers, which took place in mid-August,
resolved to remove Tvardovsky from the post of editor in chief (although the deci-
sion to do so had already been taken on 23 July and was reflected in the correspond-
ing resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party18).
Until the summer of 1958, Tvardovsky was replaced by Simonov. His policy,
devoid of harsh conservatism, was based on the attempt to achieve a certain political
balance and cultural compromise. However, the publication of Dudintsev’s Ne khle-
bom edinym and Granin’s “Sobstvennoe mnenie” in the summer issues of 1956 abruptly
disturbed this temporary balance of power between the advocates of Stalinism and
the reformers, who were not yet divided into opposing camps and were coming to
their senses after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress.
A fierce critical campaign was issued in the press—ranging from Literaturnaia
gazeta to the official party journal Kommunist—and Khrushchev explicitly men-
tioned Dudintsev and his novel in his speeches. However, only a year after the height
of this campaign, Simonov (punished but still fiercely loyal) was once again replaced
by Tvardovsky (just as before, in 1950), who had already made a name for himself
as an editor capable of rallying around his journal those who were resolutely com-
mitted to overcoming the “consequences of the cult of personality.”19 Khrushchev
needed Tvardovsky in order to create a public counterweight to the conservative
forces in the party apparatus. The emergence of a kind of institutional center, uniting
the liberal intelligentsia and its supporters among the other social strata, solved sev-
eral problems at once. First, the existence of such a center offered Khrushchev more
space for political maneuvers on the “tough road” of de-Stalinization. Second, the
existence of a “liberal” print organ such as Novyi mir provided an opportunity to ex-
press liberal hopes and thus established an original communication channel between
the authorities and the critically minded intelligentsia. At the same time it helped to
establish more centralized control over this very stratum, control that was easier to
implement. Third and finally, it created a positive image of the USSR abroad, which
was indispensable for Khrushchev during his attempts in 1957 to soften the confron-
tation that characterized the first phase of the Cold War.20 One way or another, a
new era began for Novyi mir in July 1958, the era of Novyi mir under Tvardovsky.
The highest task the journal and its head had taken on, and for the sake of which
it was worth losing one’s post and agreeing to different kinds of compromises, con-
sisted not just in maintaining literary standards appropriate for a “thick journal,” but
in the development and assertion of a cultural and political position that was capable
of extracting country and society from the dead ends of bureaucratic stagnation and
economic inefficiency, the collapse of social relations and international isolation,
the deterioration of aesthetic standards in the arts, and moral degradation. In other
words, those dead ends that were rooted, in the view of the authors and editors of
Novyi mir, in the recent Stalinist past and the reflexes of which had to be overcome,
no matter the cost.
While this position was certainly reflected in the literary works published in
Novyi mir, it found the most immediate expression in the journal’s literary criticism
and journalism, something that had been characteristic of the ideological self-deter-
mination of a Russian “thick journal” from the nineteenth century onward. Novyi
mir was drawing on the tradition of the “liberal democratic” and “revolutionary
democratic” journals (first and foremost Sovremennik, edited by Aleksei Nekrasov and
Ivan Panaev, and Otechestvennye zapiski, edited by Nekrasov and Mikhail Saltykov-
Shchedrin). The journal used the tradition of revolutionary democratic criticism as
a positive genealogy that allowed the critical writings in Novyi mir to realize their
critical function with regard to Soviet reality. On the other hand the reference to this
tradition served as an ideological cover, since the revolutionary democratic tradition
was officially recognized as one of the sources of realism and Soviet literature. This
orientation went hand in hand with an underlying allusion to the typological simi-
larity of the respective epochs (Russia under Nikolai I and after Nikolai I; and the
USSR under Stalin and after Stalin).
The democratic spirit of Novyi mir (understood as both the content and orienta-
tion of literature and its accessibility) had its origins in the “revolutionary demo-
cratic” criticism of Nikolai Dobrolyubov, Dmitry Pisarev, Nikolai Mikhailovsky,
and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. The same can be said of the journal’s “orientation to-
ward the people” (narodnost’) (understood as the defense of the interests of the “simple
people”), the principled realism, the “truthfulness,” the commitment to education
and propagandistic moralism, which cannot be separated from tendentiousness,
didacticism, and apparent normativism (the Novyi mir criticism paid tribute to the
epoch’s language and maximalism, brimming with epithets such as “correct,” “gen-
uine,” “true,” “erroneous,” and so on).21 The Novyi mir critics themselves were not
aware of this normativism and therefore contrasted it with the “normative criticism”
of their ideological opponents from Oktiabr’, Ogonek, Literaturnaia Rossiia, and other
official publications.
The most immediate methodological point of reference for the Novyi mir critics
(at least for its most distinguished representatives, such as Iurii Burtin, Igor’ Vinogra-
dov, Vladimir Lakshin, Aleksandr Lebedev, and Vladimir Survillo) was the method
of “realist criticism” that had found its fullest expression in the critical works of Do-
brolyubov, a method “whose attitude to the work of art is the same as to the phe-
nomena of real life” and exhibited clear journalistic traits.22 This approach granted
a number of specific advantages, but it also imposed certain restrictions on the criti-
cism published in Novyi mir.
First, the orientation toward “realist criticism” provided maximal clout for
Novyi mir’s public struggle for the humanization and de-Stalinization of Soviet
life. The technique of “packaging” social and journalistic ideas as literary criticism,
which had been a trademark sign of realist criticism, worked best under conditions
of strict censorship.
Second, this type of criticism ensured that literary criticism stopped serving the
predominantly corporate interests of the writers and became oriented toward the
reader. It positioned criticism in opposition to the existing hierarchies of the liter-
ary world. In its opposition to the organs of the party, writers’ organizations, and
censorship, Novyi mir put the resource of direct communication with the readers to
active use. Not only did the journal publish letters to the editor, it also turned them
into objects of critical scrutiny alongside the relationship between literature, critics,
and readers.
Third and finally, in spite of all declarations to the effect that for realist criticism
or, to use Lakshin’s term, analytic criticism, the artistic aspects of the work were no less
important than their factual and ideological basis (that is, its ability to “truthfully”
depict reality), the practice of realist criticism clearly demonstrates a bias toward
“content-based” analysis. A similar emphasis was discernible in the poetry section,
too, where the literary tastes of the editor in chief reigned supreme, as well as in the
section for poetry criticism in which “the most attention was paid to poems that
were either born out of the same semantic and stylistic tradition as Tvardovsky’s own
poetry, or hostile toward Novyi mir in terms of orientation, but not of aesthetics.”23
It is characteristic that the criterion of “artistic value” became one of the subjects
of a heated polemic between Novyi mir and the journal Oktiabr’. However, it should
be pointed out that, on the whole, the Novyi mir critics used the notion of “artistic
merit” as an additional argument in favor of a given work’s “ideological clarity.”
In other words, they assessed aesthetic merit as some kind of particular effect that
accompanied a work’s “true” ethical, ideological, and political merits. Correspond-
ingly, any distortion or rejection of the latter was automatically seen as an absence
of artistic merit. The overall ideological, aesthetic, and moral context of the era not
only justified such a utilitarian approach to artworks in many ways, but also, as a
rule, confirmed the aesthetic judgment made on its basis.
Perhaps the most important issues the Novyi mir critics were facing, and in which
social importance and the quest for new artistic forms featured side by side, were
two thematic complexes that ran through all genres of Soviet literature at the time.
These thematic complexes constituted the ideological watershed that determined the
“liberal,” “conservative,” and “patriotic” positions of the participants in the literary
process. The first such complex was the group of questions linked to the notions of
“trust,” “sincerity,” “inner freedom,” and “humanity.” The second one concerned
the problematic area of the socioeconomic and moral situation in the countryside
and, correspondingly, life in the kolkhozes. (With regard to the position of Novyi mir
we are not talking about the ethnographic specificities of the Russian village or the
ecological problem of preserving traditional culture.24 Here the village appears as a
peculiar model that makes it possible to understand the problems of Soviet society
in general.) While the first complex of issues created one of the crucial demarcation
lines between the liberals and the conservatives, the second distinguished the posi-
tion of the liberals from that of the nationalists. The semantic and at the same time
rhetorical origin of the first issue was the tension between the notions of “human-
ism” and “inner freedom.” The question was which of the competing ideological
camps would gain control over these notions and the right to legitimately use them,
since both “humanism” and, say, “the struggle for freedom” were important rhetori-
cal elements of Soviet political language. And while Novyi mir included in its political
program the fight for the humanization of Soviet reality, the “increase of initiative
from the masses,” and the “inner freedom of Soviet man,” always stressing that the
program was entirely based on the decisions of the Twentieth and Twenty-Second
Party Congresses, Oktiabr’ retorted by accusing Novyi mir of “abstract humanism”
(that is, humanism devoid of class concerns) and of calling for “an inner freedom
that is turning into anarchism.” In view of this positional and rhetorical struggle,
the Novyi mir critics were constantly required to specify their understanding of “all-
human humanism” in order to avoid falling under the definition of abstract human-
ism, which Khrushchev, as well as the party ideologues, had officially condemned.
The second ethical and socioeconomic set of problems that the Novyi mir crit-
ics had a stake in was linked to the genesis of Soviet village prose. The village topic
enabled them to juxtapose their own “genuine orientation toward the people”
(narodnost’) with the “true party-mindedness” of Oktiabr’ and later the “national
orientation” (pochvennost’) of Molodaia gvardiia. But most importantly, the village
topic provided the Novyi mir critics with an opportunity to formulate their own pro-
gram for overcoming Stalinism, the “administrative command system,” “bureaucra-
tism,” the “haughtiness of the leadership,” the “disregard for others’ labor,” and their
consequences—the “economic destitution” and the “moral degradation” of the vil-
lage. It was precisely in this place that Novyi mir’s orientation toward the people saw
potential for reforms: a sufficiently dense social fabric satiated with collective labor,
no alienation of the laborer from the results of his labor, and the existence of organic
moral values anchored in the norms of socialist consciousness.
In their analysis of village prose, the Novyi mir critics gradually reached a re-
alization that was potentially fatal to Soviet ideology and the entire Marxist po-
litical economy (it is very likely that the Novyi mir critics themselves were not even
aware of this danger at the time and presupposed the possibility of reconciling the
ideals they expressed with the principles of socialist economic management). We are
talking about the appeal to return to the peasant “the feeling that he is the master
(chuvstvo khoziaina),” here at first formulated tentatively and with reservations, then
progressively becoming more radical. Over time the treatment of the topic began to
contradict existing practices in the kolkhoz system. In his article “O chastushkakh”
(On Ditties), Burtin called the “feeling of being the master” one of the “defining
features of the social psychology of the village,” while Vinogradov, referring to Efim
Dorosh (and practically pointing to the experience of cooperative management in
the Hungarian and Yugoslav economies), flatly stated that “only by transforming
the economic basis of the relationship between kolkhozes and the government to-
ward an equal, mutually beneficial trade exchange . . . can we achieve the sought
after ‘rational organization of agriculture.’”25 In Vinogradov’s words: “We created
the kolkozes not just in order to facilitate the production of bread, but also for the
peasants themselves, in order to improve their lives.”26
The topic of the Soviet village, which formed the basis of Novyi mir’s concept of
narodnost’, allowed the Novyi mir critics to dissociate themselves from the neo-poch-
venniki (the exponents of the native-soil populist conservatism that was on the rise
since the mid-1960s). The Novyi mir critics appealed to the readers not to lose sight
of the distinction between the genuine defenders of narodnost’ and those “lovers of
old times, for whom Russian antiquity with its churches and iconography is the lat-
est fad, an art for the few that stands somewhere close to [gde-to nevdali] Picasso and
Modigliani, flattering the refined taste with its naive simplicity.”27 The swift forma-
tion of the “national patriotic” camp, which had found supporters in the party’s Cen-
tral Committee, and the attachment to this camp of the journal Molodaia gvardiia, as
well as of the entire eponymous publishing house (headed by Iurii Melent’ev, whose
origins were in the Central Committee of the Komsomol), turned these stylistic de-
bates into mere background for the main polemic, in which, to run ahead, Novyi
mir emerged as the overall loser (unlike in the struggle with Kochetov’s conservative
Oktiabr’).
The main motive of the struggle was a fundamentally different understand-

ing of the culture and social psychology of the village. For Novyi mir, the village
and “popular spirit” (narodnost’) smoothly merged with “Soviet,” “international,”
and “social,” and for Molodaia gvardiia they merged with “Russian,” “national,” and
“patrimonial.” The main prize in the struggle was the appropriation of the entire
tradition of village literature, or at least the recognition of one’s own tradition as
the most important one. While Novyi mir understood narodnost’ as an organic part
of the “universal,” the “patriotic” interpretation regarded narodnost’ as that which
remains after everything “foreign,” “alien,” and “borrowed” has been purged from
the national culture.28
The tension of this struggle reached its highest point during the last year of
Tvardovsky’s editorship at Novyi mir. The Novyi mir critics to produce the most
pointed and detailed statements on this topic were Igor Dedkov and Aleksandr
Dement’ev.29 The former attempted to demystify the “loud phraseology” of the “na-
tionally minded” critics, which lacked an independent substantial program: “the ap-
peals to ‘love the people, live their life, take them to heart, fight for their happiness’
seem to us to be too general, even empty: after all, who does not love the people
today, is anyone admitting to that?”30 He also rather wittily debunked any preten-
sions to the “privatization” of love for the motherland: “There is a vodka monopoly
and a grain monopoly, a monopoly on truth and also a monopoly on patriotism.
It seems we are faced with precisely such a pretension.”31 Dement’ev, on the other
hand, spoke from the position of normative Marxist internationalism, claiming that
it was a small step from the ideology of “neo-Slavophilism” to “national arrogance
and conceit, to ideas of national exclusivity and the superiority of the Russian nation
above all others, to an ideology that is irreconcilable with proletarian international-
ism.”32 Unfortunately, his kind of rhetoric missed the target, creating “around the
critics of Molodaia gvardiia the nimbus of opposition, taking the discussion to the level
of dogmatic, ideological argument.”33
Dement’ev’s critical statement gave the “patriots” an opportunity to retaliate.
Their initiative had the support of the authorities, who for a long time had sought
a pretext to finally suppress and disband the editorial board that had formed around
Tvardovsky. The retaliation took the form of the so-called letter of the eleven, a
statement titled “Protiv chego vystupaet ‘Novyi mir’?” (What Does Novyi mir Op-
pose?) and signed by eleven writers.34 Dement’ev’s opponents seized upon his offi-
cious rhetoric and accused Novyi mir of “hiding behind bombastic phraseology; they
[the Novyi mir critics] oppose such fundamental political forces in our society as So-
viet patriotism, the friendship and brotherhood of the peoples of the USSR, the art
of socialist realism, which is socialist in content and national in form.” Dement’ev’s
“proletarian internationalism” was beaten by the “proletarian internationalism” of
the patriots who, departing from an accusation of nationalism, presented an accusa-
tion of cosmopolitanism, claiming that the journal’s policy “could cause the gradual
replacement of proletarian internationalism, so dear to the heart of many of the crit-
ics and writers gathered around Novyi mir, by cosmopolitan ideas.”35 After this let-
ter, the editorial board survived for another half year, during which almost all its
members were replaced, while Tvardovsky received the suggestion to “reinforce”

the editorial board with Vladimir Chivilikhin, one of those who had signed the let-
ter. On 12 February 1970 Tvardovsky handed in his resignation to the secretariat of
the Union of Soviet Writers, which was accepted the following day. This marked the
conclusion of an entire era in the history of Soviet literary criticism.
The Party-Loyal Literary Criticism of Oktiabr’
It is hard to understand the significance of Oktiabr’, one of the oldest Soviet

literary journals, during the Thaw period without taking a number of important
factors into consideration: in 1959 the journal became the press organ of the Writ-
ers’ Union of the Russian Federation which had been founded to counterbalance the
liberally minded writers; between 1961 and 1973 the journal was headed by Vsevolod
Kochetov, a steadfast and inspired defender of Soviet orthodoxy; finally, Oktiabr’
entered the literary struggle during the “late” Thaw, at a time when the loud cam-
paigns of the early period (linked to the publication of Dudintsev’s Ne khlebom edinym,
Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, the almanac Literaturnaia Moskva, and so forth) were over.
This allowed Oktiabr’ to avoid diverting its attention to campaigns and focus almost
entirely on a sustained polemic with the liberals. Under Kochetov, Oktiabr’ turned
into a bridgehead on which orthodox Soviet critics could find their second breath
and develop an antidote to liberal “nihilism.” Oktiabr’ became the bridge between
Stalinism and the re-Stalinization under Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Suslov.
The scheme normally used to describe the situation and position of Oktiabr’ dur-
ing the Thaw is extremely simple: on one side stands Novyi mir (and partly Iunost’), on
the other side is Oktiabr’, which is involved in a hate campaign against Tvardovsky
and his Novyi mir that represented the avant-garde of Soviet liberalism during the
1960s. The main challenge to this scheme stems from the position of Solzhenitsyn:
the writer who had become the banner of Novyi mir could not comprehend the nature
of the discrepancy between Tvardovsky, member of the Central Committee of the
CPSU, and Kochetov, member of the Central Auditing Committee of the CPSU.
The fact that Solzhenitsyn’s base was Novyi mir rather than Oktiabr’ contravened the
customary scheme, according to which nationalism should logically follow from
Stalinism. Oktiabr’ failed to bring forth anything: subsequently no one wanted to admit
to affiliation with this journal. Molodaia gvardiia in the post-Thaw years understood
itself as a publication specifically expressing discontent, while Nash sovremennik tried
to prove its succession from Novyi mir. No one wished to be tainted with Oktiabr’s
open servility. The orthodox Sovietness of Nash sovremennik and Molodaia gvardiia at
the beginning of perestroika was a consequence of censorship, which rendered open
nationalism impossible and also a result of a change in their current agenda.
The principal newness of the literary situation during the Thaw consisted in the
birth and implementation of the preconditions for literary and ideological struggle,
something that was caused by the crisis of the Stalinist model and was now possible
for the first time since the 1920s. For the first time under the conditions of ideological
monopoly, the struggle took place openly.
This struggle resembled a struggle within the system itself rather than a strug-
gle of the authorities against some external opposition: both Novyi mir and Oktiabr’
appealed to the “purity of the socialist ideals”—Novyi mir found these ideals in the
revolution and the 1920s, and Oktiabr’ in the Stalin years. During the many years of
polemic the two journals nourished each other and lived off each other. Novyi mir
is just as unimaginable without its antipode as Oktiabr’ is without Novyi mir. After
Vsevolod Kochetov became editor in chief, Oktiabr’ took a clearly defined position
and turned, literally within half a year, into a magnet attracting everything that was
opposed to the liberal agenda of Novyi mir, thus becoming the second “journal with
a tendency” after Novyi mir.
The criticism of Oktiabr’ was the most interesting weapon in the “ideological
arsenal for the defense of socialist achievements” against their liberal opponents.
Remembering the traditions of “Marxist criticism” of the times of the Communist
Academy, the journal instigated a heavy-handed discussion on the theoretical prob-
lems of aesthetics. The incentive was the publication of a whole range of works by
Soviet aestheticians in the second half of the 1950s that indirectly cast doubt on the
Soviet interpretation of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s famous formula: “The beautiful is
life itself” (“Prekrasnoe—eto zhizn’”).36 The aestheticians, who were given a dress-
ing-down by Oktiabr’, had cautiously contended that the beautiful had some kind of
subjective origin after all, and that reality can be beautiful not “by itself” but by the
virtue of the activity of individual perception. These reservations did not protect the
aestheticians and their theory of “aesthetic assimilation” (esteticheskoe osvoenie) from
being accused of subjective idealism.
The positional fighting on the “theoretical front” became a practice in which
Oktiabr’ continued to engage. Oktiabr’ incessantly warned the reader of something:
whom and what art needs to serve, what is socialist realism, heroism, narodnost’, and
so on. The issue that preoccupied the Oktiabr’ critics more than anything else was
the fact that people had forgotten “at what price our happiness had been achieved.”
Above all, no one had the right to forget the glorious history of Soviet litera-
ture, the first large-scale discussion on which the Oktiabr’ critics timed to coincide
with the publication of the third volume of Istoriia russkoi sovetskoi literatury (1941–1957)
(The History of Russian Soviet Literature, 1941–1957). A high assembly of critics and
historians of Soviet literature congenially condemned at a “round table” the volume,
which had been prepared by the Gorky Institute of World Literature. The titles of
the speeches are self-evident: “Pisat’ pravdivo!” (Write Truthfully), the implication
being that the Istoriia russkoi sovetskoi literatury tells only lies; “Opisatel’nym meto-
dom” (By Method of Description); “Sobranie annotatsii—ne nauka!” (A Collection
of Annotations Is Not Science!), that is, there are no proper “conclusions” and few
mentions of socialist realism; “Ukhodia ot spora” (Avoiding the Argument), read:
the authors of the Istoriia show little enthusiasm for polemic with the opponents of
Soviet literature; “Protiv otpisok” (Against Replies Beside the Point), that is, there
is little talk of the achievements of Soviet literature, of which there was certainly no
shortage during the Zhdanov era; and “Ser’eznye nedochety” (Serious Shortcom-
ings), targeting especially Sinyavsky’s articles.
Thus the history of Soviet literature was the biggest sore spot for Oktiabr’. The
journal was constantly forced to speak out against the “subverters” of the previous
conception of the history of Soviet literature. This role was doubtlessly the direct
opposite to the one played by Novyi mir, which painstakingly defended and washed
clean the names of repressed writers, reintroducing them into literature. The fight
concerned particularly the new interpretation of the 1920s. A parallel that offers it-
self is the struggle of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) against
Pereval; and it is no coincidence that Oktiabr’ was most insulted by Novyi mir’s re-
habilitation of Aleksandr Voronskii.37 The Oktiabr’ critics greeted even the humble
mention of the names of rehabilitated authors as an attempt at “replacing”: the sub-
verters were trying to replace Dmitry Furmanov with Babel, Mayakovsky with
Osip Mandelstam, and so on.
Just as Novyi mir, Oktiabr’ never regarded history as something valuable in itself.
It was always first and foremost a springboard for the affirmation of specific values
directed toward the current literary process. But the most important trouble spots
lay in “recent” history, in which the “classics and contemporaries” of today were
asserting themselves. In the articles of Pomerantsev and Abramov, Novyi mir had de-
clared its attitude toward the “Soviet classics” of the Stalin era even before the onset
of the Thaw. It was precisely the authors of Soviet classics whom Oktiabr’ took under
its wings. During the entire Thaw Oktiabr’ never dared to openly defend the litera-
ture that was under attack then, limiting itself to “positional” battles with the Novyi
mir critics. The year 1968 was critical in this and many other respects: the journal’s
position toward recent history became more radical, and it finally received the op-
portunity to express its opinion on a painful issue. A. Grebenshchikov’s article “Zab-
veniiu ne podlezhit!” (Not Liable to Oblivion!) in the June 1968 issue of Oktiabr’ can
be regarded as one of the first open manifestoes of a new ideological policy, namely
the re-Stalinization that had been covertly underway since the mid-1960s already.
Demanding the “return to the reader of literary works that are even today ca-
pable of acting as advisors, mentors, friends,” the author insisted on the rehabilitation
of the most odious works of the Stalin era— the novels Schast’e (Happiness) by Pyotr
Pavlenko, Donbass by Boris Gorbatov, and Khleb (Bread) by Aleksei Tolstoy, Valen-
tin Kostylev’s epic about Ivan the Terrible, the poems of Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach,
Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s play Nezabyvaemyi 1919-yi (The Unforgettable Year 1919), and
others that were no longer being republished during the Thaw because of the all too
visible imprint of the “cult of personality.”38
During the polemic of Kochetov’s Oktiabr’ with Novyi mir, practically all the
shifts and falsifications of the literary process of the 1920s were worked through.
Behind the haze of the usual polemic about socialist realism slowly emerged the car-
cass of the “updated” history of Soviet literature—the very same model that became
canonical in the post-Thaw era. However, the disintegration of the socialist realist
canon, against which Oktiabr’ fought so stubbornly, was already impossible to stop.
Just as impossible to stop was the process of the transformation of literature it-
self. And as far as poetry was concerned, Oktiabr’ would not agree with the “theory
of self-expression.” This “theory” was said to contradict the principle of party-
mindedness and to have an extra-temporal, extra-historical character and because

of that was seen as leading the artist away from the solution of the vital and pressing
questions of his time. The Oktiabr’ critics were especially indignant at the articles
of Sinyavsky, Boris Runin, Andrei Men’shutin, and Alla Marchenko, all published
in Novyi mir and discussing the poetry of Akhmadulina, Evtushenko, Voznesensky,
and Rozhdestvensky. Oktiabr’ perceived the attempts of the Novyi mir critics to re-
move the discussion about poetry from the traditional territory of civic commit-
ment (grazhdanstvennost’), narodnsost’, and party-mindedness (partiinost’) as asserting
a dangerous conception of art, “lacking in ideology” and ultimately “formalist.”
Conceiving of the Soviet writer as the “bard in the camp of the builders of commu-
nism,” Oktiabr’ continued its struggle against “denigration” (ochernitel’stvo) with the
same frantic zeal with which Novyi mir continued to struggle against “varnishing”
(lakirovka).39 From its very inception the territory on which this struggle was car-
ried out was entirely Soviet: both polar opposites had been embedded in the Soviet
aesthetic model since the times of RAPP and Gorky. After all, socialist realism had
begun life as a mixture of RAPP psychologism (the “truth of life”) and Gorky’s “rev-
olutionary romanticism” (“in its revolutionary development”). Oktiabr’s tone was
both critical and prescriptive: “The writer’s desire to show the negative and the evil
in our lives without an immediate depiction of our people’s active struggle against
the ‘birthmarks of capitalism’ (but precisely in this lies the truth of life), without an
attempt to depict the strength of the positive example, always leads the writer to ar-
tistic failure. . . . In accordance with the heroic essence of our life, the works of Soviet
writers are permeated by heroic pathos. New and significant artistic feats await our
literature on this path.”40
In the process, almost the entire literature of the 1960s was thrown overboard.
It is difficult to find a more or less visible name in poetry or prose who did not figure
in Oktiabr’ in a negative context. This applies not only to such obvious “denigra-
tors” as Solzhenitsyn, but also, for example, to Iurii Kazakov who was mentioned
not entirely unfavorably—“a sensitive and perceptive artist, but his perceptiveness
is one-sided and directed toward the depiction of the elemental and ‘dark’ sides of
the human soul, to the detriment of its will and intellectual facilities.”41 Oktiabr’ ex-
horted the reader to “Return to Gorky!,” declaring Gorky’s “winged people” exam-
ples for contemporary literature.42 As examples of writers who had fallen away from
tradition Oktiabr’ cited Vasilii Aksenov and Anatoly Gladilin, because their heroes
were socially passive and the authors themselves “lacking in ideology” and “infan-
tile.” The “longing” and “searching” heroes of the new generation of young writ-
ers, who made their debuts during the Thaw and were grouped around the journal
Iunost’, were recommended to go and work “for their own good,” together with the
reminder that “work is poetry,” while the editorial board of Iunost’ was advised to
publish texts that would mobilize young readers, following the example of Nikolai
Ostrovsky, Alexander Fadeev, Arkadii Gaidar, and Valentin Kataev.43
One of the most important “inventions” of the Oktiabr’ critics in the 1960s was
the juxtaposition of the “truth of fact” with the “truth of history,” developed in the
polemic with the “denigrators” and the new wave of war prose. From these positions
they criticized the “worm’s eye view” of “lieutenants’ prose.” Monumentality and
breadth were regarded as some of the most essential mobilizing qualities of litera-
ture, and it was precisely because of their absence that the party loyal critics later, in
the 1970s, refused to accept Iurii Trifonov and the village prose writers; the former
because of his “closed-off little world” and the latter for their “poeticization of the
patriarchal past.”
In the second half of the 1960s the spectrum of the polemic shifted, with “liber-
als” versus “conservatives” being replaced with the new and more complex “liber-
als” against “conservatives” and “nationalists.” Although all the preconditions for
the emergence of a Russian Party had been created back in the late 1940s, during the
struggle against cosmopolitanism, “neonationalistic” (neopochvennicheskie) ideas were
first voiced in public only during the late stages of the Thaw. However, these ideas
could not be formulated in any consistent way without entering into open conflict
with the class doctrine, which was renewed in the 1960s through the resurrection of
“revolutionary ideals.”
The differences between Oktiabr’ and Molodaia gvardiia were significant in this
context. While the Novyi mir critics regarded Molodaia gvardiia as the rebirth of na-
tionalist rhetoric of the Stalinist type, Oktiabr’ saw it as a threat to “socialist ide-
als.” It was precisely because of its breadth that the position of Novyi mir was more
ambivalent: it explored different paths, liberal as well as patriotic (Solzhenitsyn and
the village prose writers). Oktiabr’ explored no new paths whatsoever. It represented
the dead end that orthodox Soviet criticism had entered once before at the end of the
1920s. At that time Marxist criticism had turned into National Bolshevism. Now
Novyi mir was trying to push it toward “all-human” values, while Molodaia gvardiia
was pushing it toward pure nationalism. Only Oktiabr’ undertook the rather roman-
tic attempt to preserve orthodox Marxist criticism (it was no accident that Kochetov,
who remained an odd figure in the eyes of the neo-pochvenniki, did not sign the
infamous “letter of the eleven” that led to the dismissal of Tvardovsky). Oktiabr’ re-
mained an orthodox internationalist journal that did not move in the direction of
nationalism, having failed to spot the antiliberal nature of the nascent “neonational-
ism,” seeing only the “anti-Soviet” element of it.
The Patriotic Criticism of Molodaia gvardiia
The ideological differentiation of Soviet society that had begun in the second
half of the 1950s was not exhausted with the emergence of two squarely opposed
groups of conservatives and liberals. And the attitude toward the recent Soviet past
and toward concrete perspectives of socialist development did not constitute the
only demarcation line. Questions of position in relation to cultural heritage, as well
as various uses of the other (the “stranger” [chuzhoi] or the “alien” [chuzhdyi])—all
this was beginning to structure, in ever more complex and contradictory ways, the
limited space of the Soviet ideological canon, which remained rigid for the time be-
ing, although it was beginning to crumble.
The narrowness of the semantic and stylistic spectrum meant that discordant
ideological motivations often engendered similar political positions (for example, for
the conservatives the idea of a strong Soviet state that opposed the “Western liberal
democracies” was based above all on the historical figure of Stalin, as well as on the
rhetoric of the class struggle and the irreconcilability of the two political systems,
while for the pochvenniki it was based on the mythological figure of the “Russian
people” and the rhetoric of national, spiritual origins that were “radically” opposed
to “Western bourgeois values”). On the other hand, different political reference
points could coincide in the object of criticism, while the critique itself was moti-
vated by different reasons (for the nationalists, contemporary Western culture with
its “abstractionism” and “cacophony of jazz” was opposed to Russian national cul-
ture, so to speak, by its very origin, by virtue of the incompatibility of civilizations;
while for the liberal Mikhail Lifshits, who was close to Novyi mir, and the literary
critic Igor Sats, who was a member of the editorial board, modernism was an ob-
ject of criticism because of its “individualism,” “irrationalism,” “relativism,” “petty
philistinism,” in other words, because of its “reactionary nature that is bordering on
fascism”).44
While the formation of the conservative and liberal public and literary camps
was accomplished in the period between the Twentieth (1956) and Twenty-Second
(1961) Party Congresses, which defined the main elements of the party’s official de-
Stalinization policy, the formation of the national patriotic sector took longer and
was accomplished only in the mid-1960s. There were several reasons for the pro-
longed incubation period in the development of the national patriotic sector. First,
the national idea itself, regardless of the fact that it had been invoked in the mid-1930s
and after the war, had a highly ambiguous standing in Soviet culture: it was at the
same time actively propagated and coyly concealed, contradicting as it did Marxist
dogma. Second, the Stalinist version of national rhetoric had already been appro-
priated by the conservatives, a fact that required the “patriots” to create their own
“national style.” And finally, the resource of this new “national style” was located in
the more distant past than in the case of the liberals from Novyi mir, whose ideologi-
cal resource was either the legacy of Lenin or that of the revolutionary democrats
of the 1860s and 1870s. Resurrecting the ideas of the Slavophiles of the 1830–1840s
(and also, but in a hidden manner, the heritage of early-twentieth-century Russian
religious philosophy), the pochvenniki of the 1960s began to search for the more
profound “spiritual origins” of Russian culture, turning to topics that were more
or less taboo under Soviet ideology, such as the “Russian idea,” “Russian spiritual-
ity,” and “Russian sanctity,” a strong Russian monarchy and Orthodox Christianity
(anti-Semitism and xenophobia in general, just as many other phenomena that were
officially “absent” from public discourse, appeared in the official print organs that
were controlled by the Russian patriots only in the form of diffuse hints, accessible
only to the initiated).45
The “national turn” of the mid-1960s was not a movement that was entirely
orchestrated from above. It was at least as much linked to a perceived need for a
search for cultural roots at a time of growing ideological crisis and dissatisfaction
with the “Stalinist version of the people and patriotism” that was shared by many.46
Village prose, which became the literary answer to this growing social demand, was
at first more tightly linked to Novyi mir than to Molodaia gvardiia (both the journal and
the publishing house), although it was around the latter journal—as we have men-
tioned before—that a circle of patriotically inclined writers, critics, and artists began
to form in the early 1960s. And it was Molodaia gvardiia that, in the second half of the
1960s, managed to seize the initiative in the highly significant discussion of topics
linked to Russian national culture, history and character, and to consolidate, and in
many respects lead, the struggle for the preservation of national heritage.47
While the liberal and conservative currents in public life and literature were
linked to the names of the editors of Novyi mir and Oktiabr’, that is, the active and
officially recognized writers Tvardovsky and Kochetov, while the man who stood
behind the literary politics of the patriotic sector, Aleksandr Nikonov (1922–1983),
was significantly less well known. However, Nikonov had informal connections in
the party Central Committee apparatus and was personally acquainted with Ser-
gei Pavlov, a former leader of the Komsomol. When he became head of the journal
Molodaia gvardiia in 1963, Nikonov, having quickly unburdened himself of the lib-
eral members of the editorial board (Anatoly Pristavkin, Vladimir Amlinskii, and
Aleksandr Rekemchuk), gathered around the journal a circle of patriotically and na-
tionalistically inclined staff (Sergei Vikulov, Anatolii Ivanov, and Valerii Ganichev
served as his deputies at various times, Viktor Petelin, as the head of the section for
criticism, Valentin Sorokin, as the head of the poetry section, and Mikhail Lobanov,
a member of the editorial board) and critics, historians, and journalists who were
regularly writing for the journal (Vadim Kozhinov, Viktor Chalmaev, and Sergei
Semanov among others).
What the Novyi mir critics at first considered a mere ornamentation, that is, the
“beautifully embellished” pseudo-archaic style of the articles published in Molodaia
gvardiia, in reality constituted an important and indispensable part of the nascent
patriotic project. At that moment it was precisely language, or rather its style and
rhetorical instrumentation, that allowed a writer to avoid expressing his position
openly, while still indicating the tendency within which this position could be re-
constructed appropriately. The pastoral idyllic rhetoric of the Molodaia gvardiia critics
enabled them to mask oppositional ideas under the appearance of a peasant landscape
removed from time.
The differences between Novyi mir and Molodaia gvardiia came to the fore in their
interpretations of village prose. While Iurii Burtin and Vinogradov wrote in Novyi
mir about the need for a transition to what they considered natural, market-oriented
commodity and money relations between independent kolkhozes (truly belonging
to the peasants) and the state, the Molodaia gvardiia critics, who also had spotted the
danger inherent in the transformation of the peasant into a hired laborer, cared not so
much about rational economic relations as about a certain spiritual, organic link be-
tween the peasant (the “Russian man” as such) and his native soil. The concepts used
by the representatives of “patriotic” criticism (“the wisdom of the native soil,” “the
secret of the people,” “the clear mirrors of the people’s ideals,” “the great roots,” and
“the life-giving sap”) were full of mysticism and in their very essence did not fore-
see the possibility of substantial discussion, thus rendering the abstract speculations
about the “primordial moral values” of the Russian people practically invulnerable
to outside criticism. These values could not be attained as the result of rational and
consistent activity; they could only be clung to by those who were capable by right of
birth to understand their wordless language. In their attempts to create an opposition
to the results of modernization, the Soviet pochvenniki created their own version of
national history. The organicist paradigm, nationalist rhetoric, and traditionalist pa-
thos were the mainstay of this version of history. A strong state, headed by a national
leader who, by entering into spiritual resonance with the “primordial values of the
people,” was capable of engendering an idea that unified the nation, appeared as the
eternally renewable resource of Russian national culture. It was precisely this quality
of Russian statehood that acquired a transhistorical status free from class-based judg-
ments. After all, “beside that which is temporary and transitory, there is something
great and inspiring in the figures of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. . . . A great
country cannot live without profound pathos, without internal enthusiasm; other-
wise it will be beset by flabbiness and stupor. What was needed was an overarching
idea, an idea that leads the minds to flaming passion, the unifying Rus’.”48
The ability of the leader to be an organic part of his nation became almost the
sole criterion for the assessment of his historical role. The figure of Stalin, too, was
interpreted by the patriots in the light of a temporary falling away from, and subse-
quent return to, the bosom of the people’s aspiration. The nationalist version of the
rehabilitation of Stalin was different from the conservative version of Oktiabr’, plac-
ing the emphasis not on Stalin’s modernizing breakthrough of collectivization and
industrialization, without which the subsequent victory in the war would have been
impossible, but rather on Stalin’s narodnost’ and ability to unite the nation. “His un-
bending will, multiplied by the gigantic organizational activity of the party, could
only help people make the impossible possible because it acted in accordance with the
hopes of the people.”49
The concepts around which the fiercest fighting raged between all three cur-
rents and the symbolic languages they had developed were the concepts of “people”
(narod) and narodnost’. Oktiabr’ reproduced the more and more obsolete officious
rhetoric, linking narodnost’ to party-mindedness (“the unity of party and people”).
Novyi mir, also turning narodnost’ into a key element of its populist program, wrote
it into its ethic pathos of “defending the interests of the simple people.” The poch-
venniki’s interpretation of narodnost’ was to become the most radical, and essen-
tially the one that stood out most from the generalized Soviet “image of the world.”
Its point consisted in presenting narodnost’ as a force that was capable of overcoming
not just individual, but social differences, too. The pochvenniki’s narodnost’ was the
triumph of a nation that was breaking down social barriers. In such a version of his-
tory the nation rather than the class (and even less so the abstract “productive forces
and production relations”) appears as the main moving force of history. Evidence for
this thesis could be found in the perilous moments of revolts and invasions, when it
was precisely the unity of the Russian nation that had overcome social alienation,
thus saving the motherland from ruin. In the eyes of Kozhinov, the narodnost’ that
Lev Tolstoy had “understood correctly” consisted in “the ability to overcome within
oneself class-related and individualistic desires and interests during the decisive min-
utes of history.”50 Sergei Semanov attempted to prove the same thesis with the exam-
ple of Ivan Susanin, who “gave his life for the tsar,” and Ivan Bolotnikov, who stirred
up a peasant revolt in order to place a “good tsar” on the throne.51 In the eyes of the
pochvenniki, both examples demonstrated the salvational role of the nation and its
primary character in relation to social interests. The dominant characteristic of the
Soviet pochvenniki was their urge to dissolve the social in the national, overcoming
the differences that existed between the two categories. At the same time, while the
values attached to the sphere of the social were labor related and “materialistic,” the
ones attached to the national sphere were spiritual. The Soviet patriotism they were
constructing would fill the socialist ideological forms, which had begun to crumble,
with “live” national content (the fate of the “socialist forms” themselves appeared to
be of little concern to the pochvenniki, a fact that they naturally kept silent). Vik-
tor Chalmaev wrote in his appeal to develop a new synthetic genre: “Now we can
frequently see a gap between the social and the national. . . . One thinks that one
can’t think of oneself as a creator solely on the basis of labor activity, when one is at
the same indifferent to the destruction in the spiritual sphere. The production novel
must also be a national epos.”52
The pochvenniki regarded the nation not as a simple aggregate, but as a phe-
nomenon owing its emergence to its organic closeness to the “soil” that nurtured
its “spiritual roots” and the “overarching idea” of unity. The national “ideal of the
people” is opposed by the material “demands of the crowd.” “The crowd is the end
product of the bourgeois leveling of the personality, evidence of the disintegration
of the people into a mechanical, arithmetical multitude that is connected only by
crude material needs.”53 The nation took shape as something that was opposed to
bourgeois individualism. However, the bourgeois value system was ascribed not to
a certain class, but to the the West as such; the critique of capitalism was also cast in
national colors, stressing the organic foreignness of the capitalist system to the Rus-
sian national character.
The assertion of the rootedness of genuine culture in the people and the soil also
drew a clear demarcation line between the “genuine” and the “false” intelligentsia.
Within the patriotic discourse, belonging to the educated class, which felt the burden
of responsibility for society, was no longer regarded as an automatic positive value.
The concept of obrazovanshchina ([the reign of] morally empty education), coined by
Solzhenitsyn in 1974, in many respects evolved from the patriotic criticism of the
second half of the 1960s, and most of the meanings standing behind this concept had
already been expressed by Mikhail Lobanov in his article “Prosveshchennoe mesh-
chanstvo” (The Educated Philistines).54 An understanding of culture as an “organic
plant that is unimaginable outside the national soil” identified the intelligentsia as the
natural enemy who, in their aspiration for “so-called education,” has torn away from
the “original national source” (narodnyi pervoistochnik).55 The intelligentsia, which had
been identified with Western bourgeois philistinism and rootlessness, was deemed to
have a highly pathogenic impact on the spiritual health of the nation: “Like a bark
beetle, the philistines are gnawing away at the healthy trunk of the nation. . . . The
historical meaning of the nation? For the philistines this is a vacuum.”56
The juxtaposition of intellectualism and the “profundity of national memory,”
on which the “values of literature” must draw, was also visible in Lobanov’s article
“Bol’ tvorchestva i slovesnoe samodovol’stvo” (The Pain of Creation and Literary
Self-Contentedness), in which Victor Astafiev’s stories were contrasted with the
“experimentalism” and “antirealism” of authors such as Yuri Olesha and Valentin
Kataev. The typical device of patriotic criticism was deployed: the identification of
modernist poetics with “foreign influence,” with something that was organically
alien to the feeling of “authentic realism” innate to Russian literature. “The life of
the people” is used as a kind of filter here, stopping all things “alien” from penetrat-
ing Russian literature: “Russian literature has always developed in the limitless com-
plexities of life, and by this very fact has somehow cleansed itself from all kinds of
depositions that are alien to its spirit. The cleansing force of national life has been and
always will be the salvation of Russian literature.”57
As a result, the writer who is oriented toward modernist poetics, the intelligen-
tsia that gives priority to the rights of the individual over that of the nation, the West
that is based on the ethics of individualism, or the global capital, appeared as easily
interchangeable masks of a multifaced enemy. The meaning of the present day lies in
the struggle between the “nation” and global “integration,” which denies the former
the right to existence.58 The agent of integration was invariably the modernist artist
or intellectual (educated philistine) who professed the theory of the “convergence of
the two systems.”
Discourses on the Russian emigration and diaspora constituted one of the most
important tools for “gluing together” the national whole. The emphasis was placed
on the fact that a writer had been born in Russia, which provided an organic link
to his native soil, rather than on the fact that he had died in foreign lands: “When
Bunin’s name is mentioned one immediately remembers the soil on which he was
born and which he glorified so purely and resoundingly.”59 Bunin was not only a
“bard of his native land,” but also a “bard of Soviet Russia”—“the new Russia, So-
viet Russia has not forgotten her bard.”60 “Soviet” appears here as some external
attribute to eternal “Russia,” the “moral belonging” to that predictably turned émi-
gré writers into Soviet patriots. Spirituality emerged as the semantic and rhetorical
bridge that enabled the distance separating the patriotically minded emigration from
the motherland to be bridged.
Unlike the Russian emigration, which was organically integrated into the uni-
fied mother body of Russian culture, the revolutionary avant-garde of the 1920s was
described as an anticulture that had tried—albeit unsuccessfully—to shed and de-
stroy the national cultural heritage. As they were interested only in the avant-garde’s
attitude to national tradition, the pochvenniki among the critics did not distinguish
between Proletkult and Pereval, the Left Front of the Arts and RAPP. The only
thing that counted was that “they, in their raging enmity . . . acquired a strange
unanimity and sang in unison as soon as the spiritual riches that had been accumu-
lated by the people were touched upon.”61 The “destructive” role of the avant-garde
was described by the patriotic critics as the substitution of the national by the pseu-
dointernational (although it is clear that the term pseudointernational itself constitutes
a pleonasm here, as any form of internationalism was regarded by the patriots as
an erroneous position). Exposure of the “erroneous and destructive” culture of the
avant-garde allowed the pochvenniki to bring the symptomatic figure of Trotsky
onto the scene, who had actively supported the national nihilism of the avant-garde
and played a key role “in the destruction of traditional Russian cultural values.”62
The “politics of balance” used by the authorities, that is, the more or less sym-
metrical distribution of pressure on the competing literary and social camps (in the
beginning “liberals” and “conservatives,” from the late 1960s onward “liberals” and
“pochvenniki”) led to the removal of Molodaia gvardiia’s editor in chief from his post
(followed by his appointment as editor in chief of the journal Vokrug sveta), a few
months after the resignation of Tvardovsky at Novyi mir. However, while in the latter
case the dismissal of almost the entire editorial board and the departure of the edi-
tor in chief led to the disappearance of the ideological and institutional center of the
“liberal” current, the opposite happened in the case of Molodaia gvardiia. The removal
of the editor in chief not only failed to trigger a change in editorial policy (Nikonov’s
place at Molodaia gvardiia was taken by his deputy and fellow fighter Anatolii Ivanov),
but even led to the emergence of new breeding grounds for the consolidation of the
patriotic movement; the role of the journal Nash sovremennik, led by Sergei Viku-
lov, and of other journals of similar orientation was strengthened. Repressions from
the side of the authorities only led to a rise in popularity and forced the proponents
of this current in the party apparatus to rally even closer. In this sense Nikonov’s
resignation, which marked the symbolic end of the process of the formation of the
national patriotic current (and which coincided with the end of the decade, just as in
the case of Tvardovsky), signalled the beginning of the active development of this
movement in the public and literary space of the 1970s.
 LITERARY CRITICISM OF THE
10
LONG 1970s AND THE FATE OF
SOVIET LIBERALISM
MARK LIPOVETSKY and MIKHAIL BERG
The Role of Literary Criticism in the Long 1970s
The debate on the function and tasks of literary criticism raged throughout
the entire period of the “long” 1970s—from the changes in the political climate in-
duced by the intervention in the Prague Spring to the early months of perestroika
(1968–1985). In 1972 the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a special
decree titled “O literaturno-khudozhestvennoi kritike” (On Literary Criticism). The
most important consequence of this decree was the foundation of the journal Liter-
aturnoe obozrenie, which doubtlessly became the best—and one of the most liberal—
critical publications in the USSR and whose first editor in chief was Iurii Surovtsev.
The preparation and discussion of the decree provided a stimulus for the debate on
literary criticism as a social institution, as did the anniversaries of the decree. Several
scholarly volumes were dedicated to issues in literary criticism. The first textbook for
future literary critics, written by Vadim Baranov, Anatolii Bocharov, and Surovtsev,
was published in 1982.1 Boris Bursov’s Kritika kak literatura (Criticism as Literature),
a cogently argued challenge to the notion of “real” (that is, sociological) criticism
based on the classics of nineteenth-century literature, came out in 1976. In 1988 Ser-
gei Chuprinin, himself a well-known critic of the younger generation, published
Kritika—eto kritiki (The Criticism Is Critics), a book that was without precedent in
207
208  MARK LIPOVETSKY AND MIKHAIL BERG
Soviet culture. This was the first time ever that contemporary critics featured as the
main characters in a critical book.
Why were literary criticism and its sociocultural functions singled out for atten-
tion by writers and their political guardians alike? After the Thaw, and with it the
limited, but nevertheless lively, debates on politics, history, and ideology had come
to an end, the ideological polemic was transferred to the field of literary criticism.
Naturally it was impossible for this function of criticism to be acknowledged offi-
cially. Because of that the debate on the tasks of criticism was divided neatly into two
contradictory discourses. On the level of ideological officialdom, the stereotypes of
Soviet rhetoric continued to be reproduced. On the other hand, the more or less
individual manifestoes of critics such as Lev Anninskii, Igor’ Zolotusskii, Vadim
Kozhinov, Chuprinin, Alla Latynina and others declared comparatively unorthodox
views on criticism as a cultural institution—views that were a far cry from the the-
ory of socialist realism. Various critical strategies grew out of the idea of literature,
or rather, the literary process, as an organic unity that either reflects or embodies so-
ciety’s “collective soul.” Such an approach inevitably invested the conceptualization
of the literary process with political significance.
It is significant that almost all critical works of the time dropped the debate
about socialist realism and its “demands.” The only exception here was the petrified
discourse of official criticism, the significance of which had boiled down to purely
ritual functions, that is, the affirmation of the existence of “party leadership in lit-
erature” and the participation in hate campaigns (against Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
Western Slavists, the Metropol’ almanac, and so on). However, one has to admit that
official criticism was trying to “write into” the ideological context phenomena that
had been rejected or surrounded with the halo of political suspicion. The apotheosis
of this attempt to broaden the horizon of socialist realism was the theory of socialist
realism as a “historically open system of form in art,” put forward by the academi-
cian Dmitrii Markov.
A specialist in the literature of the East European socialist countries, Markov
knew better than anyone else just how much criticism the main dogma of Soviet
literature continued to attract outside the USSR. In his 1975 book Problemy teorii sot-
sialisticheskogo realizma (Issues in the Theory of Socialist Realism) Markov tried to
separate the method (ideology) from the practice (poetics), probably out of a desire to
prevent a full schism between literary process and formal theory, similar to the one
that had already happened in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and was imminent in
Poland and Hungary.2 According to his book, faithfulness to socialist realism does
not necessarily demand a strictly realist style, but permits nonrealist, phantasmago-
rical, allegorical, and other “non-lifelike” forms, of course only when these forms
“further the revelation of the truth of ideas and public moods, which are in one way
or another linked to the life of society at the time. . . . The cognitive value of the
nonrealist image is measured by the degree of its correspondence to the logic of ob-
jective reality.”3 Naturally, “truth of ideas” and “logic of objective reality” are in
this case defined by their correspondence to party-mindedness, the method incarnate.
LITERARY CRITICISM OF THE LONG 1970s AND THE FATE OF SOVIET LIBERALISM  209
However, in spite of all these precautions, by casting socialist realism as an “open

system” Markov (doubtlessly with the support of the highest political authorities)
effectively allowed the modernist aesthetic to enter socialist realism.
As a rule, the representatives of party officialdom favored one or the other pole
of the hidden ideological polemic between nationalists and liberals that was at the
core of 1970s literary criticism and in many ways honed the political discussions of
the perestroika period. Critics such as Aleksandr Ovcharenko, Aleksei Metchenko,
Iurii Barabash, Pyotr Vykhodtsev, and Feliks Kuznetsov translated the nationalist
ideologemes into the language of party rhetoric, while Surovtsev, Iurii Kuzmenko,
Iurii Andreev, and, of course, Aleksandr Iakovlev, the eminent party functionary
and future “architect of perestroika,” engaged in a polemic with nationalism from
the standpoint of the very same Marxist-Leninist dogma. Iakovlev was the author of
the famous article “Protiv antiistorizma” (Against Anti-historicism), the publication
of which cost him the position of acting head of the ideological department of the
Central Committee.4
However, the ideological confrontation between national patriotic and liberal
criticism had not yet become antagonistic in the 1970s. For example, the liberal Igor’
Dedkov often published in such a flagship publication of nationalist ideology as Nash
sovremennik, while the pages of the Literaturnaia gazeta provided a platform for dia-
logue between the official critic Feliks Kuznetsov and Georgii Vladimov, the author
of works that had already been banned and who was soon to become a dissident and
emigrate to Germany.5 The nationalist ideologue Kozhinov expressed his support
for Andrei Bitov, while the liberal Chuprinin wrote a more than benevolent intro-
duction to the volume of selected works of poet (and critic) Stanislav Kuniaev, one of
the nationalists’ leaders.6
Nationalist Criticism
It took nationalist criticism of the 1970s not long to emancipate itself from
Marxist rhetoric, having recourse to it only when the critics needed a weapon of
polemic or denunciation. From 1967–1968 onward, the nationalist critical discourse
took on clearly anti-Soviet traits. Moreover, the “patriotic” critics analyzed the So-
viet regime and Soviet culture from a premodern position, and therefore the main
constituents of their discourse were an anti-Western attitude, antimodernism, and
anti-intellectualism. These critics interpreted all cultural phenomena as results of the
struggle of forces loyal to national traditions—embodied, on the one hand, by the
peasantry and, on the other, by classical Russian literature—against the malevolent
distortion and destruction of this tradition carried out by the Jews (that is, the agents
of modernization) and the Western-oriented intelligentsia. This is the origin of the
rigid scheme of binary oppositions that permeate each and every text written by
the nationalist critics, from programmatic “historiosophic” articles to brief reviews:
the people versus the intelligentsia, inherently opposed to the people; the primordial
spirituality of Russian culture versus the soulless influences from the West; folk-
lore versus mass culture; tradition versus the modernist obsession with experiments;
Russia versus the anti-Russian conspiracy, which inside the country itself is repre-
sented by the Jews and the liberal intelligentsia.
This was of course an ideological opposition to the regime, but one that was
permitted and encouraged by the authorities. It was precisely the demand for ethno-
nationalist ideology within the party elite itself that explains the paradoxical fact
that significant public escapades of the nationalist critics (in particular between 1968–
1970 and then again between 1977–1982) were rarely followed by administrative con-
sequences, although they inevitably elicited a wave of critical responses. Anyway,
the influence of this group did not decrease but, on the contrary, continued to grow
throughout the 1970s.7
The first scandalous appearances of the nationalist critics date back to the end of
the 1960s, to Viktor Chalmaev’s and Mikhail Lobanov’s articles in Molodaia gvardiia.
It was in these articles that the most important principles of their discourse were
formulated. First, they identified the chief enemy of genuine national culture—the
“educated philistines” (obrazovannoe meshchanstvo), according to the title of Lobanov’s
1968 article in the fourth issue of Molodaia gvardiia. The critic applied this stamp (in
its content extremely close to Solzhenitsyn’s later obrazovanshchina) to Vsevolod Mey-
erhold, Bulat Okudzhava, and Anatolii Efros. It was not difficult to discern behind
this deliberately obscure attack on the “educated philistines” the images of both the
Western-oriented intellectual and the modernist artist who is laying hands on the
holy cow of the national classics. It was this phantom character, and not, in any case,
the Soviet regime, who was responsible for the cultural impoverishment of the Rus-
sian nation. In his article “Neizbezhnost’” (Inevitability) Chalmaev defined the en-
emy even more clearly as “xenophilia [chuzhebesie], that is, an insane attachment to
everything foreign.”8 And because of this xenophilia, a transparent pseudonym for
“homeless cosmopolitanism,” argued the critic, “the ‘quiet chime’ of the bells of high
art that is truly close to the people [deistvitel’no narodnoe] remains unheard behind the
crackle.”9
Second, these articles were designating a warlike paranoid context, which
was absolutely indispensable for the developing discourse of “patriotic criticism.”
Lobanov, for example, defined the conflict of contemporary culture as a clash of
“irreconcilable forces—moral uniqueness and Americanism of the spirit.”10 Obvi-
ously, in this case the skeptical intellectual or author of popular “chansonnettes” (he
meant Bulat Okudzhava) featured as an agent of bourgeois influence, something that
sounded like an open political denunciation against the background of the not yet
suppressed Prague Spring and writer trials of the late 1960s. By contrast, Mikhail
Sholokhov, Leonid Leonov, Mikhail Alekseev, the young village prose writers, and
the heirs to the Esenin school in poetry, from Aleksandr Prokof’ev to Feliks Chuev,
were declared bearers of the “philosophy of patriotism” (the title of another of Chal-
maev’s articles published in Molodaia gvardiia 10 [1967]). These authors featured not
only as the defenders of national tradition, but also as the keepers of eternal mo-
rality, the Russian spiritual tradition that was being undermined by the “educated
philistines.” And therefore the struggle for morality presupposed the struggle against
modernism, against bourgeois influences, and against the intelligentsia.
On the whole, the structure of the discourse of patriotic criticism exhibits strik-
ing parallels with the dogma of socialist realism. Party-mindedness turned into
national-mindedness and national tradition, “ideological correctness” (ideinost’) into
“spirituality” (dukhovnost’), and “orientation toward the people” (narodnost’) simply
remained what it was, since it had always contained anti-intellectual connotations
and been directed against the intelligentsia. Thus a relatively new ideology was be-
ing formalized as already prevailing and official.
In Chalmaev’s and Lobanov’s articles the imperial pathos of nationalist criticism
had not yet reached its full force, and neither had the distinct anti-Semitism, but
the foundations were laid. More than ten years after the publication of Chalmaev’s
article, Kozhinov, the leading theorist of patriotic criticism, returned to the discus-
sion of the Russian “civilization of the soul” in his article “I nazovet menia vsiak
sushchii v nei iazyk . . . ” (And All Her Tongues Will Call Me . . . ) that was timed
to coincide with the 160th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth. Starting from Metro-
politan Illarion, Chaadaev, and Dostoevky’s Pushkin speech, Kozhinov developed
the thesis of Russian culture’s messianic superiority over all others. Moreover, he
portrayed Russian culture not only as inherently and genuinely Christian, but also as
the most conscientious and self-critical of all cultures—both reproof and example to
the entire world. Even Mikhail Bakhtin was inscribed into this context. According
to Kozhinov, Bakhtin’s philosophy was the natural result of the superiority of the
Russian “spiritual tradition”: “Only Russian thought was capable of creating, and
had to create, the aesthetic of dialogue, which embodies the most profound nature of
Russian literature.”11
It is not difficult to see how the metaphysics of the “civilization of the soul” and
the antithesis between spiritual Russia and the soulless West triggered associations
with Slavophilism in the opponents of patriotic discourse, especially as the nation-
alist critics themselves actively propagated the Slavophiles.12 However, Chalmaev’s
and Kozhinov’s articles clearly show that for the “patriotic critics” the ideal standard
was not even the Slavophile model but rather an angry nostalgia for premodern (ac-
cording to Kozhinov, “Asian,” anti-European) values, which elevated an “instinc-
tive,” irrational racial unity—blood and soil—above everything else and thereby
came closer to Alfred Rosenberg than to Aleksei Khomyakov or Ivan Kireevsky.
The principles elaborated in the articles of the theorists of nationalist discourse
were implemented in practice in the activities of the patriotic critics during the 1970s.
One can identify several currents here. In their numerous publications on village
prose, the nationalist critics portrayed the more than contradictory heroes of Vasilii
Belov, Valentin Rasputin, Fedor Abramov, and Vasily Shukshin as keepers of holy
folk spirituality who are being attacked from all sides by the demons of moderniza-
tion—foreigners, members of the intelligentsia, city life, the Soviet regime. Belov’s
Ivan Afrikanovich was depicted as a “man in the most complete, holistic sense of
this word,” a man “to whose level one wants to ascend.”13 The short novel itself was
described by Chalmaev as a “patriotic hymn to the millions of sowers and custodians

of the earth.”14 Similar characterizations were passed on from article to article and
turned into fixed clichés, used in patriotic discourse for the description of all texts by
the village prose authors and extended to the poets who represented “quiet” poetry,
opposed to the “loud” (that is, politicized and modernist) poetry of the 1960s (for
example, that of Evgeny Evtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky).
However, not the praise of the “close ones” but the war with the “enemies” con-
stituted the most important activity of the critics from this camp. First of all, this was
a war for the classics. The nationalist critics regarded the classics as the sacred core of
“Russian spirituality” (dukhovnost’) and because of this, guarding them against ir-
reverent approaches became likened to a religious war against infidels. The program
of this “holy war” was laid out in great detail by Petr Palievskii and Stanislav Kuni-
aev during a discussion in 1977 called “Klassika i my” (The Classics and Us), in which
the “national patriots” for the first time were featured as a group with a unified
ideology (this discussion had great resonance abroad and in samizdat but went “un-
noticed” by the Soviet official side). In his speech opening the discussion Palievskii
dealt a major blow to avant-garde art and especially to the Soviet avant-garde of the
1920s that, according to Palievskii, had been fighting a “war of annihilation” against
the Russian classics—and that means against Russian spirituality itself. As the main
weapon in this war, Palievskii eventually identified the avant-garde’s “interpretive
obsession” (interpretatorstvo), allegedly proof that the avant-garde had been turning
to the classics “for artistic content, which the avant-garde itself has never possessed
and does not possess now either.”15 However, according to the critic, historical justice
had triumphed during the Stalin era, and Russian spirituality had prevailed: “Clas-
sical culture, in union with popular culture, was very successful in the 1930s–1940s.
. . . Our best art was produced during the 1930s–1940s: Tikhii Don, evidently the best
novel of the twentieth century, was written in our country. (Laughter, noise, ap-
plause)” (“Klassika i my,” 187, 188).
The view of Soviet culture that we see here is at once antimodernist and Stalin-
ist, because the Stalinist period, of all periods, was declared a renaissance of the na-
tional spirit, in contradiction to all known facts—that is why people in the audience
were laughing. Kuniaev in his address set forth essentially the same conception, de-
claring the revolution the work of Jews (Kuniaev’s epitome of Jewish avant-gardism
in literature was Eduard Bagritsky), while Stalinism had been the triumph of the
national soul.
Weird as it may sound, many of the propositions put forward in these and simi-
lar addresses by Kozhinov, Lobanov, and Iurii Seleznev were taken up by liberal crit-
ics, too. Zolotusskii, for example, talked about the sacred meaning of the classics
stressing that only Russians could experience this level of contact to their canoni-
cal writers. Irina Rodnianskaia supported the attack on the formalists for depriving
the classics of their mystical significance (what she defined as “naive teleologism”)
(“Klassika i my,” 188). And Sergo Lominadze, head of the theory section of the
liberal journal Voprosy literatury, supported Palievskii’s attack on the famed theater
LITER ARY CRITICISM OF THE LONG 1970s AND THE FATE OF SOVIET LIBERALISM  213
director Anatolii Efros and added Iurii Liubimov, also as a direct heir to the avant-
garde, to the list of the “accused.”
The nationalist program of the “holy war for the classics,” which included both
anti-Semitism and nostalgia for Stalinism, resonated with the views of the liberal
intelligentsia, not only because of the program’s anti-Soviet pathos, but also because
of its substitute religiosity. The attempt to transform the classics into a sacred and
untouchable treasure was perceived by many as a necessary countermeasure to late
Soviet cynicism.
Simultaneously, the nationalistically oriented critics waged a war for simplic-
ity and against “complexity,” in which they invariably perceived the influence of
the intelligentsia or the West, in any case something that was foreign to the healthy
body of national art. This notion stood behind the incessant denunciation of mod-
ernism and those works of Soviet literature that were either conceived “under West-
ern influence” or, more frequently, simply digressed from traditional realism. In this
context appeared Kozhinov’s attacks on Iurii Trifonov and Arsenii Tarkovsky; Lan-
shchikov’s wrath toward the concept of “intellectual poetry”; Valentin Kurbatov’s
exasperation at the abundance of bookish, that is, excessively cultured and intellec-
tual, references in contemporary poetry; Kuniaev’s attacks on Andrei Voznesensky,
David Samoilov, and Iurii Levitanskii for being too abstract and intellectual and,
consequently, “not of the people” (ne narodnykh); and the war waged by the younger
Aleksandr Kazintsev against the “difficult” metaphorical poets of the early 1980s.16
All these authors went beyond the boundaries of traditional realist aesthetics, all of
them presented themselves as artistically difficult in the eyes of both readers and au-
thorities, but more important was the fact that their work highlighted cultural tra-
ditions, first and foremost modernist and avant-gardist, which did not fit into the
framework of the nationalist myth.
Attempts to polemicize against the nationalist critics’ cultural and political pro-
gram, undertaken by Aleksandr Dement’ev, Iakovlev, Surovtsev, Kuzmenko, and
other representatives of the liberal wing of official criticism, remained inefficient.
All these critics, observing the many mistakes and blunders made by the nationalists,
correctly identified the antihistoricism of the national patriotic constructs. But na-
tionalist discourse was in fact trying to construe a new religious metaphysics, a new
ideological myth of blood and soil, and the discussion of literary texts, which are
by their very nature suggestive and multifaceted, was perfectly suited to this task.
Worse, the liberal polemicists had no conceptual tools with which to counter the
nationalist antihistoricism apart from the Leninist-Stalinist dogma (itself no less an-
tihistorical and mythological).
Liberal Criticism
The liberally oriented critics differed from their “patriotic” colleagues not only
conceptually, but also stylistically. While nationalist criticism was characterized
mainly by a combination of grandiloquent prophetism and a Soviet-style obsession
with ideological formulas, the liberal critics had no unified style or methodology.
Rather than ideologizing a given piece, the liberal critics preferred to either carry
out an in-depth analysis of the writer’s poetics (in the case of academic and aesthetic
criticism) or to provide an emotional, and always personal, response to the author’s
artistic world (in the case of impressionistic or sociological criticism). On the one
hand, this weakened the liberal tendency within literary criticism: the only thing
with which these critics could counter the pressure from the “patriots” were their
individual opinions (which, naturally, changed over time). Moreover, due to diver-
gent approaches they often polemicized with one another, rather than presenting a
unified ideological front. On the other hand, it was precisely this nonideological (at
least on the surface) attitude toward literature that constituted the novel feature of
1970s criticism—especially after the dogmatic criticism of the 1930s–1950s and the
ideologically polarized criticism of the 1960s.
So, which literary tendencies attracted the attention of the critics from the lib-
eral camp? In the first place the very same village prose we already mentioned. For
the liberal critics, just as for the “national patriots,” village prose was and remained
the single most important and productive tendency of the 1970s literary process. Of
course, there can be no doubt that the liberally minded critics’ interpretation of this
literary current was fundamentally different from patriotic mythology. One ex-
ample is Dedkov’s 1969 article “Stranitsy derevenskoi zhizni” (Pages from Village
Life), published in Novyi mir, in which he convincingly showed that the heroes of
village prose, and above all Belov’s Ivan Afrikanovich, had nothing in common with
the image created by patriotic critics: “In him [Ivan Afrikanovich] there are many
good and in a human way attractive traits; his life elicits compassion and pity. But
. . . misfortune does not take away the guilt.”17 In the same year, Alla Marchenko,
arguing with Anninskii and Kamianov, who had also spotted in Ivan Afrikanovich
the traits of an ideal hero, turned her attention to the hero’s ignorant philistinism and
his tragicomic irresponsibility.18 Similarly, Rodnianskaia in her article “Vstrechi i
poedinki v tipovom dome” (Meetings and Duels in a Standard House) saw in Kostia
Zorin, Belov’s alter ego from the short story cycle “Vospitanie po doktoru Spoku”
(Upbringing According to Doctor Spock), a personification of the existential dead
end caused by the crisis of the entire Soviet sociocultural system.19
It is no coincidence that the authors who, in the eyes of the liberal critics, be-
came the central figures of the village prose movement were Vasily Shukshin, Fedor
Abramov, Sergei Zalygin, Victor Astafiev, and Boris Mozhaev. In their work the
dramatic tension between the characters and the historical collisions clearly out-
weighed the tendency toward the mythologization (in the spirit of national patriotic
ideology) of the “little man,” which was becoming ever more pronounced in the
work of Vladimir Soloukhin, Belov, Valentin Rasputin, Viktor Likhonosov, and
other village prose writers. Shukshin’s work was an especially fertile ground for the
critics. For example, at first Anninskii interpreted Shukshin’s short stories as a re-
minder “of the stable and simple core of our mutable and difficult life.”20 But, in an
article that was published after Shukshin’s death, the critic detected in Shukshin’s
protagonists “the unsatisfied dignity of a spiritual individual who has been unable to
realize himself. . . . This is the meaning of the torment of the human soul in Shuk-
shin’s late work . . . and from here comes the deadly ennui. None of Shukshin’s char-
acters know what they are longing for. But the longing is there!”21
Galina Belaia, one of the first to apply Bakhtin’s concepts of the other and the
dialogic word to the analysis of current literary material, uncovered some brilliant
examples of dialogism in Shukshin’s prose while he was still alive and far from be-
ing a classic. Subsequently Belaia developed the ideas first mentioned in her article
“Iskusstvo est’ smysl” (Art Is Meaning) into a large-scale historico-theoretical con-
cept based on an analysis of the struggle between the “dialogic” and the “authori-
tative” style as the central theme of Russian literary history from the 1920s to the
1970s.22 In Belaia’s writing, purely academic analysis became infused with manifestly
political significance within the context of the literary and ideological arguments of
her time: the dialogism of Shukshin’s prose, which the critic had uncovered, offered
a basis for the conclusion that “‘popular consciousness,’ understood in a monolithic
sense, is a fiction, a cerebral construct.”23 Later in her analysis of Shukshin’s work,
Belaia turned her attention to his eccentric philosophy of the feast as temporary
emancipation, to carnival liberty and its surrogates; she was among the first who
suggested reading village prose as for the most part philosophical (“ontological”)
literature.24
As can be seen from this deliberately short and incomplete overview of opin-
ions, the “signified” of liberally minded criticism was the deepening crisis of Soviet
society—social, psychological, ideological, and existential. Naturally, this topic was
never broached openly but always discussed in an indirect way. It was no accident
that in the end the liberal critics found their “soil” in intellectual “urban” literature, a
current that openly and purposefully tried to establish the meaning of the social and
cultural crisis of “late socialism.” It is worth noting that this literature gave rise to
contradictions—sometimes milder, sometimes more pronounced—not only between
the liberals and the “national patriots,” but also among the liberal critics themselves.
Andrei Bitov and Aleksandr Vampilov, Iurii Trifonov and Irina Grekova (the pseud-
onym of Elena Sergeevna Venttsel’), Granin and Aleksandr Kron, post-Vampilov
playwrights and “forty-year-old” (sorokaletnie) prose writers were regarded as exam-
ples of a certain “everyday” (bytovoi) literature with a limited social horizon, which
remained under the suspicion of being “philistine.” All of them suffered the same
accusations of trivial subject matter, lack of clear authorial position, petty and unhe-
roic characters, insignificant plot, and so on. The frequent recurrence of these attacks
testifies to a profound contradiction within critical consciousness during the 1970s.
The history of the reception of Trifonov’s prose and the prose of the soro-
kaletnie is exemplary in this context.25 At first, Trifonov’s “urban tales” provoked
a standard reaction: “The Procrustean bed of everyday life” (Nikolai Klado); “The
colorful litter of the Flemish school” (Vsevolod Sakharov); “In a small closed world”
(Iurii Andreev); “The dimensions of a small world” (Grigorii Brovman)—these titles
and judgments accompanied Trifonov throughout the first half of the 1970s.26
Trifonov’s prose clearly went beyond the limits of 1960s social realism, being
more polyphonic and not offering any definite moral judgments. Many liberal crit-
ics misunderstood it precisely because of its aesthetic complexity. Anninskii’s article

“Intelligenty i prochie” (Intelligentsia and the Rest) stood out among the general
attacks on Trifonov’s “obsession with the everyday” (bytovizm). Refusing to admit
that the author’s attitude to his heroes from the intelligentsia could be slightly more
complex than mere denunciation or mere justification, Anninskii accused the “urban
tales” of a “lack of moral clarity.”27
It took the systematic efforts of critics such as Anatolii Bocharov, Vladimir
Pertsovskii, Belaia, and, slightly later, Nataliia Ivanova, Igor’ Dedkov, Svetlana
Eremina, and Vladimir Piskunov, who all devoted great attention to the analysis
of the poetics of Trifonov’s prose, to see his phenomenology of history and the ev-
eryday as a single indivisible process, immune to simplified evaluations. Anatolii
Bocharov insistently pointed to the difficulty of Trifonov’s artistic logic, which can
never be reduced to a single voice or a single point of view: “The originality of Tri-
fonov’s manner lies precisely in the fact that it is impossible to find a clear demarca-
tion between the author and the narrator in every single case, every small episode.”28
Nataliia Ivanova in her book Proza Iuriia Trifonova (The Prose of Iurii Trifonov) at-
tentively reconstructed the system of historical subtexts that run through the every-
day world of Trifonov’s heroes like a multitude of threads and lend truly historical
significance to their everyday decisions. In the 1980s, Belaia, Eremina, and Piskunov
emphasized the philosophical component of Trifonov’s poetics: “He discovered the
fluidity of life, of the life process. . . . He set himself the goal to embody that which
cannot be embodied: ‘To see the passing of time, to see what it is doing to people,
how it changes everything around.’”29
However, in critical circles a simplified view of Trifonov had become estab-
lished: “As a rule, Trifonov’s heroes are tested by the ‘blaze of the [revolutionary]
bonfire,’ that is, the ideals of the 1920s–1930s.”30 Trifonov “examines our lives with
the rays of revolutionary morality”—as if the ambiguity of the figures of activists
from the 1920s–1930s and the illusiveness of stereotypes about their purity and hero-
ism had not been demonstrated by Bocharov himself and others in their analysis of
Trifonov’s prose.31
This simplification testified to the critics’ stubborn rejection of any nonsocio-
logical reading of “everyday prose” and to the irremovable existence of a rigid ma-
trix of ideas that were concerned not only with how realist prose had to be, but also
with contemporary life itself—after all it were the attempts to judge literature from
the viewpoint of “life” that prevented critics from grasping the novelty of Trifonov’s
poetics. This matrix reemerged when they began to discuss the “ambivalent” prose (a
definition coined by Ruslan Kireev) of the sorokaletnie: they contrasted these writ-
ers with Trifonov, at the same time accusing them of the very same failures for which
they had reviled Trifonov’s prose.
Behind the colorful conglomeration of authors, which the critics, in particular
Vladimir Bondarenko, had christened the sorokaletnie or “the Moscow school,” one
can discern a definite literary tendency that was shaped by the texts of Vladimir
Makanin, Kireev, Anatolii Kurchatkin, Anatolii Kim, and the prose (not yet pub-
lished at the time) and drama of Ludmila Petrushevskaya, along with other play-
wrights of the post-Vampilov current.32 Their aesthetics principally excluded the

social dimension from the image of the world, replacing it with an existential, psy-
chological one, thus standing in polemical opposition to the social criticism of the
“generation of the sixties,” as well as to the all too familiar “active stand in life” of
late socialist realism and the nationalist myth creation.
Dedkov voiced the most radical disapproval of this tendency, in his article
“Kogda rasseialsia liricheskii tuman . . . ” (When the Lyric Mist Had Dispersed . . . ).33
This article triggered a lively, protracted debate but also, paradoxically, promoted
the recognition of the generation of the sorokaletnie as a really existing phenome-
non. While certain official critics, such as Feliks Kuznetsov, attacked the sorokaletnie
for their unambiguous indifference to official dogma, Dedkov regarded them as es-
sentially a product of the Era of Stagnation, conformism, and accused them outright
of avoiding topical social themes for the sake of harmless “trivialities.”
Dedkov’s “Kogda rasseialsia liricheskii tuman . . . ” was the desperate attack
of an idealist from the “generation of the sixties ” against the social apathy and
conformism of the period of Stagnation. What is more, this article was one of the
first symptoms of the dramatic rift between the generation of the sixties and an en-
tire group of representatives of younger generations, from the sorokaletnie to the
postmodernists—a rift that would become obvious in the 1990s. At the same time,
the academically minded critics turned out to be much more discerning with re-
gard to the literature of the sorokaletnie. Bocharov, Kamianov, and Rodnianskaia
were those who were most perceptive toward the current’s ideology, and they also
produced the most pervasive portrayals of its outstanding representatives, above all
Vladimir Makanin.34
The debate on “everyday” literature was a symptom of the serious crisis of
the realist aesthetics or, rather, of the gap between a realism that had transgressed
its boundaries in the literary works of Trifonov and the sorokaletnie and the rigid
criteria for social (actually, sociological) realism that persisted in the conscious-
ness of many liberal critics. However, it was these critics—and first and foremost
Bocharov—who first mentioned the crisis of village prose and the war aesthetic and,
in a wider sense, the realist aesthetic as a whole in the literature of the 1970s.35 In his
books and articles of the early 1980s, Bocharov conducted a consistent and thought-
ful study of the nonrealist or, to be more precise, modernist forms that had become
prominent in literature during the late 1970s: phantasmagoric tendencies, mytholo-
gism, ironic narration from the point of view of an unreliable narrator, growing
philosophical reflectiveness, allusions to the genres of fable and allegory, and the
emergence of surrealist techniques.
Kamianov, too, wrote of a “realism that had suddenly discovered its indebt-
edness to philosophical awareness, to an awareness of the ultimate truths,” having
tirelessly demonstrated his particular perceptiveness toward intellectual prose of the
modernist type, from Bitov to Makanin.36 Nataliia Ivanova in her article “Vol’noe
dykhanie” (Free Breath) remarked upon the sharp rise in fantastic prose and a new
variant of confessional literature (“author’s prose”) that was evident even in the work
of representatives of orthodox socialist realism (Pyotr Proskurin) and village prose
writers (Valentin Rasputin, Vladimir Krupin).37 And Alla Latynina confidently es-
tablished the competence and legitimacy of “historical fantasy” with regard to the
novels of Bulat Okudzhava, which disregard historical accuracy and verisimilitude.38
At the same time, it was this very increase in modernist tendencies in the lit-
erature of the 1970s and 1980s that caused, if not a schism, then at least a rift among
the critics of the liberal camp. A vivid example was the debate on mythologism and
the overall nonrealist form of contemporary literature, which was begun by An-
ninskii with the article “Zhazhdu belletrizma!” (I Thirst for Belles Lettres!),” where
he interpreted contemporary writers’ enthusiasm for certain nonrealist idioms—
mythologism, allegory, parable—as an evasion of acute social topics.39 According
to Anninskii, by turning toward certain nonrealist forms, the writers of the new
generation of the 1970s were adopting a convenient form of conformism. Allegorical
forms, the critic reckoned, enabled both young and experienced authors (his main
representative of the latter category was Chingiz Aitmatov) to avoid all honest anal-
ysis of social reality and to hide from socially explosive and dangerous “truth,” tak-
ing cover behind aesthetics. Nor was Anninskii the only one who perceived aesthetic
difficulty, formal experiment, and avant-gardism in general as a form of excess that
deflected attention from the vital tasks of literature—on the contrary, his perception
was symptomatic of the profound contradiction within liberal criticism itself.
On the one hand, the liberal critics could not possibly accept the national patri-
otic cult of tradition, understanding as they did the sinister subtext of this rhetoric.
On the other hand, they were often far from being prepared for aesthetic experi-
ments. Moreover, the liberal critics quite often interpreted avant-garde or mod-
ernist experiments as undermining the moral traditions of Russian culture, that is,
the nineteenth-century classics and the classics of the twentieth century that con-
stituted an alternative to socialist realism—the works of Osip Mandelstam, Anna
Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Alex-
ander Solzhenitsyn. A good example is the dominant liberal attitude toward the
radically experimental, modernist aesthetic of Valentin Kataev in the 1960s–1970s,
which was seminally important as a link between the modernist metafiction of the
1920s–1930s and the postmodernism of the 1980s–1990s. Taking the odious reputa-
tion of this former master of socialist realism as their point of departure, the liberal
critics—Benedikt Sarnov was the first and later received support from Vladimir
Kardin, Nataliia Krymova, Zolotusskii, and Latynina—stubbornly produced varia-
tions on the same theme: the coldness and amoralism of Kataev’s power of observa-
tion, the immorality of his modernist mastery.40
This logic can be traced in the work of many representatives of the liberal ori-
entation in criticism. It is characteristic that even the scandal around the uncensored
almanac Metropol’ (1979), one of the loudest political campaigns of that time, was
tinged with moral judgment. Once again symptomatic was the fact that moral defi-
cits were attributed for the most part to those texts that went beyond the limits of
the realist aesthetic. The transformation of morality into the main aesthetic criterion was
becoming more and more prominent in liberal criticism of the late 1970s and early
1980s. In Kardin’s sarcastic words, “on a scale from one to five, a literary text would
receive the highest mark for kindness. They would touchingly find it in the works of
poets, prose writers, playwrights, and journalists. One could rename without fur-
ther ado the Union of Soviet Writers into the Union of Kind Souls.”41
It was this predominance of ethics over aesthetics, but also the equation of any
deviation from realism with a deficit in moral values (of the author or the characters),
that accounted for the unexpected convergence of liberal criticism with that of the
“national patriots,” who also propagated the myth of “spiritual tradition” as the cor-
nerstone of their aesthetics. Naturally, the moral pathos of 1970s liberal criticism was
to a large extent predetermined by the literary texts it discussed. The texts that were
in the center of critical attention—village prose, war prose, Trifonov and the authors
of the “tales of moral experiment,” Vasil’ Bykov and Vladimir Tendriakov—were
all concerned with moral questions above everything else. Still, the liberal critics
proved incapable of devising an independent logic of aesthetic analysis of new trends
in literature, increasingly nonrealist, modernist, and postmodernist.
One would think that the criticism that developed in the underground, not con-
stricted by the framework of what was permitted in Soviet literature, would have
been able to resolve the contradictions that had emerged in literary criticism during
the 1970s. However, strangely enough, there are more similarities than differences to
discover between these two discursive currents that had hardly any point of contact.
Unofficial Literary Criticism
Literary criticism became common in unofficial literature only with the emer-
gence of the first samizdat journals. The main task of unofficial literary criticism
(hardly ever formally proclaimed) was the legitimization of uncensored, noncon-
formist literary practices. For this purpose criticism appealed to a range of authori-
tative predecessors but distanced itself from the compromised strategies of official
Soviet culture. Nevertheless the language and approaches of the unofficial critics
mirrored those used in official criticism, naturally without the corresponding value
judgments. The growth of unofficial criticism was for the most part thematic and
based on that which was being systematically forced out of the field of Soviet critical
discourse.
The competition within the field of unofficial culture itself led to the emer-
gence of different schools and strategies, each with their own addressees, and due
to divergent goals and reference, these groups were increasingly isolated from each
other. In the eyes of the unofficial critics, the most important binary opposition was
not so much the one between official and unofficial culture as the one between émigré
culture and world culture, as well as the one between Leningrad unofficial culture and
Moscow unofficial culture; and the opposition between Moscow conceptualism and
Leningrad spiritual poetry was also of seminal importance.
Some of the first examples of unofficial criticism of the 1970s that warrant close
attention appeared in the samizdat collection Belaia kniga (The White Book), com-
piled by the poet and journalist Aleksandr Ginzburg, based on materials relating to
the prosecution of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who had been sentenced for
publishing their work in the West. Belaia kniga did not yet contain any “literary”
articles in the proper sense—such articles did not exist, as they were not in demand
by the institutions of unofficial culture, which were only beginning to form at the
time. The first examples of unofficial literary criticism appeared in the genre of open
letters and statements.
One such example was Viacheslav V. Ivanov’s “Zaiavlenie v iuridicheskuiu
konsul’tatsiiu” (Statement to the Legal Advice Office). This is an official text, written
in response to an enquiry by the Legal Advice Office of the Bauman District of Mos-
cow. However, the structure, apparatus, and system of Ivanov’s argument belong
entirely to the genre of internal scholarly review. The main difference is the object of
study—in this case the publication in the West of the uncensored literary and critical
works of Sinyavsky. One of the main goals of the trial was to provide evidence that
the publication of such works in the West was not literature, but political provoca-
tion, and that the defendants were being tried not for literary work, but for an alto-
gether different, fully punishable, and essentially extra-literary activity.
Ivanov, having understood the rules of the game, placed Sinyavsky’s tales (Liu-
bimov and Sud idet [The Trial Is Underway]) firmly within the fully legitimate “form
of a stylized first-person narrative [skaz] that has a long-standing tradition in our lit-
erature,” using the term skaz in its terminological meaning.42 Skaz makes it possible
to attribute all statements, even those made in the first person, to the narrator rather
than the author of a given text. A search for Sinyavsky’s predecessors will inevitably
come up with examples such as Pushkin’s Povesti Belkina (The Tales of Belkin) and the
work of Gogol and Dostoevsky, undoubtedly held in high esteem within official
literature. The significance of skaz itself was bolstered with an appeal to the names
of Boris Eikhenbaum and Lev Vygotsky. Of no lesser importance was Ivanov’s own
interpretation of the term literature and the typical conclusion: “prose written in such
a form can generally not lead to the prosecution of its author” (Tsena metafory, 461).
Other materials from the Belaia kniga that reveal further attributes of the na-
scent unofficial criticism include Lidiya Chukovskaya’s “Otkrytoe pis’mo Mikhailu
Sholokhovu, avtoru ‘Tikhogo Dona’” (Open Letter to Mikhail Sholokhov, Author
of And Quiet Flows the Don). Discussing (and condemning) Mikhail Sholokhov’s call
at the Twenty-Third Congress of the CPSU to sentence Sinyavsky and Daniel not
according to the articles of the penal code, but according to the revolutionary sense
of justice (revoliutsionnoe pravosoznanie)—factually, the mob law of the civil war pe-
riod—Lidiya Chukovskaya reckoned that Sholokhov had transgressed the boundar-
ies of what was considered legitimate behavior for a Russian writer, the standards for
which were set by Russian classical and early Soviet literature, which had preserved a
connection with the classics. Her example are the actions of Maxim Gorky, who had
delivered various writers “from prison and exile” after the revolution (Tsena metafory,
504). Chukovskaya, naturally, had recourse to several unassailable authorities such as
Pushkin, who had taken pride in his habit of “calling for mercy toward the fallen,”
or Chekhov at the moment he contradicted Aleksandr Suvorin, who had attacked
Zola in his newspaper, who in his turn had defended Dreyfuss. Chukovskaya assured
Sholokhov that literature would avenge itself (and had in fact already done so) by
punishing the Soviet writer and Nobel Prize winner with creative paralysis.
Yet another example of literary criticism included in the Belaia kniga and de-
voted to the analysis of “writerly” behavior was Varlam Shalamov’s “Pis’mo staromu
drugu” (Letter to an Old Friend), published anonymously and later circulated widely
in numerous samizdat copies. For Shalamov, a former Gulag prisoner and the author
of Kolymskie rasskazy (Kolyma Tales), the most important moment of the Sinyavsky
and Daniel case was the fact that the accused were the first ever to plead not guilty
in an open political trial. Characteristic, too, was Shalamov’s cautious critique of the
very genre of Sinyavsky’s and Daniel’s texts, which was most commonly identified
as fantastic skaz: he thought that the fantastic was not the most successful choice of
genre for representing the Soviet system (Tsena metafory, 523: “fantasy is unsuitable”).
The “Otkrytoe pis’mo deputatu XXIII s’’ezdu KPSS Mikhailu Sholokhovu”
(Open Letter to Mikhail Sholokhov, Delegate to the Twenty-Third Party Congress),
published in Feniks-66, one of the first samizdat almanacs, in fall 1966, several months
after the end of the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, also exhibited the structure of a
literary critical essay. The text was written by the well-known dissident Iurii Ga-
lanskov. Unlike Lidiya Chukovskaya, who was addressing her colleagues as a Soviet
writer with her own (marginal, in the view of officialdom) ideas about place, role,
and behavior acceptable for an honest Soviet writer, Galanskov was writing from the
standpoint of uncensored, unofficial literature and addressed the representatives of
his own milieu, as well as any compassionate observers in the West who cared to lis-
ten. Although his text is also based on the opposition literature—non-literature, this
opposition manifested itself in a fundamentally different way. Literature featured as
a synonym of uncensored Russian literature, while almost all Soviet literature was
regarded as non-literature. Moreover, reciting his list of unassailable authorities (Pas-
ternak, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mandelstam, Mikhail Bulga-
kov, Andrei Platonov, and so on), the author proclaimed the principle according to
which literature existed and would continue to exist in the conditions of totalitarian-
ism: “not thanks to, but—on the contrary—despite the Union of Soviet Writers and
official publications, almost illegally, almost under the threat of administrative and
moral condemnation and often even under the threat of direct judicial reprisals.”43
A similar tendency was put forward by Arkadii Belinkov in his book on Yuri
Olesha, Sdacha i gibel’ sovetskogo intelligenta (The Surrender and Demise of a Soviet
Intellectual), which played an essential role in the formation of new norms of writ-
ers’ behavior. In declaring the writer’s behavior part of the artistic strategy, Belinkov
formulated principles that became central to the establishment of unofficial criticism.
Some chapters from this book (the book as a whole circulated in samizdat) were pub-
lished under the title “Poet i tolstiak” (The Poet and the Fat Man) in the first issue of
the journal Baikal for 1968. Belinkov’s publication triggered a sharp reaction from the
high official critics.44
Thus the second half of the 1960s was the time of open letters, in which the
authors continued to discuss issues of the power and status of literature, limitations
of censorship and values relating to writers’ behavior. While formally addressing

the Soviet literary powers, Solzhenitsyn, Arkadii Belinkov, Georgii Vladimov, and
many others were in fact addressing the liberal Soviet literary milieu and also those
who at that time were referred to as “worldwide public opinion” (mirovoe obshchest-
vennoe mnenie). Despite all this, attempts to liberalize Soviet literature and to broaden
the scope of the permissible ended largely in failure (apart from emigration and re-
pressions, one should mention the replacement, from above, of the editorial board in
a range of journals such as Novyi mir and Iunost’). This led to a new form of polariza-
tion in Soviet literature and, as a consequence, to the emergence of regular samizdat
literary journals.
The Journals of the Moscow Underground
One of the first regular periodicals of civic and literary samizdat was the journal
Veche.45 It was published by the historian and publicist Vladimir Osipov, a partici-
pant in the poetry readings on Mayakovsky Square in 1960–1961, who had subse-
quently received a political sentence. Upon his return from the camps he settled in
the town of Aleksandrov in Vladimir oblast, where he began to publish his samizdat
“thick” journal in 1971.
Literary criticism was not dominant on the pages of Veche. However, it was rec-
ognized as structurally indispensable and necessary in order for the journal to cor-
respond to the canon it invoked, that is, that of Russian civic, political, and literary
journals. Veche positioned itself as both Orthodox Christian and nationalist. Most of
the works studied by the journal’s literary critics had appeared in so-called tamizdat,
that is, been published by Western publishing houses and in the already existing émi-
gré periodicals.
A typical example is the article “Pisatel’ Solzhenitsyn i professor Serebria-
kov” (The Writer Solzhenitsyn and Professor Serebriakov), signed “A. Skuratov”
(a pseudonym used by Anatolii Ivanov). Here Solzhenitsyn’s novel Avgust chetyrna
dtsatogo (August 1914) is identified as one of those books “in which unquestionable lit-
erary merit is accompanied by questionable ideology.”46 “Questionable,” in the eyes
of Skuratov, are the images of chaos and disarray in which both soldiers and officers
of the Russian Army arrive at the front of World War I according to Solzhenitsyn’s
text. The author lamented that Solzhenitsyn did not even try to moderate his images
of chaos and weakness by evoking Tolstoy’s contrasting conviction that troops are
not led by generals, but by fate, foresight, and the people’s truth. Thereby the samiz-
dat critic anticipated certain positions that would soon be argued by the literary crit-
ics of the official “national patriotic” journals Molodaia gvardiia and Nash sovremennik.
A fundamentally different aspect was revealed in Venedikt Erofeev’s essay
“Vasilii Rozanov glazami ekstsentrika” (Vasilii Rozanov as Seen by an Eccentric),
published in Veche in 1973. By the very fact of turning to Rozanov, an odious figure
in the eyes of the liberal writers, Erofeev introduced an essential modification to the
position of the unofficial writer. As it turned out, unofficial literature inherited not
only the “progressive” phenomena in Russian literature (according to the terminol-
ogy of prerevolutionary as well as Soviet criticism), but also those that the latter re-
jected as questionable marginal occurrences.
On the example of Rozanov, Erofeev modeled the ideal position of the unof-
ficial writer as that of an outcast and marginal figure by definition: “A troublemaker
with a most subtle heart, a hypochondriac and misanthropist. All nerves and no im-
purities, he wrote a lampoon as soon as the subject touched upon that which we are
used to hold in reverence and sang eulogies to all things at which we normally scoff.”
Informing his imagined conversational partner (Vasilii Rozanov) of the emigration
of almost all the most interesting writers after his death, Erofeev clarified: “Those
who stayed behind were clever, simple, honest, and hardworking. No shit or smell of
shit, all those who stayed behind are diamonds and emeralds. I am the only one who
smells here. Well, and there are a few outcasts who smell, too.” The “diamonds and
emeralds” were the Soviet writers who, after the end of the Thaw, had reconciled
themselves with the limitations imposed by Soviet censorship, which were turning
them into “simple, honest, and hardworking” Soviet writers. The outcasts were the
unofficial writers—the waste of society, marginal losers.
For a long time the unofficial literary critics focused their attention on the poets
and prose writers of the Silver Age, whom Soviet culture had forgotten or repressed
and who were thus regarded as natural predecessors. These writers were being pub-
lished in tamizdat, along with writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Mandelstam was prob-
ably the author most thoroughly studied by the unofficial critics.47 A telling example
was Genrikh Medovoi’s article “Genesis Mandel’shtama” (The Genesis of Mandel-
stam), published in volume 16 of the journal Evrei v SSSR, which appeared in Mos-
cow between 1972–1979. Medovoi discussed the concept of tradition as applied to
Mandelstam and left the dilemma he created deliberately unresolved. One pole was
Goethe’s claim that the reader is unable to identify a wholly original poet as a poet
and that a poet without predecessors is not a poet.48 The other pole was Akhmatova’s
statement about Mandelstam’s unique position within Russian poetry and her dif-
ficulty to name his predecessors.
Another important aspect of unofficial criticism was the revision of the relation-
ship with the Russian classics that had been appropriated by Soviet official culture
long ago. Unofficial criticism had set itself the task of revealing new facets in the
perception of the classics; the reader was to be given the chance to understand that
official culture was distorting the familiar classics. Thus, Grigorii Pomerants in his
article “Tolstoi i Vostok” (Tolstoy and the East) underlines that Tolstoy was a great
thinker because of “his ability to ask the eternal questions afresh, stripping away the
familiar varnish of answers; about infinity, death, injustice, suffering.”49 Pomerants
did not claim that the positions of the count-peasant Tolstoy were identical with that
of the writer and unofficial activist, but at the same time his description of the “mir-
ror of the Russian revolution” (Lenin) did not preclude the possibility of consider-
ing the author of War and Peace a predecessor of unofficial Soviet culture. Pomerants
defined Tolstoy’s position as individualization and claimed that “the age-old Eastern
Slavic resistance against the empire is visible through Tolstoy’s nihilism” (“Tolstoi i
Vostok,” 281).
It seems that unofficial criticism did not leave behind a single example of so-
cioeconomic text analysis: Marx and his theory remained the bugbear of conform-
ism—the sign of Sovietness—throughout the entire history of unofficial criticism.
This is why the place of socioeconomic and sociological analysis was taken over by
metaphysical analysis, most of the time easily adaptable for an ideologically pointed
form of criticism. And it is easy to understand why Pomerants experienced Tolstoy,
who seemed to him less complex and metaphysically unique than Dostoevsky, nev-
ertheless as close “through his refusal to submit to history and the state” (“Tolstoi i
Vostok,” 284).
Samizdat in Leningrad
The literary criticism that appeared in the journals of Leningrad samizdat was
both similar to that in Moscow samizdat and fundamentally different. It was similar
insofar as it adhered to the same principle, that is, it relied on and developed traditions
that official culture continued to repress. It was different because it represented a fun-
damentally different sociocultural formation and a different generation. Although
not denying the importance of the dissidents’ civic activity, the representatives of
unofficial culture in Leningrad distanced themselves from politics and claimed that
cultural activity was just as important. While publications such as Khronika tekush-
chikh sobytii (Chronicle of Current Events) were acknowledged and naturally read by
the representatives of unofficial culture in Leningrad, their own literary criticism
was no longer addressed to nonconformist groups sympathetic to the cause of the
dissidents but rather to their own—much more narrow—circle.
This change of both authorship and readership provided the critics with an op-
portunity to specify whom they regarded as their authorities and predecessors and to
widen the circle of topics and authors for consideration. One article that was charac-
teristic of Leningrad nonconformist criticism was Boris Ivanov’s “Kanonicheskoe i
nekanonicheskoe iskusstvo” (Canonical and Noncanonical Art).50 Ivanov, the editor
in chief of Chasy, defined the canon in art as a system of value judgments, demands,
and preferences lying outside art and imposed on it from the outside. According to
Ivanov, this allows canonical criticism to distinguish between form and content and
to demand that the artist adhere to the canon. Noncanonical art, on the other hand,
rejects the demands of the canon and bases itself instead on the experience and self-
expression of the artist, which are declared a value unto themselves (on the condition
that they can be comprehended).51
Another important theoretical assessment of both unofficial literature and
the position of unofficial criticism was the article “Dvadtsat’ let noveishei poezii
(predvaritel’nye zametki)” (Twenty Years of Contemporary Poetry [Preliminary
Remarks]) by Viktor Krivulin, the editor of 37, another Leningrad journal.52 This
article stands out for the attempt to define the very phenomenon of unofficial poetry
and to give it a structure by providing a history, a division into periods, a brief over-
view of the differences between various schools of uncensored poetry, an elabora-
tion on the problem of self-definition. Noticeable is also the attempt to include the
poetry of the South (Eduard Limonov and Vagrich Bakhchanian) rather than merely
describe the second culture of Moscow and Petersburg and, finally, a revision of the
methods of perceiving and interpreting nonconformist poetry.
It is worth noting that Krivulin, when describing the issues faced by contempo-
rary poetry (noveishaia poeziia), was in no hurry to specify that he was talking about
unofficial poetry. Instead he emphasized the difference between contemporary (un-
censored) and modern poetry (novaia poeziia), which is represented by Silver Age po-
ets such as Akhmatova. Thus Krivulin effectively blurred the opposition between
official and unofficial poetry and underlined the absence of any such opposition, insist-
ing on the integrity of contemporary Russian poetry and claiming that there were
commonalities between the poetry of Evtushenko and Voznesensky, on the one
hand, and Krivulin himself and Elena Shvarts, on the other, which were difficult to
discern at the time but would become obvious in historical perspective.
One of the main aspects of the article, albeit one which the author failed to ar-
gue fully, was the assertion that a revolution of poetic language had been underway
for the last twenty years or so (beginning in the early 1960s). Krivulin’s attempts to
define the novelty of a revolutionized poetic language in its magical attitude to the
word, which existed in unofficial literature and essentially revived an understanding
of poetry derived from classical antiquity. However, he also claimed that uncensored
literature, having understood the potential danger of a return to the magical ma-
nipulation of the reader’s consciousness and will as practiced in Soviet literature, had
adopted a negative magical attitude toward the word, thus confronting the official
culture.
It was only natural that unofficial literature should in return reproduce and de-
velop the tendencies that official Soviet literature repressed. Especially significant
was the turn toward the legacy of the OBERIU poets (Daniil Kharms, Aleksandr
Vvedenskii, and Leonid Lipavskii). Mikhail Meilakh and Vladimir Erl’ pubished
comments on Kharms and Vvedenskii and introduced the texts of their circles into
samizdat culture.53
A seminal innovation was the addition of the works of unofficial literature’s
progenitors to the list of legitimate traditions. Here we must mention first and fore-
most Aleksandr Stepanov’s “Glavy o poetike Leonida Aronzona” (Chapters on the
Poetics of Leonid Aronzon) that appeared in 1985 in the collection Pamiati Leonida
Aronzona, 1939–1970 (To the Memory of Leonid Aronzon, 1939-1970), which Stepa-
nov had compiled in collaboration with Vladimir Erl’, and also as an appendix, in the
same year, to Chasy and in Mitin zhurnal.
A rare example of unofficial literature appealing to the authority of predeces-
sors who did not belong to its traditional canon was Iurii Kolker’s article “Aidesskaia
prokhlada” (The Coolness of Hades; in Chasy 30 [1981]), which found entry into his
two-volume commented edition of the works of Vladislav Khodasevich. This edi-
tion circulated in samizdat between 1981–1983 and was subsequently published in
Paris. The author tried—and this attempt provoked resistance and a polemic on a
scale rarely seen in the circles of the nonconformist critics—not only to see Vladislav
Khodasevich “in the first line of Russian poets, this assembly of dear shadows sum-
moning the wind from Hades,” but also to provide a theoretical foundation for the
passeism of Khodasevich and Baratynsky—their rejection of the value of innovation
and renewal of neoconservative attitudes through a turn toward the classical clarity
(and morality) of the literature of the past. This theoretical demarche was under-
scored by the article “Passeism i gumannost’” (Passeism and Humaneness; in Chasy
31 [1981]), in which Kolker, with deliberate polemical fervor made the claim—an
affront to the new promoters of the acmeists and the futurists in the nonconformist
literary circles—that “innovation in its essence is antihumane, while passeism on the
other hand is always individualistic, and therefore inevitably humane,” and that a
conscious rejection of innovation and an orientation toward eternal values “implies
personal responsibility for everything and everyone.”
This attempt at revising the legitimate foundations of unofficial literature
caused a sharp reaction that was articulated by Aleksandr Kobak and Boris Ostanin
in their article “V teni aidesskoi prokhlady: Popravki k panegiriku” (In the Shadow
of the Coolness from Hades: Corrections to a Panegyric).54 Emphasizing the polemi-
cal character of Kolker’s articles and their inevitable excesses, as well as revealing
Kolker’s long list of partialities, Kobak and Ostanin arrived at a reproach that was
fundamental in the context of nonconformist criticism; they perceived Kolker’s po-
sition as a continuation of the nonreligiosity of the Silver Age intelligentsia: “In a world
of cultural idols in which Pushkin is the highest god and canonical Russian versi-
fication (which the modernists dared to amend) is divine creation, there is no space
for either God or Divine Creation . . . these formulas are confirmed by the general
character of [Kolker’s] essay and the overwhelming predominance of the aesthetic
over the religious.”55
It is only logical that religiosity and the related spiritual practices that Soviet
culture continued to repress turned into one of the main traditions for unofficial
culture in general, and unofficial criticism in particular. Unofficial literature styled
itself not only heir to prerevolutionary culture, but also keeper of religious founda-
tions, something that doubtlessly increased the self-confidence of its practitioners.
The confrontation between unofficial and official culture included the opposition
between spiritual and nonspiritual and between religious and atheistic. This is why
the numerous unofficial religious seminars and publications were afforded such sig-
nificance within nonconformist culture, spirituality remaining one of the founda-
tions on which Leningrad’s “second culture” positioned itself.56 This was one of the
watersheds separating Moscow and Leningrad unofficial culture. Replacing the
term “spirituality” (dukhovnost’) with “mentality” (mental’nost’), already in the early
1980s the Moscow conceptualists regarded any ideology or spiritual practice as an
unfounded claim to totality and included them in the list of possible but not indis-
pensable foundations, an understanding that turned out to be closer to the readers’
needs.
Consequently, a large proportion of critical works from the Leningrad envi-
ronment exhibited spiritualistic, spiritual, or metaphysical features, which immedi-
ately moved the object of study beyond Soviet culture’s remit of competence. This
was made possible by the religious grounding of many unofficial literary works. A
characteristic example was Nina Guchinskaia’s article (written under the pseudonym
N. Efimova) “Vos’merka Logosa” (Logos’ Figure of Eight), on the poetry of Elena
Shvarts, which contained affirmations such as “Elena Shvarts’ poetry is genuine and
indispensable because of its religious character. Everything is real in it—pain and
anger . . . and life and death and a relationship to God. . . . Elena Shvarts is not only
a religious, but also a mystical poet . . . and this sets her poetry apart from that of the
symbolists and acmeists.”57
The religious orientation of literary criticism did not, of course, go unchal-
lenged. A number of articles in samizdat journals undertook demonstrative attempts
to analyze Elena Shvarts’ poetry without recourse to “spirituality” and “spiritual-
ism” (dukhovnost’ and spiritual’nost’). Among them were Ostanin’s article on the
poetry of Elena Shvarts “Marsii v kletke: O poezii Eleny Shvarts” and Vladislav
Kushev’s scandalous article “Krasavitsa v maske” (The Masked Beauty; in Chasy 38
[1982]), in which spirituality is replaced by physiology, while mystical practice is lik-
ened to menstruation.58
This article appeared after the opening of Klub-81, which had increased the pub-
licity and slightly raised the profile of unofficial literature not only in the eyes of
official Soviet culture, but also in the eyes of the unofficial writers themselves. From
this moment on the samizdat journals began to print more uninhibited articles about
their contemporaries, such as Kirill Butyrin’s important “Poeziia Stratanovskogo”
(The Poetry of Stratanovskii), published in 1981 under the pseudonym K. Mamonov
in the first issue of the author’s own journal, Obvodnyi kanal, and in volume 21 of the
journal 37.
Most probably it was the absence of a new descriptive language appropriate to
the objects of study that slowed down the development of literary criticism in the
“second culture,” and this also applied to criticism of official literature. Articles about
Soviet writers remained rare in the samizdat journals and in any case never caused a
big sensation. Some of the most typical and scholarly accurate articles of this genre
were Butyrin’s “Posle Vysotskogo” (After Vysotskii), Krivulin’s article on Iurii Tri-
fonov’s prose, Ostanin’s article on Aleksandr Kushner’s verse, and Elena Ignatova’s
“Soblazny poshlosti” (The Temptations of Vulgarity).59
The quest for a new language of description took place simultaneously and
was linked above all to the appearance of the texts of the Moscow conceptualists,
accompanied by articles written in the Leningrad journals by Mikhail Sheinker,
Boris Groys, and others. As early as 1978 the texts of Lev Rubinshtein, introduced
by Sheinker, featured in volume 15 of the journal 37, and in the same issue Boris
Groys published his article “Moskovskii romanticheskii kontseptualizm” (Moscow
Romantic Conceptualism), which was to become the most famous article of Soviet
unofficial criticism. The appearance of these articles, but also the descriptive lan-
guage used by their authors, were to a large degree the result of two seminars of
many years’ standing, both with a significant impact on the development of critical
language. The first of them was the General Theory of Systems Seminar, founded
on the initiative of the mathematician Sergei Maslov and meeting first at Leningrad
State University and then, from 1972 onward, in Maslov’s apartment. Apart from
mathematicians, the seminar was also frequented by Boris Vakhtin, Lydia Ginzburg,
Boris Groys, Viacheslav Dolinin, Lev Kopelev, Grigorii Pomerants, Arsenii Rogin-
skii, and Efim Etkind. To a certain degree this seminar can be seen as the source of
most of the distinguished Leningrad samizdat journals—not only the journal of ab-
stracts and annotations Summa, published by Maslov himself, but also 37, one of the
editors of which was Groys, as well as Chasy, which was coedited by Ostanin, and
Pamiat’, coedited by Arsenii Roginskii. Of no lesser importance were the interdis-
ciplinary discussions on various sociopolitical, religious, and cultural issues, which
furthered an understanding of the dire need for a new language to describe the new
cultural phenomena.
Another doubtlessly important seminar was meeting in Moscow at the same
time. It had grown out of Sheinker’s philological seminar, which had at first been
attended by philologists and poets (Vladimir Saitanov, Olga Sedakova, and others)
interested in an opportunity to study new Russian poetry. Later it transformed into
a seminar, which for several years met in the apartment of Aleksandr Chechko. Most
of those who came to discuss issues of new art and its language were artists, poets,
and scholars from the circles of the Moscow conceptualists: Ivan Chuikov, Erik Bula-
tov, Ilya Kabakov, Oleg Vasil’ev, Groys, Genrikh Sapgir, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Dmi-
try Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Mikhail Aizenberg, and Vladimir Papernyi among
others. On the basis of this seminar a culturological language emerged, which was
subsequently put to use in the creation of A-Ya, an art journal that managed to bring
Soviet nonconformist art out onto the world stage. The first issue of this journal,
published in 1979, began with the programmatic article “Moskovskii romanticheskii
kontseptualizm,” reprinted from 37. This article clearly formulated the vector of
transition from Leningrad unofficial culture to Moscow unofficial culture and, even
more clearly, from literature to contemporary visual art. It was one of the first signs
that Russian culture was about to lose its literature-centric orientation.
The failure of both Leningrad and Moscow samizdat to react to these theoreti-
cal signals with either a polemic or retort was symptomatic.60 The events that took
place in the field of nonconformist criticism in 1978–1979 were essentially a dress
rehearsal for the future upheaval in Russian culture: the vectors of movement were
drawn, as were ways of overturning the existing hierarchy of values; new mecha-
nisms for the study and description of cultural objects were proposed, and the new
descriptive language was deemed unsuitable for the old objects of culture, irrespec-
tive of whether their background was official or unofficial.
The journal Transponans, published in Eisk, constituted a slightly more distinct
reaction to the new discourse in art and theory. From its very outset, it was oriented
toward the neo–avant-garde whose members studied and continued the quest of
the early-twentieth-century Russian avant-garde. This journal (editors Sergei Sigei
and Ry Nikonova) counted Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Ilya Kabakov (whose pro-
gram piece “Avtor dva raza smotrit na svoe proizvedenie” [The Author Looks at His
Work Twice] was published in volume 25), Andrei Monastyrskii, and Dmitry Prigov
among its regular authors. Just as frequently it published reactions to current cultural
events in Moscow and Leningrad.61
The journal Metrodor, published by the young philologists Dmitrii Panchenko,

Suren Takhtadzhian, and Pavel Diatroptov represented another specific aspect of
literary criticism. Here the discussion of structuralist criticism, started by Leonid
Zhmud’, stood in the center of attention, next to a playful approach to things (for
example, the debate around the fictional author Metrodor of Lemnos) and an interest
in the poetry of the Moscow conceptualists.
The reaction of official culture to the various types of critical discourse repre-
sented by the different samizdat journals and almanacs was predictable. Aleksandr
Ginzburg, the compiler of the Belaia kniga, containing attempts at widening the
range of what was permissible in Soviet culture, was sentenced to five years in a labor
camp in 1968. Iurii Galanskov, the editor of the almanac Feniks-66 and author of the
open letter to Sholokhov, who had outlined the rules of appropriate behavior for
writers and identified a number of the predecessors of unofficial literature, suffered
a similar fate and received a seven-year sentence. Galanskov died in 1972 in a camp
in Mordovia. Similarly brutal was the reaction of official culture to the nationalist
discourse—Vladimir Osipov, the editor of the journal Veche, received an eight-year
camp sentence, his second after the one he had served for the poetry readings on
Mayakovsky Square. The editors and authors of the twenty volumes of Evrei v SSSR
changed fairly often. One of them emigrated to Israel, others were sent to the camps,
including the journal’s last editor, Viktor Brailovskii, who was sentenced in 1981,
two years after the journal had been discontinued. The Jewish discourse was just as
unacceptable as the Russian one. No less harsh was the reaction of official culture
to the attempt to combine politics with criticism of émigré and Soviet literature:
all members of the editorial board of the journal Poiski were arrested and sent to the
camps after the publication of eight volumes. Having forced Petr Egides to emigrate,
the authorities first arrested Valerii Abramkin, Viktor Sokirko and Iurii Grim, and,
later, after they had announced the discontinuation of the journal, Vladimir Ger
shuni and Gleb Pavlovskii.
Official culture reacted much less sensitively to the forms of critical discourse
preferred in the Leningrad samizdat. Only Tatiana Goricheva, the editor of the jour-
nal 37, and Sergei Dediulin, the coeditor of the journal Severnaia pochta, were expelled
from the USSR, and the authorities forced both journals to close down in 1981.62
Metrodor stopped publication in 1982, after the KGB had invited the editors for a pre-
cautionary conversation. On the other hand, official culture’s attitude toward the
long-lived journal Chasy, and its attempts at distancing itself from the established
canon through the replacement of the sociopolitical discourse by a religious and spir-
itual one, can be described as relaxed and indifferent. Between 1976–1990 the edi-
tors published eighty volumes without receiving a single official caution: Chasy was
stopped only by perestroika and the freedom of the press, which eventually rendered
samizdat obsolete.
Official culture displayed a similarly indifferent attitude to the new descriptive
language and practices of the Moscow conceptualists. Soviet culture failed to recog-
nize, in their art as well as in their theoretical articles, the death sentence of its own
future, which was subsequently executed by history in the course of the next decade.
 DISCOVERIES AND ADVANCES IN
11
LITERARY THEORY, 1960s–1980s
NEOFORMALISM, THE LINGUISTIC MODEL,
AND BEYOND
WILLIAM MILLS TODD III
Institutional Contexts
The post-Stalin years in Soviet literary theory constitute a historical moment

in the way that Roman Jakobson or Pierre Bourdieu have analyzed such synchronic
slices, namely as force fields in which certain vectors are more vital and productive
than others and where certain trajectories irrupt from the past and others will erupt
into the future.1 Nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than the works entitled
“theory of literature” that appeared periodically throughout the 1960s–1980s, their
titles recalling Boris Tomashevsky’s formalist Teoriia literatury: Poetika (Theory of Lit-
erature: Poetics; six editions, 1925–1931) and inviting comparisons with such non-So-
viet volumes as René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (three editions,
1949–1977). The most significant, the three-volume Teoriia literatury: Osnovnye pro
blemy v istoricheskom osveshchenii (Theory of Literature: Basic Problems in Historical
Illumination), was published by the Academy of Sciences and edited by scholars who
had made their careers during the Stalin period.2 Its topics did not promise much in-
novation by comparison with standard school textbooks: image, character, genres,
style, and “socialist realism as a regular development of literary history.” The three
volumes could offer neither Tomashevsky’s analytic rigor nor Warren and Wellek’s
interdisciplinary range. The volumes focused on canonical Russian authors (such as
230
DISCOVERIES AND ADVANCES IN LITERARY THEORY, 1960s–1980s  231
Pushkin and Tolstoy) and the well-established genealogy of Russian critical thought
that passed in linear fashion from Aleksandr Radishchev to the Decembrists to criti-
cal realists to early Marxists to socialist realism. And yet, as a force field, it offered
vectors pointing toward the future, thoughtful work by young scholars who would
soon become prominent: Eleazar Meletinsky for pioneering work on epic and my-
thology; Sergei Bocharov for sophisticated studies of Pushkin and Tolstoy; Petr
Palievskii for polemics with structuralist theory; Vadim Kozhinov for work on the
history of the novel, for helping (with Bocharov) to recover the legacy of Mikhail
Bakhtin, and, ultimately, for his ultranationalist ideology. Moreover, the volumes
cited the works of Russian and foreign literary theoreticians who had been ignored
or repressed since the 1920s: the formalists, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Blan-
chot, to name a few. Prominent place was given to such rising Soviet stars as the
medievalist Dmitry Likhachev, whose influential and eclectic writings would en-
compass a humanist approach to the literary development of character, structuralist
poetics, and Bakhtinian discourse analysis. These volumes provide a baseline for un-
derstanding the fundamental interests, the intellectual resources, and the expanding
aspirations of Soviet literary theory during the “epoch of Stagnation.”
The mathematical jargon I have been adapting captures something of the style
of this time, in which literary theoreticians gradually became able to pick up where
the formalists and literary sociologists of the immediate pre-Stalin period had left
off. But where the lively, contentious Soviet literary theorizing of the 1920s had been
marked by a vocabulary of struggle and where early Soviet theorists had engaged
each other in knock-down, drag-out polemics, the post-Stalin generation adapted a
scholarly, at times scientistic, frame of reference, generally avoiding overt polemics
and finding refuge in specialized critical vocabularies and in scholarship addressed
to pre-Soviet culture. Where the theoreticians of the 1920s contended to provide the
Marxist-Leninist theory of literature, their post-Stalin counterparts chose to leave
questions of reflection, base and superstructure, means and relationships of produc-
tion, and other topics of classical Marxist thought to the relatively undistinguished
specialists of “scientific communism” at the universities and the Academy of Sci-
ences. The principal discoveries and contributions between the years 1953–1991 ap-
peared on what sociologists of knowledge call the second and third of three levels
of social interpretation: at the lowest level, empirical research; above this—a level
permitting theoretical discussion of discrete spheres and processes of social life (such
as the sociology of small groups); and at the top level (for the Soviet Union)—the
method and structure of historical materialism, its laws and categories.3 It was the
top level that was generally unquestioned, at least publicly, in the work this chapter
surveys.
The prestige system of Soviet intellectual life paid far greater respect to empiri-
cal work than did Western literary intelligentsias during this time, especially those
developing deconstruction and other versions of negative hermeneutics. Archival
discoveries, biographical information, and scholarly editions of major texts carried
considerable prestige because, by and large, they permitted the scholars who con-
ducted this work to meet objective scholarly standards. In the Soviet Union such
232  WILLIAM MILLS TODD III
empirical work was not only a virtue, it was a necessity for young literary scholars.
Many of them were employed as research specialists at academy institutes, and they
were required to take part in collective projects of the planned economy—editions
of major writers, collections of materials from the archives, literary histories, vol-
umes celebrating anniversaries of major writers. Such work brought steady employ-
ment, prestige, and a measure of autonomy from the ideologically coercive activities
of the Soviet state, but the price was often the inability to develop a critical voice or
develop major monographic studies.
Mid-level theorizing and critical study were conducted by scholars inside and
outside the Academy of Sciences, the libraries, and the institutions of higher educa-
tion where literary scholars were obliged to work, unless they were able to join the
Union of Soviet Writers. For members of the union, a prominent and popular form
of literary scholarship during the post-Stalin period had a powerful precedent in the
work of formalist Yuri Tynianov: fiction about literary figures. Such “documentary
tales,” as a prominent practitioner Iakov Gordin called them, involved, at their best,
no less rigorous research than high-quality empirical work.
The empirical work, the documentary tales, and also the literary theory to
which I next turn, whether written by established scholars or by those on the mar-
gins of the Soviet cultural establishment—and, indeed, even by non-Soviet scholars
of Russian literature—tended, whatever the differences in critical approach, to sup-
port a common master narrative about Russian literature. According to this con-
struction a coercive government confronts the great writer who, in the words of
one of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s fictional characters, constitutes a “second govern-
ment,” one lacking repressive state apparatuses, to be sure, but armed, nevertheless,
with moral force and “truth.” The writer-witness is persecuted by tsarist or Soviet
authorities, but the work lives on, and the writer enters the calendar of writer-saints
celebrated by chroniclers as disparate as Pushkin, Alexander Herzen, and Roman
Jakobson: Pushkin in his 1822 notes on Russian history, Herzen in his 1851 book on
the development of revolutionary ideas in Russia, and Jakobson in his 1931 article,
“O pokolenii, rastrativshem svoikh poetov” (On a Generation That Squandered Its
Poets). The writer works in harmony with a reading public of which the critic Vis-
sarion Belinsky began to dream in 1840: a public for whom literature would be “not
a sweet slumber in a soft armchair after a rich dinner . . . but a res publica, great and
important.” Such a public, he continued, would be “a single living personality, his-
torically developed, with a certain direction, taste, and view of things.”4 Such a pub-
lic would, in fact, come to be during the ensuing century and a half, if sometimes in
the dreams of the pre- and postrevolutionary intelligentsia. In Soviet times its unity
was reinforced by the government’s centralized control of publication, dissemina-
tion, libraries, and education and by the dissident intelligentsia’s opposition to that
government. Sociologists of literature would slant their surveys to demonstrate the
moral seriousness of the reading public, its demands for a literature purveying moral
profundity and lessons for living.5
Because the Soviet establishment reserved for itself the highest levels of theo-
rizing and because scholars working at mid-level theory, literary criticism, literary
history, and empirical research tended to avoid outward polemics, it remains for pos-
terity to draw the necessary comparisons. In this chapter I examine several clusters of
critics and theoreticians: the Moscow-Tartu School of semioticians, Soviet sociolo-
gists of literature, and two thinkers whose careers, begun in the 1920s, revived in the
post-Stalin period, Lydia Ginzburg and Mikhail Bakhtin. It is impossible to address
all of the excellent work that Soviet literary scholars accomplished during this pe-
riod. The principal criteria for selection are impact on subsequent literary scholar-
ship, at home and abroad, theoretical coherence, and degree of departure from the
standard theoretical notions embodied in the three-volume Teoriia literatury.
The Moscow-Tartu School
In the Soviet Union important work on literary theory developed in a number

of regional centers. Theoreticians at “peripheral universities” deserve mention for
their attempts to transcend the ways in which standard academic studies constructed
the literary process. In Izhevsk in the Western Urals, for instance, Boris Korman and
his group addressed lyric poetry (often neglected by literary sociologists), the prob-
lem of authorship, and the problem of the literary text. Their studies of authorship
paralleled simultaneous work by such non-Russian theoreticians as Wayne Booth
and Seymour Chatman on the “implied author” that a reader infers from the text.
In Kemerovo, in southwestern Siberia, a group of scholars, including Valerii Tiupa
and Natan Tamarchenko, focused their work on the integral nature of the literary
text, on narratology, on literary discourse, and genre. These schools did not become
well known abroad, but they were well respected among innovative scholars in the
Soviet Union.
One group, however, the Moscow-Tartu School of semiotics, did achieve inter-
national attention for its theoretical work and for its ability to take on an impressive
set of topics. The school formed when a diverse group of scholars joined informally
during the 1950s–1980s to provide alternatives to the regnant Soviet approaches to
language, literature, and culture. Their work develops the linguistics of Ferdinand
de Saussure, elaborated by Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Louis Hjelmslev, with its cen-
tral notions of sign as union of signifier and signified, with its distinction between
language as system (langue) and language as utterance (parole), and with its analysis
in terms of the significant differences between paired equivalent elements in a sys-
tem (that is, meaning is a matter not of individual elements, but of the relationship
between comparable elements). In its early stages members of the Moscow-Tartu
School did intricate analyses of lyric poetry and of highly conventional prose works
using statistical and linguistic methods. They subsequently came to treat art works
and other cultural artifacts as the products of “secondary modeling systems,” that
is, as elements arranged according to rules of selection and combination that could
be seen as language-like and hence accessible to analysis by the procedures of struc-
turalist linguistics. The group shared an interest in Western and pre-Stalinist Rus-
sian literary theory—especially in the Russian formalists—and in contemporary
linguistics, semiotics, and cybernetics. In a time of pervasive intellectual stagnation
this loose confederation sought to formulate objective and exact methods for literary
scholarship, to republish works of Russian theory that had been repressed during the
1930s–1950s, and to bring scholarship in the humanities into line with developments
in other disciplines.
It is difficult now to comprehend the extent to which the policies of the Sta-
lin era hindered the unfolding of academic life. A vigilant censorship and other
repressive state apparatuses, the prescriptions of party congresses and academic hi-
erarchies all combined to discourage critical thinking. Literary scholarship, which
had rejected the formalists’ attempts to examine literature as a process with its own
dynamics and evolution, had become particularly vulnerable to the demands of the
political apparatus. By an irony of cultural history Soviet literary criticism had fol-
lowed the pattern of innovation and mechanization outlined by the formalist theory
of literary evolution: the innovative and socially committed literary criticism of the
nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia with its utilitarian view of literature and
its understanding of art as a reflection of reality had become institutionalized and
stultifying, a barrier to reexamining the considerable role of literature in Russian
society. Yet some disciplines, because of their remoteness, abstractness (linguistics),
or technological promise (cybernetics, information theory) were relatively exempt
from the official ideologization of academic life. It was to these disciplines that a
number of young linguists and philologists turned for support in renewing the hu-
manities during the latter half of the 1950s and the early 1960s. Their fascination
with the “exact methods” and “objective scholarship” that these formalized disci-
plines offered ultimately must be understood in the context of the impasse that schol-
arship had reached.
This fascination turned them and others back to a recovery of the heritage of
the formalists, much of which reappeared or was published posthumously during the
post-Stalin years. These publications, however, encompassed only the most technical
and theoretical of the formalists’ writing, not their provocative sociological writings
of the late 1920s, which challenged Marxist theory by focusing on literary institu-
tions rather than on the aesthetics of reflection and base-superstructure models. Boris
Eikhenbaum’s sociological Moi vremennik (My Journal, 1929) had to wait until the
fall of the Soviet Union before reappearing in its entirety; but his rigorously formal
Melodika russkogo liricheskogo stikha (Melodics of Russian Lyric Verse, 1923) was in-
cluded in a 1969 collection of his works on poetry.
A major response to formalism became a series of conferences (Tynianovskie
chteniia, from 1982) and collected articles (Tynianovskii sbornik, from 1984), organized
by two talented and productive young Moscow scholars, Aleksandr Chudakov and
Marietta Chudakova. The conferences, which took place in Latvia, were devoted
to the legacy of Tynianov but quickly spread in range and critical approach, bring-
ing together surviving students of the formalists, members of the Moscow-Tartu
School, sympathetic overseas scholars, and others marginal to the Soviet scholarly
establishment.
One of the Moscow-Tartu group’s most erudite members, the linguist Viache
slav V. Ivanov, would in 1976 trace the rise of Soviet semiotics to the research and
theories of Russian and foreign linguists and anthropologists, the psychologist Lev
Vygotsky, the cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein, the information theorists Andrei
Kolmogorov and Claude Shannon, the phenomenologist Gustav Shpet, and the phi-
lologist Mikhail Bakhtin and his colleague Valentin Voloshinov for their work in re-
constructing ancient cultures, in developing theories of the sign, and in studying the
structures and levels of art.6 The group’s acquisition of these interests was achieved
through conferences, informal gatherings, and as part of vehement debates between
“physicists” and “lyricists” in scholarly and popular periodicals. These debates, a rare
instance of genuinely open discussion between schools and generations during this
period, like the debates in the English-speaking world over Charles Percy Snow’s
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), encompassed large issues of man
and machine, the humanities and the sciences. The Soviet version addressed, in par-
ticular, the potential of cybernetics for modeling the human mind. Structuralism
and semiotics did not set off the debate, which began already in 1959, but they soon
became part of it, serving as an example of the importation of “exact” scientific
methods into the humanities.7
During the 1950s structuralist analysis slowly began to develop in the Soviet
Union, enabled in part by Stalin’s 1950 articles on linguistics, which in effect freed
the discipline from Marxism’s base-superstructure model, licensing the study of
grammar and internal laws of language development. Two conferences brought the
movement into focus and lent it its particular Soviet concern with cybernetics and
information theory: the conference “O primeneniiu matematicheskikh metodov
k izucheniiu iazyka khudozhestvennoi literatury” (On the Application of Mathe-
matical Methods to the Study of the Language of Artistic Literature, 1961) and the
symposium “Simpozium po strukturnomu izucheniiu znakovykh system” (On the
Structural Study of Sign Systems, 1962). The first conference centered around the
interest of the academician Kolmogorov in poetry’s special potential for conveying
information, but already the papers showed the group’s wide range of interests and
approaches: Issak Revzin used Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957) to specu-
late on the generative structures of literary texts, Ivanov surveyed the achievements
of Western structuralism, and Alexander Zholkovsky constructed a genealogy from
the works of the Russian formalists and Sergei Eisenstein. Zholkovsky and Iurii
Shcheglov would subsequently develop their own “generative poetics,” a pragmatic
one that focused on the effects generated by the poetic text. The Moscow Sympo-
sium, organized by Ivanov, included many of the same participants, but had a more
semiotic and less cybernetic focus. Danish semiotic theory (“glossematics”) offered
the promise of interaction between mathematics and semiotics and the possibility of
joining the human sciences in a common and exact methodology. A group of papers
on art as a semiotic system served as a beginning of the movement beyond verbal
texts; papers on etiquette, games, and fortune-telling began the group’s investiga-
tions of behavior and popular culture.
The Tartu presence in the Moscow-Tartu School began with Iurii Lotman’s
1963 essay “O razgranichenii lingvisticheskogo i literaturovedcheskogo poniatiia
struktury” (“On the Delimitation of the Concept of Structure in Linguistics and
Literary Scholarship”) and his Lektsii po struktural’noi poetike (Lectures on Structural

Poetics), which appeared in the first issue of an important new series, Trudy po zna-
kovym sistemam (Works on Sign Systems, 1964). The participants from Tartu Univer-
sity brought a different scholarly culture to the movement: more oriented toward
canonical literature and the history of ideas, less concerned with linguistics and with
popular genres. Tartu University brought as well the legacy (however constrained
by Soviet reality) of having been the Russian Empire’s most European university,
with a tradition of academic autonomy that the other Russian universities had not
always enjoyed.8
The publications of the Moscow-Tartu School, Trudy po znakovym sistemam, and
other periodicals from Tartu, appeared in shoddy editions whose print runs could
not come close to meeting the domestic and international demand for them. Their
opponents in Soviet academic life published in much more widely circulated pub-
lications and leveled a consistent series of charges against the semioticians, as Peter
Seyffert has noted: that semiotics was mere fashion, formalism couched in incompre-
hensible shibboleths, that its claim to universal applicability could not be sustained,
that “mathematical methods” and “exact science” were promises often unrealized
and unrealizable.9 Certainly the school’s focus on the sign and language opposed the
entrenched Russian view of art as “thinking in images,” and certainly its view of
culture as a semiotic mechanism rather than a reflection of the means of production
challenged the dogma of Soviet Marxism. While the school avoided questions of
contemporary culture, as Mikhail Ryklin has noted, its work on such topics as the
consequences of constricting information in “despotic” nineteenth-century Russia
had a clearly critical resonance with state policies in the Soviet Union.10 Such critical
reverberations made it inviting for scholars in the humanities and social sciences to
apply the school’s methods to other periods and in other disciplines.11
For a variety of internal and external reasons, the Moscow-Tartu School had
ceased to function by the mid-1970s. Growing government opposition to intellec-
tual unorthodoxy met with opposition from the Tartu faculty, especially over the
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. A number of members of the school emigrated
from the Soviet Union and made successful careers abroad. The growing interest of
members of the school in questions of cultural history, which began with studies of
typology and increasingly branched out into highly specific research with little at-
tention to theory, led to methodological diffuseness. Nevertheless, the publications
of the Moscow-Tartu School continued to appear in periodicals and, increasingly, in
book form. By the 1990s Lotman was starring in a highly regarded television series
on Russian culture. By another irony of cultural history the Moscow-Tartu School,
condemned for neglecting traditional Russian views on literature and society, had
become the principal interpreter of both and of their interrelations for the new Rus-
sian Republic. After Lotman died in 1993, this canonization was completed by gen-
erous obituaries in the Russian press and by the republication of his semiotic studies.
Because so many of the school’s works were experimental and because their
work was so far ranging, it can be difficult to generalize about their activity. Never-
theless, a common feature of their work was their use of linguistic models. This was
also the case with American, Danish, French, and Italian structuralism, but the use of
linguistic models stands out even more sharply in the Soviet context because the pre-
dominant approach to literature focused on “images,” not “signs,” and on social de-
terminism rather than on self-regulating sign systems. Against this background the
Moscow-Tartu School could be seen as a movement, even though its members were
drawing upon a number of different linguistic and semiotic theories. Yet members of
the school tended not to pursue linguistic models as exhaustive sets of discovery pro-
cedures, as did Jakobson in his studies in the “poetry of grammar”: they moved from
the mechanisms of meaning production toward interpretation and beyond the study
of closed systems toward contextual studies. As the group moved beyond language
to other semiotic systems, the ties to linguistic theory could become tenuous. Never-
theless, even in these later essays one detects an enduring fascination with language,
language use (pragmatics), and analytic operations learned from formal linguistics
(such as analysis in terms of binary opposition). The problems that the group ad-
dressed tended to follow logically from this fundamental appeal to linguistic models:
how does poetry convey information with its formal resources; how does poetry
use the resources of language to model reality and the artist’s worldview; how may
other cultural spheres (including social behavior, which the group treated as a text)
can be analyzed using the model of linguistic analysis; what is the text that is avail-
able for semiotic analysis; how do different cultures in different historical periods
use signs differently; and what is the impact of such secondary modeling systems
(such as literature, art, or the theater) upon human cognition and behavior? The logic
of their methodology did not, however, lead them into exploring deeply such sub-
jects as “the death of the author” (who would become a mere “guest of the text” for
such French semioticians as Roland Barthes) or the theory of tropes. Unlike West-
ern structuralists and poststructuralists, the Moscow-Tartu group tended to view the
text as a unity, however multilayered and however rich its resources for generating
interpretations. Language retained for them its ability to represent reality, complexi-
ties of coding notwithstanding; and the human subject was inevitably seen as the
constitutor, or at least the user, of codes, more than constituted by them. In this the
Moscow-Tartu semioticians, especially those who worked on canonical figures, con-
tributed a semiotic version to the traditional Russian heroic portrayal of authors and
to the traditional Russian veneration of high cultural texts. By extension, they could
also view literary characters as users, not merely victims, of codes. Lotman’s treat-
ment of the principal characters in Pushkin’s historical novel Kapitanskaia dochka (The
Captain’s Daughter) is a case in point; while he shows Pushkin’s rich invocation of lin-
guistic and cultural codes, gentry and Cossack, he also argues that Pushkin endows
his characters with the ability to transcend these codes.12
Members of the school did innovative work on many subjects: on various as-
pects of semiotic theory and on text theory, on mythology and the reconstruction
of ancient symbol systems (Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Meletinsky, and Dmitri Se-
gal), on musical semiotics (Boris Gasparov), on lyric poetry (Zholkovsky, Revzin,
and Ivanov). Borrowing a favorite technique from the school’s analytic procedures,
description by analysis of pairs of equivalent elements in a system, one may treat the
group’s concerns by focusing on the work of two leading members, one from each
center: Lotman, by training a literary scholar and intellectual historian (he had stud-
ied in Leningrad with surviving formalists) and Boris Uspensky, by training a lin-
guist and Slavic philologist (he had studied briefly in Denmark). Lotman’s primary
research area was Russian literature and culture of the 1780s–1830s, and Uspensky’s
was the Russian language of the late medieval period and of the eighteenth cen-
tury—although each ranged far afield in search of telling instances and challenging
sign systems.
Uspensky’s work moves from the analysis of point of view toward studies of
Russian culture in a broad, anthropological sense. His Semiotics of the Russian Icon (“O
semiotike ikony,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 5 [1971]: 178–222; English translation
1976) subjected the “language” of icons to linguistic analysis (syntactic, semantic,
pragmatic), paying particular attention to the “internal perspective” of medieval
icons, according to which painter and viewer establish their point of view within
the painting, not outside it. A Poetics of Composition (Poetika kompozitsii, 1970; English
translation 1973) treated point of view more generally, and, although terms are not
always defined with desirable precision, the book suggests an innovative revision of
plot-based narratology, namely, the analysis with respect to four levels of point of
view (ideological, phraseological, spatial and temporal, and psychological).
For Lotman, as for Uspensky, the text is both a sign (in the secondary modeling
system) and a sequence of signs in verbal language. Both continued to focus their
attention on problems of communication and point of view. Lotman’s Structure of
the Artistic Text (Struktura khudozhestvennogo teksta, 1970; English translation 1977) and
Analysis of the Poetic Text (Analiz poeticheskogo teksta, 1972; English translation 1976)
share some of the same problems of definition and focus that marked Uspensky’s Po-
etics of Composition. But Lotman, the literary scholar, pays more attention to linguistic
analysis and to information theory (the latter generally used metaphorically) than the
linguist Uspensky. While problems of integration in moving from level to level and
in moving from analysis to interpretation are not solved theoretically, these books
offer many suggestive ideas and fragments of literary analysis. Lotman’s treatment of
“event” in the first book as “the shifting of a character across the borders of a seman-
tic field,” as a transgression, or as the violation of an expectation, has been widely
influential in studies of narrative.
From these large synthetic works on artistic texts, Lotman and Uspensky
moved to speculative discussions on an even higher level of synthesis, the typology
of culture. In their 1971 essay “On the Semiotic Mechanisms of Culture” (“O semi-
oticheskom mekhanizme kul’tury”; English translation in New Literary History 9, no.
2 [1978]: 211–32), culture becomes a system of sign production marked off from non-
culture, a system of constraints and prescriptions. Here they differentiate cultures by
modes of sign production, and Lotman and Uspensky identify two opposed types of
culture: cultures oriented toward expression (which view themselves in terms of an
aggregate of texts) and cultures oriented toward content (which see themselves as a
system of rules). In a more specific and controversial essay, “Rol’ dual’nykh modelei
v dinamike russkoi kul’tury (do kontsa XVIII veka)” (1977; English translations in
1984 and 1985, the latter as “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture”13),
they treat Russian culture as marked by a binary opposition between the “sacred”
and “profane,” an opposition that dictates diametrically opposed modes of behavior.
The same terms, for example, new and old, can in different periods occupy different
positions in this hierarchy. Lotman and Uspensky oppose this binary structure to a
European ternary one, in which a neutral middle sphere allows for new systems to
develop gradually, not catastrophically.
Subsequent research by Lotman and Uspensky into Russian cultural history ad-
dresses topics of moral and political significance: lying, theatricality, obscenity, re-
ligious dissent, pretenders to the throne, and the use of multiple languages. It builds
upon their theoretical insights about the semiotic quality and mechanisms of cul-
ture (see their above-mentioned essay “On the Semiotic Mechanisms of Culture”).
Various cultural orders, such as literature and social life, can interact and can be com-
pared, according to this theory, because they use similar language-like rules for the
selection and combination of their constituent elements; because they share problems
of coding, convention, and communication; and because discrete “utterances” in
each order (a ballet, social behavior, a poem) form interpretable “texts.”
Lotman’s penultimate book, Culture and Explosion (Kul’tura i vzryv, 1992; English
translation 2009), which appeared just after the fall of the Soviet Union, returns to
speculative semiotic-based historiography to reexamine the relationship of culture
to what is outside it and to explore Russia’s new possibility to enter the “European
ternary system,” with its concomitant development by gradual change as opposed to
change by violent overthrow. His last book, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture (Conversations
about Russian Culture), published posthumously in 1994, returns to the turn of the
nineteenth century to give a thick description of the daily life and traditions of the
Russian gentry—its rituals, fashions, and social patterns and the meaning that these
had for those who practiced them.
Soviet Sociology of Literature
It is to be expected that the current period of change in Russian culture would

be accompanied by serious examination of the representations and institutions of lit-
erary art, since this has been the cultural activity within which and around which
Russian intellectuals have examined their society and its movements since the late
eighteenth century. To a considerable extent this interrogation of the literary process
had already commenced in the late Soviet period, as a number of sociological studies
began to question the production, dissemination, and reception of literature in the
Soviet Union.
When asked to describe her field, the head of the Department of Books and
Reading at the former Lenin Library, Valeriia Stel’makh, one of the leading figures
in the rebirth of literary sociology, provided some very basic definitions that her
Western colleagues might recognize and share: “Sociology as a whole is called upon
to ‘measure’ and explain the regular laws of social processes. . . . First, literature as
a social institution, its status in society; then the writer and his social significance
and criticism and its social functions; and, of course, the reader—his history, socio-
demographic characteristics, and reading behavior, which is determined, in turn,
by a multitude of factors. All of these are the components of a single literary sys-
tem.”14 This outline hints at empirical and theoretical projects, at essays in analysis
and explanation, and it offers a reasonable catalogue of agents in the literary process.
But it is equally remarkable for the issues it ignores: controversies over methodol-
ogy and concepts (including the very idea of “system” itself), the variety of theories
that might account for literature as an effect of social causes or cause of effects, and
debates over the proper foci for such investigations. It takes for granted the existence
of a single literary system and neglects the possibility of disparate institutions (mass
culture, samizdat, tamizdat, and émigré literature).
Thirty years previously, however, even so neutral an account as this would have
been unthinkable. Sociology of literature, no less than sociology in general, disap-
peared from academic study during the Stalin era.15 A few functions of a sociology of
literature, mainly those concerned with dissemination, continued to be performed
by publishers, librarians, and literary scholars.16 Since criticism, like the other areas
of scholarly inquiry, was to embody the teachings of historical materialism, it was
in some sense sociological, although it revealed little contact with the social sciences
and was generally marked by what one Soviet scholar has called superficial descrip-
tiveness and a predilection for thematic surveys, traits suggesting a naive use of liter-
ary art as an unproblematic means of knowing the world.17
Sociology, sanctioned at the Twentieth Party Congress (1956) and recognized as
a separate discipline in 1966 at the Twenty-Third Party Congress, came to examine
many aspects of Soviet social organization, including leisure. As an element in stud-
ies of leisure activity, literature was gradually added to this list.18
This resurrected Soviet sociology potentially served a number of purposes: as a
weapon in the ideological struggle with the West, as a tool for more effective plan-
ning and control, and as a means of understanding the actual processes of Soviet
society as it came to grips with the “scientific-technical revolution” and with the
problems of “mature socialism” and perestroika. For Soviet literary sociology the
tendency was for the first of these purposes, ideological struggle, to become muted.
Comments on the greater percentage of readers in Soviet society compared to the
Western democracies and comments on Western sociology as an instrument of the
capitalist marketplace yielded to important bibliographical work, to theoretically so-
phisticated historical surveys of Western literary sociology, and to skepticism about
the “myth of the Soviet reader”—the factory or farm worker who lays aside his or
her hammer and sickle at the end of the day to pick up the classics of nineteenth-
century realism.19 The second of these purposes, planning and control, evolved dur-
ing the post-Stalin era. At first Stel’makh could justify surveys of Soviet readers in
terms of “training them aesthetically . . . and guiding their reading,” and a strong
pedagogical current runs through the studies of the 1960s and 1970s; the very title
of the first such study, Sovetskii chitatel’ (The Soviet Reader, 1968), betrays a certain
homogenizing tendency. But later commentary argued against the mythologizing
and pedagogic tendencies of earlier studies, both of the 1920s and of the 1960s–1970s,
DISCOVERIES AND ADVANCES IN LITER ARY THEORY, 1960s–1980s  241
in favor of the study of multiple reading publics, including the “silent reader” of mass
literature.
All levels of social research and interpretation—the empirical, the concrete
theoretical, and the historical materialist—were covered to some extent in a volume
that proved to be a landmark in Soviet literary sociology, the collection of thirteen
articles compiled and edited by Vladimir Kantorovich and Iurii Kuzmenko and en-
titled Literatura i sotsiologiia (Literature and Sociology, 1977). This collection merits
attention for several reasons: it encompassed most of the topics of post-1950s Soviet
literary sociology; it provided a forum for most of the important trends and levels of
Soviet sociology of literature; and, as the first such collection to be published in the
post-Stalin period, it constituted a major step toward the official recognition and ac-
ceptance of this field of literary study.
Of the twelve contributors to that pioneering volume, only four (including the
two editors) had formal training in the social sciences; four were writers of imagina-
tive literature. The relatively low contribution of social scientists and the number of
writers in the volume are not anomalous. The recent development of Soviet sociol-
ogy as an academic discipline, initial reluctance to make it an undergraduate subject,
and suspicion toward the enterprise in the party hierarchy until the end of the Soviet
period—all of these factors created what Viktor Perevedentsev called a “sociology
without sociologists,” not just for literary sociology, but for the field in general.20
This gap was filled by scholars trained in economics, history, philosophy, and peda-
gogy, as one might expect, but also by writers and literary critics. Indeed, one of the
salient characteristics of Soviet literature of its last two decades, one to which the
essays in this collection bear witness, might be called the “sociologization” of litera-
ture and literary criticism. Soviet sketches and fiction on industrial, rural, and family
themes not only provided material for sociological analysis by the scholars repre-
sented in this volume, Soviet authors also actively drew upon sociological research.
Vasily Shukshin’s story “Shtrikhi k portretu: Nekotorye konkretnye mysli N. N.
Kniazeva, cheloveka i grazhdanina” (Strokes toward a Portrait: Some Concrete
Thoughts by N. N. Kniazev, Man, and Citizen) even features as its hero an amateur
sociologist. And much of Soviet sociology—not just literary sociology—appeared
in Soviet literary periodicals, such as Novyi mir and Literaturnaia gazeta. Two frequent
publishers of essays in literary sociology were the journals Voprosy literatury and Liter-
aturnoe obozrenie. The latter ran series of articles on such topics as urbanization and the
reading public and engaged the participation of professional sociologists.21
The cocompiler and leading force behind the Literatura i sotsiologiia volume,
Vladimir Kantorovich, himself embodied the interaction between concrete sociol-
ogy and imaginative literature. Born in 1901, he graduated from the Faculty of So-
cial Sciences at Moscow University in 1924 and began to publish sketches and fiction
in the late 1920s. Under Maxim Gorky’s supervision he directed the criticism section
of the journal Nashi dostizheniia until 1937, when he was “illegally repressed.” “Reha-
bilitated” nineteen years later, he was able to resume his career as a writer and to pub-
lish a series of articles calling for literary sociological research during the 1960s and
1970s. His frequent objections to quantitative methods, to crude typologies, and to
content analyses represent the writer’s voice that is frequently heard in Soviet literary
sociology and that is complemented by the profound skepticism toward the concept
of “system” of such influential Soviet thinkers as Bakhtin.
Literatura i sotsiologiia opened with a preface from the compilers that might be
called an “anti-introduction.” Instead of offering a long synthetic article on the the-
ory and methods of literary sociology, Kantorovich and Kuzmenko began by assert-
ing the contributors’ lack of a common approach. A reference to Brezhnev called
attention to the complexity of their subject, “multifaceted Soviet culture.” A quo-
tation from the proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress licensed them to
pursue their studies with an interdisciplinary approach on both the theoretical and
practical levels of research. These three themes (refusal to advocate a single literary
sociological method, interdisciplinary study, and the complexity of Soviet life) dom-
inate this volume and subsequent studies.
The first part of Literatura i sotsiologiia, comprising essays on methodology by
Iurii Surovtsev and Vadim Kovskii, developed these three themes and placed them
in historical perspective. Clearly one of the purposes of these literary sociologists
was to divorce their work from that of the so-called vulgar sociologists of the 1920s,
primarily Valerian Pereverzev and Vladimir Friche. One way of doing this was to
avoid the ambitious theories that led the sociologists of the 1920s to claim the laurels
in the race to establish a Soviet Marxist theory of literature. Another, more practical
way of not following the example of the “vulgar sociologists” was to avoid those ar-
eas of inquiry that they addressed: the unmediated class determination of the writer’s
production and the rigidly isomorphic correspondence between a work and the so-
cial structure. This permitted, moreover, polemics not only with the past of Soviet
literary sociology, but also with Western theories, including Theodor Adorno’s so-
ciological study of music and Lucien Goldmann’s sociology of the novel, and with
naive survivals of “mirror” theories of art in contemporary Soviet criticism, theories
according to which the work of literature provides a direct “reflection of the social
world.”
Surovtsev and Kovskii proceeded to examine the limits and possibilities of liter-
ary sociological scholarship and its relationship to aesthetics, suggesting appropriate
levels of social research for the various links in the literary channel that they propose:
“artist—work of art—consumer.”22 They advised extreme caution in describing the
relationship of the artist to his work and that of the work to the consumer. That such
linkages are neither simple nor direct was the overwhelming message of the two
essays. The second linkage, between the work and society, could be studied quantita-
tively, with caution, and also on the concrete theoretical (middle) level with reference
to Marx’s concept of “consumer capability,” in this case a group’s ability to respond
to a work of literature. “Group” here was to include not merely economic position,
but also demographic features, cultural level, and ethnic factors. The artist-work
linkage, because it was the special concern of the “vulgar sociology,” was treated
with even greater caution. Surovtsev proposed Lenin’s essays on Tolstoy as a model
study because it considered a variety of factors, influences, and traditions and did
not treat the ideology of the writer as a mere mechanical inscription of class interest.
Surovtsev and Kovskii placed the sociological analysis of the form and content
of individual works almost entirely off limits in these two essays, especially statistical
content analyses, which, because they could be subject to naive interpretation, raised
for Kovskii the specter of unsophisticated Stalinist demands for positive, conflict-
free situations in literature. Both Kovskii and Surovtsev prefer traditional aesthetic
categories for the analysis of literary works, and this disposition is reflected in the
stability of such traditional notions as genre, hero, image, or plot in Soviet socio-
logical analyses. Like György Lukács and an older generation of German Marxist
critics, including Marx himself, Surovtsev displayed a firm sense of the inviolability
and monumentality of a classic, and he offered no insights into the process of literary
canonization; nor did he display any interest in studying the conflict and interaction
between “high” and “mass” culture. Kovskii, in fact, combined his reverence for
the classics with a certain contempt for mass literature, Soviet and Western. Only
toward the very end of the Soviet period did this contempt for popular literature
begin to fade. Indeed, a Soviet commentator came to see the weakening of the evalu-
ative pedagogical impulse as a condition for the maturation of literary sociology, to
the extent that it opened a space for the study of the multiple functions of literature
in society.23
If the limitations and words of caution in Literatura i sotsiologiia seem timid, one
would do well to recall the historical situations of Soviet and Western literary cul-
tures, as Kovskii suggests. In the West, renewed interest in the sociology of liter-
ature, particularly in studies of ideology and literary reception, arose as a critical
response to the limitations of immanent theories of literature, including the New
Criticism or early structuralism. But in the Soviet Union, the sociological study of
literature had to recover from the excesses of not only the 1920s, but of the Stalin era
as well, and it has had to do this in an ideological situation that was, at least initially,
skeptical toward many aspects of sociology. Moreover, the specificity of literature
in the West has been guaranteed by the conventional view of literature as an object
of aesthetic contemplation. Literature in the Soviet Union, on the other hand, had
to fulfill crude instrumental functions and had at times been treated as propaganda
or textbook. The aesthetic specificity of literature was much less secure in such sur-
roundings, and most of the papers in Literatura i sotsiologiia seemed determined to pro-
tect it.
The two methodological essays to which I have been referring also devel-
oped the theme of the complexity of Soviet culture. Kovskii, in particular, noted
the “complex and contradictory” effect of the scientific-technical revolution on all
spheres of contemporary culture: the growing differentiation of Soviet social struc-
ture, the rise of new social and productive groups, and new problems of education,
morality, and culture, accompanied by new social relationships. With few excep-
tions, the remaining essays in Literatura i sotsiologiia, written well before the advent
of the computer age, glasnost, and perestroika, brought to their discussions of the
interrelationships of literature and life a similar sense that there are no easy, sweeping
answers to the problems of modern life.
The second section of Literatura i sotsiologiia was significant because the papers
projected the complexity that other contributors found in the structures of modern
Soviet culture onto Russian literary history. The disenchanted, sociological view
of Soviet culture that had been outlined in the methodological section of the vol-
ume was spelled out in detail in Kuzmenko’s “Problemy istoriko-tipologicheskogo
izucheniia sovetskoi literatury” (Problems of the Historical-Typological Study of
Soviet Literature). Kuzmenko’s paper offers, as well, the most rigorous application of
historical materialism to Soviet literature, which he divides into two main periods,
an “epoch of socialist transformation” (from 1917 until just after World War II) and
an “epoch of developed socialist society” that followed the first after a brief period of
transition. Kuzmenko defined the age of “mature socialism” as a less stormy period,
one marked by gradual change and dominated by a developed system of govern-
mental and social institutions, subject to legality and order and featuring a variety
of social classes and national cultures. Kuzmenko’s distinction between the two ages
of Soviet literature closely resembles Lukács’s well-known distinction between the
worlds of the epic and of the novel.24 Thus, to Kuzmenko, the earlier Soviet period
was one of direct ties between man (chelovek) and man and a heroic world of epic
scope, in which social forces were visible and transformable, the individual could
take responsibility for his surroundings, and the writer could be a participant, not a
mere observer. His description of the later period, on the other hand, bears consider-
able resemblance to Lukács’s vision of the post-1848 European novel. In late Soviet
literature, the protagonist becomes subject to a “trial by a world of things” as he
must stand in a more complex, mediated relationship with the social and historical
processes, must contend with a tighter web of circumstances, and must sometimes
make unheroic compromises. Kuzmenko lists Chingiz Aitmatov, Rasputin, Shuk-
shin, and Trifonov among the writers who came to the fore of this movement in
Soviet literature.
The final section of the Literatura i sotsiologiia volume, on studies of literary re-
ception, represents what became the most productive field of Soviet and post-Soviet
literary sociology. The work that appears in this pioneering volume, largely con-
nected with the Lenin Library’s empirical research, was, and continues to be, aug-
mented by two further types of scholarship. The first, theoretical in nature, explores
literary reception as a psychological and aesthetic phenomenon, to which the clearest
Western parallel would be Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading, which also draws upon
psychology, sociology, and phenomenology.25 Serious work in this area began to ap-
pear almost simultaneously with the post-1968 wave of Western studies of reading.26
The second type of research is historical, dedicated to reconstructing patterns of re-
ception from primitive surveys, signals within texts, and “documentary” materials
(letters, diaries, reviews) of the past.27 While these studies have not been able to draw
upon large databases and, consequently, have had to extrapolate a great deal from
scattered information, they nevertheless offer a valuable sense of the expectations,
habits, and background of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia.
Meanwhile, in an essay on the formation of literary sociology, Lev Gudkov
lists several criteria for measuring the institutionalization of a scholarly discipline:
extensive growth of research and publication, systematizing and reviewing works
(retrospective bibliography, textbooks, seminars, conferences), specialized peri-

odicals with methodological sections, pedagogic programs to train new specialists,
research centers, schools, and tendencies.28 Judged by these standards, Soviet liter-
ary sociology was well along the way to full institutionalization by 1991. Research
methods had been developed, criticized, and refined, and published research proved
increasingly capable of addressing an increasingly differentiated Soviet literary pro-
cess. Well before the advent of glasnost and perestroika, literary sociology as well as
a “sociologized” literature had begun to confront the complexities and conflicts of
post-Stalinist Soviet life, using literary techniques and scholarly concepts that tran-
scended the socialist realism of the past.
Beyond Formalism, Marxism, and Semiotics
The Stalin era effectively silenced formalism and literary sociology, driving
their leaders and students underground or into such activities as archival research,
editing, teaching, and literary history. A generation of polyglot, philosophically so-
phisticated, and imaginative scholars who came to the fore during the 1920s and early
1930s disappeared from view. Those who had the good fortune not to be purged or
to die prematurely slowly reappeared during the 1950s–1980s with published schol-
arly work, but not always with the daring and innovation that characterized their
earlier thinking. Two striking exceptions were Lydia Ginzburg (1902–1990) and
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), philologists deeply rooted in European philosophical,
literary, and social thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, acute
readers of literature, and theoreticians whose work defied easy characterization. I
focus on them because of the magnitude of their achievement during these years and
because they translated the vitality of the pre-Stalin period into internationally in-
fluential, innovative work on major topics, work which maintains its influence in the
post-Soviet period. But other broadly educated thinker-scholars performed similar
feats: Mikhail Gasparov (1935–2005) in versification theory and Eleazar Meletinsky
(1918–2005) in folklore and mythology are two salient examples.
Ginzburg, the most accomplished student of Tynianov and Eikhenbaum, began
her career in the 1920s. But as she was coming into her own with a classic study of
nonfictional prose, the formalists were coming increasingly under attack and her ca-
reer as a literary scholar had to be put on hold for decades, although she did manage
to publish books on Lermontov (1940) and Herzen (1957). She survived the Blockade
of Leningrad—her fictionalized memoir, Zapiski blokadnogo cheloveka (English trans-
lation: Blockade Diary, 1995), would become a major publishing event (1984)—and the
post–World War II anticosmopolitan campaigns. She lived to not only publish the
best single-author account of Russian poetry (O lirike [On the Lyric], 1964; expanded
edition, 1974) and one of the most original and far-ranging Russian books on nar-
rative prose (O psikhologicheskoi proze, 1971; English translation, On Psychological Prose,
1991) but also a volume on the problem of character in literature, O literaturnom geroe
(On the Literary Hero, 1979), in which she engaged contemporary trends in literary
and social theory. Now that it is possible to publish her memoirs and notebooks, she
has earned the reputation of an innovative creator of “in-between literature,” writ-

ing on the border between fiction and nonfiction, and she has come to be seen as a
major modern author, although, like Lotman, Uspensky, and Bakhtin, she generally
avoided public criticism on Soviet writing.29
Ginzburg did not hesitate to cite modern, often Western, philosophy (Albert
Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre), psychology (Sigmund Freud, William James, Carl
Jung, and Lev Vygotsky), sociology (George Herbert Mead, David Riesman, and
Max Weber), and literary theory (Erich Auerbach, Roland Barthes, the avant-garde
magazine Tel Quel, and René Wellek). Drawing upon the classics in these fields, as
well as on modern theory, Ginzburg’s essays and books addressed the interaction of
life and literature in Russian culture through the concepts of modeling, character-
ization, cognition, and the dynamic interaction between literature and behavior.30
Her materials are drawn primarily from nineteenth-century prose and poetry, but
she reaches back to French, German, and Russian literature of the eighteenth cen-
tury and forward to modern Russian poetry and modern European fiction. Her
work is attentive to historical processes, understood in the dynamic fashion of her
formalist teachers Tynianov and Eikhenbaum, but also to the structured nature of
the text, understood as the functional interaction of its elements. She most clearly
articulates this position, which marks all of her work from the 1920s to the 1980s, in a
late essay, “Ob istorizme i o strukturnosti (teoreticheskie zametki)” (On Historicism
and Structuredness), which put her squarely in the middle of controversies over syn-
chronic and diachronic analysis. Here and elsewhere she consistently attempted to
combine the two in a theoretically principled fashion, seeing history as having shape
and structure as having history.31
Ginzburg’s longer works of the 1970s–1980s develop this position, between the
reflection theories of Soviet Marxism and the language-modeled theories of Soviet
semiotics, in greater range and detail. She operated on the middle level of theoriza-
tion and did not explicitly contradict the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. But in two
particular ways she ignored officially accepted notions of socioeconomic causation:
in her attention to processes of modeling—as opposed to theories of literature as a
“reflection” of social reality—and in the equal weight that she placed upon social,
psychological, and literary materials in the creation of literary personages. She de-
veloped this position most directly in dialogue with two nineteenth-century Rus-
sian critics, Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov, whose influence on Soviet
literary scholarship, it could be argued, exceeded that of Marxist theorists work-
ing with a more dialectical theory of base-superstructure relationships. Literature
becomes, in short, a process of modeling that draws upon other models, which, as
models, have the quality of being structured; in no sense is this a simple matter of
“reflecting” reality. It is, rather, as Ginzburg put it in the introduction to her O psi-
khologicheskoi proze, a matter of the incessant aesthetic (making) activity of humankind.
The provocations that O literaturnom geroe offers to semiotic theory are more
forthright than those to literary Marxism. Foremost among them is Ginzburg’s
treatment of the “author,” which Roland Barthes, for one, had unceremoniously dis-
missed as a “decrepit deity of the old criticism.”32 Ginzburg’s criticism, with its atten-
tion to role theory, modern ethics, and sociology, is anything but “old.” But on this
one issue she does persistently return to a romantic vision of the writer as “creator”
or even, to use her word, “demiurge.”33
An equally striking challenge to semiotics stems from the fact that although
Ginzburg was published in the collections of the Moscow-Tartu group, and although
she and her work were well respected by members of the group, linguistic analytic
procedures played demonstratively little part in her publications. In her earlier book,
O psikhologicheskoi proze, in which she does refer to semiotic studies of modeling and
typology, she does not use linguistic methods to any significant extent, and she
moves quickly, instead, to larger units of analysis: norms, ideals, structures, forms,
historical definitions, philosophies, and genres. In O literaturnom geroe, her discussion
of “direct speech” as a means of generating literary characters comes only at the end
of the book, as, it seems, a less complicated or interesting factor than the previously
discussed ones involving modeling or typological systems. Its best parts focus on
speech genres. In place of “language” or the linguistic model, the notion of model-
ing mediates between cultural orders in Ginzburg: social, psychological, and literary
models as well as a variety of subtypes (masks, characters, and personages represent-
ing ideas). Ginzburg’s notion of model is a systemic one, and consequently for her a
literary character becomes not just a sum of traits attached to a proper name, as in
such structuralist treatments as those by Roland Barthes or Seymour Chatman, but
rather a systematic relationship between traits, a relationship that can be motivated
by a variety of historical, social, psychological, scientific, and philosophical consid-
erations: “the unity of a literary hero is not a sum, but a system with its organizing
dominants. The literary hero would be a collection of diffuse signs, were it not for
the principle of connection—the focus of the authorial viewpoint, which is espe-
cially important for the varied prose of the nineteenth century.”34 Such a treatment
of characters returns us to her implicit polemic with the dismissal of the author from
theory’s view of the literary process. Her commitment to the unity of the text in
terms of authorial viewpoint brings with it a view of the unity of literary characters
in terms of the same ultimate viewpoint.
In his range of critical inquiry, in the vicissitudes of his career, and in the com-
plexity of his reception, Mikhail Bakhtin is the most challenging theoretician of the
Soviet period. He began his career just after the revolution, he lived much of his life
in exile away from the capitals, and his greatest work appeared in print only toward
the end of his life or posthumously. Charting the limits of his work and influence is
far more difficult than with Ginzburg and the Moscow-Tartu School, in large part
because he has become an internationally prominent figure inspiring many volumes
that carry his thought into philosophy, religion, social analysis, cultural studies, the
visual arts, and, of course, literary criticism. His early philological and philosophical
education gave him a far greater range of reference than is common among modern
Russian theoreticians, as it extends from classical antiquity and the European Middle
Ages and Renaissance to the controversies of the 1970s, with particular engagement
in neo-Kantian, sociological, theological, and linguistic thinking of the nineteenth
and early twentieth century. His very style, the embodiment of his ideas about po-
lyphony, heteroglossia, and dialogue—rough-hewn, at times abstract, at times allu-

sive, sometimes aggressively polemical, dazzlingly suggestive on crucial issues—has
made his work conducive to multiple appropriations.
Bakhtin’s path to Russian and overseas reading publics has been tortuous, as is
well documented.35 But a career challenged by exile, serious illness, and the hostility
of the Soviet academic establishment eventually found a destiny abroad as fortunate
as the native one was troubled. Almost as soon as his texts could be printed in the So-
viet Union in the 1960s–1970s, translations made his work internationally accessible
and often more readable than the Russian originals, which—especially the early and
late works—had not been polished for publication. For nearly fifty years there has
been, at least abroad, a Bakhtin for every season. The treatment of “polyphonic”
discourse in Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky book (Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo, first Rus-
sian edition 1929; revised edition: Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 1963) offered Anglo-
American “new critics” a dynamic, sophisticated approach to Dostoevsky’s style,
rhetoric, and characterization beyond the intellectual history approaches of previous
scholarship. Bakhtin’s celebration of the “carnivalesque” in his Rabelais book (Rabe-
lais and His World, largely completed by 1940, published in the Soviet Union in 1965)
was greeted by politically engaged English and American scholars of the 1960s and
early 1970s, who celebrated its democratizing spirit of hierarchy overturned; in the
1980s critics anxious to move beyond formalized narratology welcomed Bakhtin’s
sociolinguistic studies of novelistic discourse (written in the 1930s–1940s, collected in
book form in Russian only in 1975); the disputed attribution to Bakhtin of works by
Valentin Voloshinov (on Freudianism, on linguistics) and Pavel Medvedev (on for-
malism) lent Bakhtin useful credentials (on Marxian and Freudian discourse) to aid
in the Western development of cultural studies.36 When cultural theory in the later
1980s and the 1990s labored under the relentless gaze of Michel Foucault’s disciplin-
ary order or drifted amid deconstruction’s infinite deferrals of meaning, a fresh sup-
ply of Bakhtinian writings, early and late, offered the reassurance of human agency,
answerability, outsidedness, and unfinalizability.
Bakhtin’s impact on the period covered by this chapter, meanwhile, while ex-
tending, certainly, to philosophy and sociology, lay primarily in the realm of literary
criticism, literary history, and literary theory, very broadly conceived. This story is
no less intricate than that of Bakhtin’s overseas reception, as both Soviet “physicists”
(literary scholars who believed that the study of literature should operate as exact
science) and “lyricists” (those opposing this assumption) of the time could each try
to call him their own. For Viacheslav V. Ivanov, Bakhtin was a pioneer semiotician
who had anticipated semiotic work on communication, information theory, quasi-
direct discourse, and binary structural analysis (the high and low cultural patterns
that Bakhtin described in his Rabelais book), even as Bakhtin critiqued the Saus-
surean linguistics that formed the conceptual basis of structuralism.37 Iurii Lotman
himself travelled to Moscow to meet Bakhtin in 1970.38 Boris Egorov also points
out that the polemics between Bakhtin and the formalists in the 1920s were much
sharper than Bakhtin’s comments on the structuralists of the 1960s.
Nevertheless, Bakhtin’s own notes from the last years of his life show that he
remained skeptical not only toward Saussurean linguistics, but also toward notions
of coding, convention, and what he called the abstracting “dialectics” of semiotic
analysis. These notes address the conceptual building blocks of structuralist commu-
nication theory and transform them into entities that do not exist prior to dialogue
but are constructed as it progresses.39 These critical comments are fully consistent
with his treatment of language and novelistic style in his Dostoevsky book and in his
essays on “Epic and Novel” and on “Discourse in the Novel,” in which the hero of
the novel becomes the “speaking person,” a speaking person whose speech addresses
the speech of other characters, even the author’s. Just as this hero for Bakhtin embod-
ies an excess of potential over social role and position, so the novel itself is marked
by an excess of potential over any possible generic skeleton. With similar consistency
Bakhtin would reject structuralist treatments of the addresser and addressee position
in their communication theory, the “author” and “reader,” likewise because he finds
they do not allow for genuine change and interaction, for a surplus of potential over
their abstracted quality.40 Bakhtin dismisses aspects of the text that set boundaries
to such “unfinalizability, ” sometimes at the expense of employing critical sleight of
hand (see his neglect of Dostoevsky’s plots or Rabelais’s utopian passage on the Ab-
baye of Thélème).
Bakhtin’s dialogic linguistics, treatment of the novel’s engagement with other
literary and social discourses, and awareness of the interaction between official and
nonofficial discourse suggest important projects for the sociological study of litera-
ture and literary institutions. His skepticism toward systems and abstraction offers
an important methodological challenge to other approaches to literary sociology, as
would the ethical orientation of his early manuscripts.
During the decades spanned by this chapter, the 1950s–1980s, Soviet literary
theory changed and matured in ways often unseen both by the Soviet public and by
readers abroad. Moscow-Tartu semiotics, neoformalism, literary sociology, and the
work of major scholars such as Bakhtin and Ginzburg, who belonged to no group
but were assimilated by others, created concepts and understandings that begged for
more open debate. Since 1991 those debates have taken place, and on a far more inter-
national scale than was previously possible, as Russian and overseas scholars work to
preserve and explore this critical heritage. The debates and the publication of mem-
oirs, correspondences, and notebooks from the “epoch of Stagnation” amply docu-
ment the continuing vitality of the period’s most challenging theories.
 LITERARY CRITICISM AND
12
THE END OF THE SOVIET SYSTEM,
1985–1991
BIRGIT MENZEL and BORIS DUBIN
Literary Criticism at the Soviet Epoch’s End
At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986, which, as it turned out, was

the ruling party’s penultimate, Mikhail Gorbachev, elected general secretary of the
Central Committee of the CPUSSR a year ago, raised the question of broadening
the policy of glasnost. The task of bringing about a “genuine revolution in conscious-
ness” in the name of “creating a new life,” which the general secretary would pro-
claim in one and a half year’s time, was to a large degree entrusted to journal essays
and literary criticism.1 These genres were destined to become important instruments
for the reappraisal of Soviet history, the cultural legacy, and the entire complex of
ideas about literature and its place in society. Just like during the Thaw, the literary
intelligentsia was to become an active force of renewal in society.
However, only a few years later literary criticism would fall out of “great time”
(Bakhtin) and become a marginal and hardly visible phenomenon in public life. The
process of decentralization and commercializing culture triggered feelings of disap-
pointment and defeatism in most critics, as well as a tendency toward self-isolation,
regardless of the ideological camp to which they belonged. Most of them turned out
to be incapable of reacting to the changes in the cultural situation by elaborating new
criteria for the description and appraisal of culture.
250
LITERARY CRITICISM AND THE END OF THE SOVIET SYSTEM, 1985–1991  251
What does the role of literary criticism at the end of the Soviet epoch look like
in retrospective? Was its marginalization caused by an internal crisis, at least partly?
Would it not be appropriate to regard the depreciation of the role of literary criti-
cism as a sign that the cultural system was normalizing and developing a functional
differentiation similar to the one that can be seen in developed Western countries?
The Change in the Social Context of Literary Criticism
The reading public’s demand for diverse information about the country’s past, as
well as for the literature that had been banned for decades, led to a gradual abolition
of the institution of censorship as a means of totalitarian control of culture. A law
that abolished censorship in the print and other mass media came into force in the
USSR on 12 June 1990, but the process of the liberation of culture, art and literature,
and literary criticism had begun already in the second half of 1986. The intelligen-
tsia, which supported the reforms, was inspired by the hope to build a “socialism
with a human face,” a hope that had first surfaced during the Khrushchev Thaw a
few decades earlier, to realize the utopias of the 1920s, and to see the triumph of the
moral values of the classics and of unofficial literature, which was finally no longer
suppressed.
In July 1986 Elem Klimov was elected chairman of the Filmmakers’ Union.
Subsequently the so-called shelved films (polochnoe kino), not released for the gen-
eral audience in their time, found their way onto the country’s screens. In the fall of
the same year writers from the generation of the “men of the sixties” (shestidesiatniki)
were elected to head the editorial boards of a number of leading journals: Sergei Za-
lygin became editor in chief of Novyi mir, Grigorii Baklanov of Znamia, and Vitalii
Korotich of Ogonek. In spring 1986 Ogonek published a number of poems by Nikolai
Gumilyov, a poet whose work had hitherto been taboo. In the new novels of Chin-
giz Aitmatov (Plakha [The Block; translated into English as The Place of the Skull]),
Viktor Astafiev (Pechal’nyi detektiv [A Sad Detective Novel]), and Valentin Rasputin
(Pozhar [The Conflagration]) religious themes were no longer accompanied by athe-
ist propaganda, while many pressing topics were treated with a hitherto impossible
degree of frankness. Previously banned works from the Stalinist era (for example
Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem and Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur), by the authors of the
first wave of emigration (such as Vladimir Nabokov and Vladislav Khodasevich) and
also anti-Soviet texts by Soviet authors that had been written “for the desk drawer”
(v stol), such as Vladimir Dudintsev’s Belye odezhdy (White Garments) and Alexander
Tvardovsky’s Po pravu pamiati (By the Right of Memory), were now published.
Literary interactions were subject to significant changes. The “thick” literary
journals, which featured sections for journalistic essays and published literary works
previously unavailable to the majority of readers, found themselves in the very cen-
ter of culture. According to the sociological polls of the time, the works that caused
the greatest sensation among readers in 1987–1988 were Anatolii Rybakov’s novel
Deti Arbata (The Children of the Arbat) published in the journal Druzhba narodov.2
The readership’s attitude to the publicistic genre changed, too: the journal articles
252  BIRGIT MENZEL AND BORIS DUBIN
of Nikolai Shmelev, Anatolii Strelianyi, Iurii Chernichenko, Vladimir Seliunin, and

Grigorii Khanin enjoyed mass success among educated readers.
The second impulse to overcome censorship followed in 1988 when, in spite of
the authorities’ resistance, the works of authors of the “third wave” of emigration
(Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Viktor Nekrasov, Vladimir Voinovich,
Vasilii Aksenov, and Andrei Sinyavsky), as well as of those who had gone into “inner
emigration” (Evgeny Zamyatin and Boris Pasternak) and representatives of Western
modernism, such as Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, began to appear
in print. The readers’ favorite for 1989 was Solzhenitsyn’s Arkhipelag GULAG (The
Gulag Archipelago), published in Novyi mir, due to which the journal’s print run in-
creased by several hundred percent over the course of a few months.3 Sergei Zaly-
gin, editor in chief of Novyi mir, declared the impending year of 1990 as the “year of
Solzhenitsyn.”4
An important moment in the institutional changes in literature and literary
criticism was the gradual erosion of the boundaries between literature and writers,
as well as between the literary critics of the Soviet “metropolis” and the Russian
emigration. The Soviet literary critics Galina Belaia and Nina Ivanova were given
the opportunity to participate in the first joint conference of Soviet and émigré writ-
ers in Copenhagen in March 1988. In the same year similar conferences were held in
Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Barcelona.
In addition, now the works of the so-called religious philosophers (Vladimir
Solovyov, Vasilii Rozanov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Pavel Florensky, Georgii Fedotov, and
others) were published in the Soviet Union. And finally, the texts of underground
authors such as Eduard Limonov, Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, and Vladimir
Sorokin, which were as yet unknown to the public and destroyed many moral and
aesthetic taboos, began to appear in print.
The politically committed “thick” journals—Novyi mir, Druzhba narodov, and
Znamia—turned into a determining influence upon the educated part of society.
Their print run sharply increased. As an example, the print run of the illustrated
weekly Ogonek, which previously had been 200,000–300,000 copies, now reached 1
million. The print run of Novyi mir, which had been 430,000 copies in 1985, increased
to 2.7 million over the course of five years, and the number of people who actually
read the journal was probably up to four times higher. The print run of Znamia in-
creased three-and-a-half-fold between 1987 and 1990, that of Druzhba narodov almost
fivefold.5
Dozens of small-scale periodicals emerged in the late 1980s–early 1990s along-
side the “thick” journals with their mass audience. Most of these small-scale pe-
riodicals were literary, although a significant segment was devoted to philosophy
and essays in the humanities. There were also science fiction and fantasy journals
intended for young urban readers.
Unlike the “thick” journals, which were concentrated in the capital, small-scale
periodicals emerged all over the entire Russian territory, including the small towns.
With few exceptions these journals vanished after a few years, having gone through
a brief launching stage and their very own publication boom. Here the boundaries of
the politically, ideologically, and aesthetically permissible were overcome even faster
than in the sociocultural centers of society. A small number of authors and literary
models owe their reputation to such small-scale publications. Later they were appro-
priated by the “thick” journals, which had by then lost their mass audience and were
approximating the form of the little review.6
The most significant instances of the structural changes in Soviet literature as
a social institution during the second half of the 1980s were thus the removal of the
limitations of censorship and the normative boundaries of “accepted” and “permit-
ted” literature; the concomitant unprecedented widening of the literary field; the
promotion of politically committed journals and the “thick” journal as the sociocul-
tural form at the center of literary interactions; the boom in the publication of works
from the distant and not so distant past, as well as contemporary publicistic writings;
and the rapid activization of the educated readership and the sharp increase in journal
print runs. Within these processes one can discern several stages.
The first period, from 1986–1989, was characterized by a steady growth in the
audience of the liberal journals: Novyi mir, Druzhba narodov, Znamia, Oktiabr’, Avrora,
and Ogonek. It was their print run in particular that increased unusually fast. By 1990
the liberal journals had increased their subscriptions by an average of 4–9 times (the
“nationalist” [pochvennye] ones increased only by 1.2–1.5 times). Moreover, this in-
crease in subscribers was due to a single social stratum: as a rule, the new subscribers
were people with higher education living in the big cities and willing to support the
reform initiatives of perestroika.
During the second stage, between 1990–August 1991, the politically committed
intelligentsia’s broad support for the reform slogans reached its peak.7 Consequently,
the increase in the print run of all journals and newspapers came to a halt, with the
exception of those with the greatest mass appeal and the most eclectic publications
(such as Argumenty i fakty or Komsomol’skaia Pravda), which strove to bring the mass
audience closer to the more educated groups and mostly reproduced ready clichés
and symbols. The Law on Print Media, which came into force in August 1990, made
it possible for employee collectives to own a paper, a step that delivered newspapers
and journals from the ownership of official organizations and agencies. Journals like
the following became independent: Oktiabr’, Znamia, Inostrannaia literatura, Druzhba
narodov, Iunost’, Novyi mir, Ogonek, and Literaturnaia gazeta.
While they were in the process of acquiring their independence, these journals’
new status led to a hardening of the opposition between the liberal democratic and
the nationalist forces, which were acting in conjunction with the organs of the Soviet
literary nomenclature (that is, the struggle between the Union of Soviet Writers and
the Russian Federation, the struggle between the journals Oktiabr’ and Znamia, and
the struggle between Moskva and Nash sovremennik). In January 1990 the “patriots”
from the organization Pamiat’ (Memory) provoked a public scandal during an eve-
ning event of the literary association April organized in the House of Authors. In
March the newspaper Literaturnaia Rossiia printed a manifest of the “national patri-
otic” writers that later became known as the “Letter of the 74.” Among those who
had signed it were the leaders of the Union of Soviet Writers (with the exception of
Sergei Mikhalkov), the editors of the nationalist journals (Anatolii Ivanov, Sergei
Vikulov, Stanislav Kuniaev, Mikhail Lobanov, and Aleksandr Prokhanov among
others), nationalist essayists (Igor Shafarevich and Vadim Kozhinov), and the writ-
ers Valentin Rasputin, Egor Isaev, Pyotr Proskurin, and Leonid Leonov. The phrase
“civil war in literature” became common currency.8
However, more and more these battles seemed belated, while the bitterness and
exaggeration with which they were being fought spoke of inner exhaustion, broken-
ness of spirit, even feelings of doom. In the middle of 1990 the liberal democratic Lit-
eraturnaia gazeta published Viktor Erofeev’s article “Pominki po sovetskoi literature”
(A Funeral Feast for Soviet Literature), which triggered a noisy polemic. Pointing
to the “three dimensions” in which Soviet literature had existed since the times of
Khrushchev’s Thaw (“official,” “village prose,” and “liberal”), Erofeev proclaimed
the death of all three tendencies, including the liberal one.9 All mass media had to
endure a sharp decline in popularity that began in 1991, and yesterday’s ideological
leaders suffered the fastest losses. By 1992 practically all the “thick” journals were
back to their pre-perestroika volume. Moreover, the features of their audience had
changed significantly: the reading public was becoming more provincial, depend-
ing on residence, and culturally more imitative. The most outstanding members of
the intelligentsia, that is, the most competent, educated, and active sector of society,
turned away from those liberal journals that for some time had figured as its sym-
bolic representatives. This factor predetermined a further loss in reader numbers and
a concomitant loss in print run for these journals. Suffice it to mention that between
1990 and 1993 the print run of Novyi mir and Znamia dropped by almost fifteen times,
that of Druzhba narodov by twenty times, and it was even bleaker for other journals.
While before it had been the case of one social stratum consolidating—that is, the
educated and democratically minded inhabitants of the large and very large cit-
ies—it had now come to the disintegration and formation of rifts, gaps, and caverns
within this very stratum. In any case, what we can observe here are clear damage to
the networks of cultural interactions or even the destruction of these networks.
What was happening was a crisis of the reading public in conjunction with a
crisis of authorship and the exhaustion of society’s intellectual energies. Literary
criticism interpreted the demobilization and fragmentation of the public, the slump
in reform impulses and inspiration in society, and the erosion of literary reference
points, canons, and value criteria as a growing crisis of the literary process. The top-
ics of journal round tables and editorial board polls were characteristic: “Literaturnyi
protsess: Segodnia i zavtra” (The Literary Process: Today and Tomorrow), “Kuda
ischez literaturnyi protsess?” (Where Did the Literary Process Disappear To?), and
so on.10
The former leading journals now had a print run of between three thousand and
ten thousand copies and factually shared the same circle of authors, a situation that
is still the same today. Yesterday’s authoritative “majority” was marginalized very
fast, the active “nucleus” of society exhibited symptoms of tiredness.11 The country’s
population, including the educated stratum, moved from perestroika to survival
mode, a forced adaptation to the new economic realities (unregulated prices and the
like). This process set in at the end of 1991 and gathered rapid momentum in 1992
and beyond. These shifts in the system of literary interactions, which emphasized the
end of all attempts at reforming socialism, as well as the crisis and subsequent disin-
tegration of the intelligentsia, formed the context for the transformations in literary
criticism, too.
In the final analysis, the emerging glasnost, prescribed from “above” as the main
direction of a state policy that remained centralized, stumbled upon the usual prob-
lems of Soviet society—artificial homogeneity and largely isolated, self-sufficient
cultural life. In these conditions, the closed nature of the Soviet educated community,
caught up in the ideological triangle of “the authorities—the people—the West” (or,
in other words, “communism—nationalism—liberalism”), became manifest partic-
ularly quickly. The flattened structures of society and its semantic sphere explain the
unbelievable speed with which the very foundations of the previous system crum-
bled (the Communist Party’s factual renunciation of its monopoly on ideology and
power, the disintegration of the USSR, and the fall of the high-ranking figures in
the cultural hierarchy), as well as the quick exhaustion of the reform impulse in both
the authorities and society as a whole, including its most educated segments.
The educated community’s reaction to the publication boom of the late 1980s,
as well as that of its “leader” and “reference point,” that is, the literary and journal-
istic criticism, was a case in point. The almost simultaneous publication of “crossed
out” texts from several decades, of diverse poetics that were often far from canonical
and of varied genres, including some that were alien to Soviet cultural custom, took
away any sense of the historical context within which it would have been possible
to interpret a given work. A universal framework of correlations, evaluation, and
analysis was wholly absent in this situation, and any talk about creating them ad hoc
in view of the publication avalanche would have been pointless.12
The reaction of the literary critics and the most prepared members of the read-
ing public can be qualified as defensively conservative, eclectic, and imitative. Some
“new” names—writers who were in reality well known but had previously not been
admitted to official publications—were added to the list of former literary authori-
ties (but not really in the principal roles). These include Joseph Brodsky and Venedikt
Erofeev from among the departed and Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin, Dmitry
Prigov, and Ludmila Petrushevskaya from among the living and that were almost
all the new additions. This undermined the canon, which was anyway rather amor-
phous, and deprived the criteria for canonization of any definiteness whatsoever.
And this in turn led to a characteristic “amnesia”: the “memory” of the literary sys-
tem proved unable to retain the events of the years of change because it failed to
comprehend or interpret the fact that this change was happening and how significant
it was. This was precisely the result that emerged from Boris Dubin and Abram Reit
blat’s analysis of the points of reference (mentions of significant names) used by re-
viewers in the literary journals of the 1990s: the changes—in comparison to similar
samples taken in 1960–1961 and in the late 1970s—turned out to be minimal.13
There were also significant changes in genre. On the one hand the basic form of
journal criticism—the problem-focused article commenting on the state of literature
and tendencies in its development—disappeared almost completely or was at least

reduced to a minimum. The residual or even retrograde function of such analytical
panoramas was taken over by an annual overview of literary events and develop-
ments. All principled literary discussions and polemics, whatever the subject, came
to a close, and this without any pressure from the “outside.” On the other hand, there
was a sharp decrease in the number of reviews published, and the journals shortened
their review and bibliography sections. These sections returned later in the form of
authors’ columns, such as “So-and-so’s Bookshelf,” or became close in form to cer-
tain types of advertising, which was also sometimes published under the name of one
or the other “signature” author.14
To sum up, the main social and cultural factors that provide us with a context
for understanding and interpreting the role of literary criticism include: the social
and cultural immaturity of Soviet (and later of post-Soviet) society; the closed—
in the sociological sense of the word—nature of the educated community (the in-
telligentsia, in particular the intelligentsia working in the humanities); the latter’s
connections to the authorities as its main source of influence or only important
benchmark; the role of the classics and the canon for the self-definition of the intel-
lectual stratum; the intelligentsia’s orientation toward socially relevant literature that
was reflecting “life” and the topical issues of the present at the expense of depriving
it of sociocultural independence and claim to universality; the clique nature of small
culture-generating groups, which remained isolated despite aiming for innovation
and recognition (some of the results of their activities would subsequently be ap-
propriated by the bearers and facilitators of the canon); and eclecticism as a strategy
of cultural and social supremacy during periods of “stabilization” after successive
waves of widening of the literary field. To us, these pivotal systemic features pres-
ent a theoretical framework that helps us comprehend and describe the evolution
of literary criticism during the period under study; but we are convinced that they
remain relevant even beyond these chronological boundaries.
Norms and Functions of Perestroika Criticism
Right until the end of 1986, official statements and programmatic publications
on literature adhered to the traditional administrative command style. For example,
Vitalii Ozerov (born 1917), editor in chief of the journal Voprosy literatury between
1959–1979 and head of the council for literary scholarship and criticism in the Union
of Soviet Writers between 1967–1986, a functionary decorated with many honorary
titles, gave a summary report on the state of literary criticism at the Eighth All-Rus-
sian Writers’ Congress in June 1986, in which he demanded that literary criticism
become more effective in an effort to educate the “literary cadres.”15
For their part, the liberally and democratically oriented critics enthusiastically
greeted Gorbachev’s reform efforts with its orientation of government policy toward
“universal human values” (obshchechelovecheskie tsennosti). One of the first to react to
these slogans was Igor’ Dedkov in his October 1986 article “Vozmozhnost’ novogo
myshleniia” (The Opportunity for a New Way of Thinking).16 The liberal intelli-
gentsia sensed that the limit reached in the 1960s had now finally been left behind.
Alla Latynina remarked that “abstract humanism” was only rehabilitated during the
course of perestroika.17 Many authors took great care to underline the moral and ethi-
cal tasks of literature and criticism. Dmitry Likhachev, Sergei Averintsev, and Daniil
Granin wrote several articles on these issues.18 Apart from changes in worldview, the
turn toward the universal and the all-human also had methodological consequences
for the study and evaluation of literature, sponsoring a comparative analysis of lit-
erature that would place Russian literature into the context of twentieth-century
European and world literature—as a counterweight to the previous dogmas on the
supremacy of socialist realism and in the context of the current polemic with the
nationalist idea of an exclusively Russian literature.19
However, on the whole the essence of the rallying call of the first years of per-
estroika boiled down to the need for criticism to return to Lenin’s teachings and the
traditions of realist criticism, the most outstanding representative of which was seen in
Nikolai Dobrolyubov (affirming the new by way of appealing to the authority of the
past and “resurrecting” this authority has been an indispensable part of the strategy).
Exalting Lenin and party politics while clearly distinguishing it from the later dis-
tortions of Stalinism and the Brezhnev regime became the essence of the “new way
of thinking” (a phrase originally used by Lenin) and of Gorbachev’s course toward a
reformation of socialism from above. Here we can see the resurrection of an opposi-
tion that dates back to the time of the Thaw, that between the “good Lenin” and the
“bad Stalin,” which was defining the poles, the course, and the heat of the journal
polemic of the perestroika years.
The demand to resurrect the traditions of social and revolutionary democratic
criticism was first pronounced in June 1987 by Iurii Burtin, in the past a colleague of
Tvardovsky’s at Novyi mir. In the article “Real’naia kritika vchera i segodnia” (Real
Criticism of Yesterday and Today), which triggered a stormy debate, he claimed
that contemporary criticism did not deserve its name, since today more than ever
the real function of criticism was to translate the images created by writers into the
language of the people, thus turning them into a factor of national consciousness.
Literary criticism, as Dobroliubov understood it, consists in journalistic analysis of
reality with the help of literature. In the contemporary situation that meant drawing
conclusions with regard to the development of socialism in the USSR. The task of
literary criticism was to comprehend contemporary life with the help of a common
denominator, a general idea, which today could only be democracy.20
By defending Leninist principles and revolutionary democratic traditions, the
advocates of liberal socialism yearned to bring to a close the reforms that had been
curtailed in the 1960s in the struggle with the nationalists, who had managed to con-
solidate their position in the 1970s, and with the heirs of Stalinist normative criticism.
Those critics who had advanced nationalist positions as early as the 1970s also
regarded the social journalistic function of literary criticism as the most important
one, although they were often talking about aesthetic rather than critical analysis:
only the love for high and eternal art and beauty can be the yardstick of serious criti-
cism according to Vadim Kozhinov, who contrasted the “ignoramus” Belinsky with
Pushkin;21 while Aleksandr Baigushev linked the value of a work to the Russian
nationality of its author and identified “Russianness,” the noble orientation toward
the development of the soul, steeped in traditions, as the highest merit of literature
and criticism.22
With the beginning of commercialization the goals criticism set for itself
changed. Nataliia Ivanova and Marietta Chudakova stated that Russian literature-
centrism had come to an end.23 The rigid scheme of three opposing critical cur-
rents—the party official, the liberal democratic, and the national patriotic—that
had emerged as early as the late 1950s and grown stronger between the 1960s and
the early 1980s, collapsed. All these currents of “civic” criticism were overcome by
disappointment: this was not how they had imagined the outcome of perestroika.
Many were deeply concerned by the sharp decrease in journal print runs, and even
the hope that now the treasures of literature that had been rescued from oblivion
would be appraised according to their merits had been thwarted. Instead, all camps
and groups resounded with loud accusations and self-accusations with regard to the
death of Russian culture and the Russian intelligentsia. The future was painted in
the bleakest colors. The critics of the main, ideologically committed current and
the advocates of an aesthetic analysis of literature were united by the absence of any
consideration for the real interests and needs of the readers and the newly forming
market.
Ideological Positions and Generation Conflict
Literary criticism of the perestroika era revealed and widened the schism that
had first become visible during the 1960s and 1970s. The division into three political
camps took hold and open confrontation broke out between them.
The first was the liberal camp, which supported the reforms. Its representatives
were oriented toward Western models of democracy and pluralism, market econ-
omy and the corresponding political system. After 1986 these critics initiated many
important debates. Apart from the above-mentioned articles by Latynina, we can
list Leonid Batkin’s “Son razuma” (The Sleep of Reason) and Iurii Burtin’s “Vam, iz
drugogo pokoleniia . . . K publikatsii poemy A. Tvardovskogo ‘Po pravu pamiati’”
(To You, Who Are from Another Generation . . . On the Publication of A. Tvardo-
vsky’s Poem “By the Right of Memory”), which led to a debate on the intelligentsia’s
service to Stalin’s regime and its role in the 1960s and during the time of Stagnation.24
It was the representatives of the liberal current who stimulated the debate on the
review of the history of Russian twentieth-century literature in 1988. The articles
of Anatolii Bocharov, Galina Belaia, Marietta Chudakova, Evgeny Dobrenko, and
Igor’ Zolotusskii in Voprosy literatury, Literaturnaia gazeta, Novyi mir and Oktiabr’ led
to the irrevocable destruction of both the historico-literary model that had emerged
during the Soviet time and the doctrinal foundation of the socialist realist canon.25
Sergei Chuprinin’s article “Drugaia proza” (Another Prose) opened the polemic on
the so-called other literature, the literature that did not fit into the framework of
critical and socialist realism.26
The second camp was that of the national Bolsheviks and neo-Stalinists, uniting
critics who spoke out in favor of the preservation or reinstitution of the communist
system or, at least, in favor of an authoritarian state-planned economy, party control,
and, consequently, a centralized policy in the field of culture. In 1987–1989 the liter-
ary critics and functionaries who belonged to this group, such as Aleksandr Baigu-
shev or Pavel Gorelov, raised objections to the “rehabilitation” of repressed writers,
contrasting them with the representatives of “secretaries’ literature,” that is, Alek-
sandr Prokhanov, Iurii Bondarev, and Georgii Markov.27 The neo-Stalinists called
for the reinstitution of socialist realism, although they allowed for a possible expan-
sion of its principles, which would be necessary for the integration into the literary
system of authors whose work had reached the reader as a result of the relaxation and
subsequent abolition of censorship.
The third camp was that of the conservatives and neo-Slavophiles who were
striving for political and spiritual renewal based on the abolition of Marxism-
Leninism and a return to Russian patriarchal peasant values, traditions, and forms of
morals and manners. The most important role in this process was ascribed to Rus-
sian Orthodoxy. These critics were the first to speak out in favor of the rehabilitation
of the religious philosophers, and they had been the ones who had written about
the destruction of nature as a consequence of industrialization and collectivization
in the 1970s. These critics often wrote in a sharply polemical tone. For example,
Tatiana Glushkova’s article “Kuda vedet Ariadnina nit’?” (Where Does Ariadna’s
Thread Lead?), which was directed, with a noticeable anti-Semitic note, against the
“returned” writers and poets—including Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak, and
Osip Mandelstam—once again posed the question of the interrelations between the
intelligentsia and the people.28 In his article “Vse nachalos’ s iarlykov” (It All Began
with the Labels) the critic and poet Stanislav Kuniaev drew attention to the peasant
poets, who had been subject to persecutions by the revolutionary intelligentsia—
including members of the literary avant-garde—in the 1920s–1930s and were sub-
sequently repressed. Kuniaev’s article “Radi zhizni na zemle” (For the Sake of Life
on Earth), which was directed against the young poets and also permeated by open
anti-Semitism, marked the beginning of several arguments on the need for a review
of the history of literature on the Great Patriotic War.29
The generation factor played a particular role in the cultural upheaval that was
underway.30 The critics of the older generation, commonly referred to as the Thaw
generation, made their positions clearly known. Among the best-known critics of
this generation were Lev Anninskii, Galina Belaia, Igor’ Dedkov, Renata Gal’tseva,
Vadim Kozhinov, Stanislav Kuniaev, Feliks Kuznetsov, Vladimir Lakshin, Lazar’
Lazarev, Alla Marchenko, Stanislav Rassadin, Irina Rodnianskaia, Benedikt Sarnov,
Vladimir Turbin, and Igor’ Zolotusskii. Their ideological differences notwithstand-
ing, the most important point these critics had in common was a faith in the high
social status of literature and criticism that had its roots in the Thaw era.
This was the reason for their missionary inclinations, confidence in their own
social role and expectation that their educational and moral position would provide
new impulses for the spiritual and political renewal of society. The communication
style of the representatives of the Thaw generation was characterized by “double-

think” (dvoemyslie). As Viktor Toporov observed on this point, the “Aesopian lan-
guage,” which enabled authors to express their disagreement with the prevalent
dogmas, often turned into its own opposite—the authors began to play with it and
ended up depending on their own allusions: “One must say that all this [Aesopian
language] was no conspiracy against the Soviet authorities, but rather an intricate
and risky game with them. The use of Aesopian language was art’s game with the
authorities on the authorities’ terms, obviously in the hope of being able to beat them
in their own field.”31
The common experience of the critics of the middle generation (the “people
of the seventies,” also known as the “forty-year-olds” [sorokaletnie]) was precisely
the absence of the large-scale historical events of a “heroic epoch.” Any feeling they
had of belonging to one single group was expressed much less pronouncedly than
the “men of the sixties.” (This is why these “interim” [promezhutochnye] figures were
often called a “lost” or “forgotten” generation.) The “people of the seventies” in-
clude Vladimir Bondarenko, Sergei Chuprinin, Mikhail Epshtein, Viktor Erofeev,
Aleksandr Genis, Tatiana Glushkova, Nataliia Ivanova, Vladimir Novikov, Karen
Stepanian, Viktor Toporov, and Pyotr Vail’. In the early 1980s Dedkov used the term
“forty-year-olds” when referring to a conference of Moscow writers in November
1979, and in the same article he accused them of aestheticism and mannerism, ego-
centrism and moral indiscriminateness.32 And indeed this generation exhibits a com-
mon sense of disappointment and loss of any hope in the possibility of social and
political reforms. These people became established during the period of Stagnation;
some of the “forty-year-olds” rediscovered formalism, which had begun to be reha-
bilitated in the 1960s, with considerable gains for the way in which they thought and
wrote about literature.
The third and youngest generation, called the “thirty-year-olds” or “men of
the eighties,” who started to appear regularly in print only in the mid- or even late
eighties, includes the critics Aleksandr Ageev, Aleksandr Arkhangel’skii, Pavel Ba-
sinskii, Andrei Vasilevskii, Oleg Dark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Mikhail Zolotonosov,
Andrei Zorin, Aleksandr Kazintsev, Viacheslav Kuritsyn, Mark Lipovetsky, Andrei
Nemzer, and Evgeny Shklovsky. These (at the time young) critics did not become in-
fatuated with great utopias and then disappointed or bitter about their impracticabil-
ity. When the communist system finally collapsed after there had been absolutely no
dynamic in the life of society over several decades, they saw their chances, being still
at an age where it is possible to invest all one’s strength in one’s professional activity
and development. A typical feature of these younger critics was their inner distance
to the Soviet system; many of them exhibited a certain pragmatism, some of them
an elitist consciousness.
The open conflict between the generations began in August 1991 when the com-
munist system collapsed once and for all, and with it any hopes that it could be re-
formed. One of the first to declare war on the men of the sixties was the young
philosopher and literary critic Dmitrii Galkovskii, who wrote in November 1991:
The men of the sixties walked all over their older brothers and fathers, whose
resistance was too weak and who were too few in number; the men of the sixties
devoured and defiled the golden stocks of nature, the capital of future genera-
tions: they pumped oil, annihilated woods, built hundreds of idiotic towns with-
out any sense, they sent the labor of the last generations of the Russian peasantry
up into the cosmic pipe. All this was accompanied by deafening screams, no, by
the ultrasound howl of demagogy and loud empty words, for example poetry in
stadiums, although sometimes not entirely without talent after all.33
These accusations were directed against the ideological, psychological, and aesthetic
positions of the men of the sixties.34 According to Galkovskii, they represented some
kind of “exemplars of Soviet mentality” (obraztsovyi sovok) and cultivated their own
youth that had already become an anachronism, while preserving a psychology
characterized by submission to authoritarian and imperial thinking.35 The young
critics rejected the literary model left behind by the men of the sixties because of
its pronounced tendency toward moralization and the exclusive orientation toward
allegorical forms of expression. The men of the sixties, the young generation be-
lieved, inherited this literary model, authoritarian in its essence, from socialist real-
ism, which in its own time had continued the ideological tradition of the nineteenth
century, so harmful to the aesthetic nature of art.
Discussions on the New, “Other” Literature and Postmodernism
From the viewpoint of the development of literature itself, the most important
among the multitude of debates that arose in late Soviet, and subsequently post-
Soviet, literary criticism concerned the character and values of the new or “other”
literature. This debate reflected a broad spectrum of critical positions. The abolition
of the state monopoly on ideology gave rise to the question of how this would affect
the relation of criticism to both classical literature and those canons that had only
recently been sanctioned and accepted as classical. Would the previous unified canon,
sanctioned and propagated from above, be replaced by several different canons that
would coexist and enjoy equal rights?
From 1988 onward, new works and works that previously had had no chance of
being published began to appear in print, together with the texts of the third wave
of emigration and religious philosophical works from the past. Only now did the
public find out about the literature that was standing on the other side of the “moral
appeal,” although this literature had been circulating in samizdat for many years.
And immediately the gap between literary practice and the categories of analysis and
evaluation used in criticism became obvious: both the principles and norms of social-
ist realism and the evaluation criteria that were typical of critical realism and had
been borrowed from classical Russian literature turned out to be unsuitable. Crit-
ics began to speak about the crisis of contemporary literature.36 At the same time
the increasing number of publications of “other” literature signaled a comparatively
more significant occurrence than both “returned” literature and the late Soviet liter-
ature that had filled the pages of the “thick” journals in the first years of perestroika.
Both the established journals and the newly founded periodicals that had never suc-
cumbed to conformity published materials relating to the debate on new literature,
in which émigré or recently emigrated critics participated together with the authors
of “other” prose themselves.37 Thus completely unusual phenomena found their way
into the field of vision of literary criticism.
The appreciation of the “other,” new literature presented the critics with a dif-
ferent kind of task: it had to clearly define the object it was dealing with. No longer
was criticism required to devise new interpretations of works that had been written
long ago, corresponding to the needs of the present day. Now it had to provide an
initial interpretation and evaluation of fresh and exceptional works. Criticism now
strove to become a factor that influenced the formation of readership opinion and an
important reference point for literary studies. With the description and classification
of new literature the multilayered term postmodernism that had emerged and devel-
oped in the context of Western culture, gained currency. So the questions arise: Did
something change in the discourse of literary criticism? Were the generally accepted
arguments and categories, marked by old, that is, Soviet or nineteenth century,
beliefs and evaluation criteria, replaced by new, broader approaches to the under-
standing of literature? Can one speak of a paradigm shift in literary criticism? This
discussion extended to all genres of criticism, from the newspaper “duel articles”
(stat’i-poedinki) to the voluminous scholarly analytical articles in the “thick” journals.
Its characteristics included heightened emotionality, a sharply polemical tone, and an
oddly confused categorical apparatus and language.
The first critics to write about new literature and present some detailed analyses
were Mikhail Epshtein, Mark Lipovetsky, and Sergei Chuprinin.38 Chuprinin, one
of the most prominent critics of the perestroika time, member of the “forty-year-
olds” generation, and deputy editor in chief of the journal Znamia, was the first to
introduce the reading public to the work of several young prose writers in Febru-
ary 1989, in Literaturnaia gazeta, coining the term other prose and accepting it as an
independent literary phenomenon.39 Chuprinin formulated the concept of other
literature very broadly, including such authors as Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Evgeny
Popov, Venedikt Erofeev, and authors of experimental prose who had never been
published in the Soviet Union, such as Vladimir Sorokin. In his analysis he admit-
ted that many things in other prose upset his literary taste. This literature could in-
deed endanger the morals of the young: “‘Other prose’ is really often shocking, to
many people and because of many things. For example because of the scandalous
and peremptory choice of words, expressions, plots, moral judgments, [all of] which
sometimes insults our modesty.”40 His article immediately stirred up a heated debate.
Nataliia Ivanova, another leading liberal critic of the “forty-year-olds” generation
and ideologically close to the “people of the sixties,” categorized some of the other
literature as an “ethical renewal” and “self-purification from evil.”41
In any case one can say that a typical feature of most discussions on the new
or other literature was the paradigm of an extended concept of realism, stipulat-
ing that reality can be represented and that literature can and must represent it. By
proposing various names and neologisms for the new literature—“over-realism”

(sverkhrealizm), “hyper-realism” (giperrealizm), “artistic prose,” “metarealism,”
“apocalyptic realism”—new critics such as Mark Lipovetsky, Andrei Nemzer, Oleg
Dark, Pyotr Vail’, Aleksandr Genis, and Andrei Zorin objected against evaluating
this other writing within the paradigm of ideological criticism and tried to give a
better description of the new literature by using literary and aesthetic categories.42
They pointed to the removal of taboo as the main identifier, that is, the expansion
of the group of objects and phenomena that were regarded worthy of depiction, on
the level of topic and plot (when, for example, violence, eroticism, and sex came to
the forefront), on the moral level (when previously undiscussed, closed-off areas of
life, such as illness, death, scandalous, shameful, or funny situations became liter-
ary objects), but also on the level of style and speech (when literary works began
to be infused with vulgar, commonplace, scabrous vocabulary and descriptions).
However, they all agreed that other literature was based on the urge to “overcome
ideology as such,” as Evgeny Dobrenko pointed out: “The de-ideologization of reality
signifies the breakthrough to a wholly other culture, to a new, aesthetic reality. The
other culture neutralizes all languages, all ideology, and thus frees man from his slav-
ish dependence on them.”43
Since 1989 certain works pertaining to other literature have been labeled post-
modernist. This concept quickly became common currency and the subject of de-
bate. Or rather, the debates on the alleged topic of postmodernism were used for
a discussion of the qualities and traits of new or other literature. Moreover, what
was debated here was nothing more and nothing less than the state of contemporary
Russian culture or, even broader, of world culture. This is how philosophical and
culturological concepts that had been evolving in the West since the 1970s arrived on
Russian soil. In March 1991 the Moscow Literary Institute (Moskovskii Literaturnyi
Institut) hosted the conference “Postmodernizm i my” (Postmodernism and Us),
which elicited a broad response. Almost all the “thick” journals began to provide dis-
cussion material on postmodernism, which has remained a permanent feature ever
since, even in journals that had previously not permitted the publication of other lit-
erature, such as Novyi mir. At the end of 1991 some critics asked, in the preface to the
discussion “Posle postmodernizma” (After Postmodernism) in the journal Voprosy lit-
eratury, whether it was true that a new picture of the world had emerged in literature
or whether this was a case of a game of fashionable concepts.44
However, the concept of postmodernism, which was initially used in Russia
with reference to the visual arts, became widely known only through the writings
of various literary critics during 1990–1991.45 The discussions on other literature and
postmodernism had an impact on the literary and critical discourse itself, which be-
gan to display a syncretism of genres and to blur the boundary between literature and
literary criticism. Viacheslav Kuritsyn affirmed that the postmodernists followed the
examples of Sots Art: “A distinct feature of postmodernism is the tendency toward
syncretism, toward the meeting and merging of various art forms, toward a unity of
forms and genres, toward a syncretism that is not only internal—this is of secondary
importance—but, most importantly, toward a syncretism of thought.”46
The discussions about postmodernism exerted considerable influence on the re-

appraisal of Russian twentieth-century literature. Authors who belonged to different
cultural spheres and literary “ranks,” which previously had been radically opposed
to one another, suddenly found themselves in the same rank. Varlam Shalamov, who
had written about the Stalinist camps and Victor Astafiev, who had set out as a vil-
lage prose writer, were published in the same collections as the authors of the new
wave and identified as precursors of postmodernism by some critics. Igor Iarkevich,
a young prose writer and critic close to Sots Art, claimed that the real “classic of
underground culture” was Alexander Fadeev’s novel Molodaia gvardiia (The Young
Guard), ironically playing with the historical connotation of the Russian word for
underground (podpol’e) and the borrowed English term underground.47
Literary critics such as Mark Lipovetsky, Mikhail Epshtein, and Viacheslav Ku-
ritsyn, who have all written copiously on the literature of the new wave, attempted
to locate the historical roots of Russian postmodernism. While Lipovetsky, follow-
ing Boris Groys, maintained that there was an internal link between modernism,
the avant-garde, and socialist realism, Epshtein located the roots of the post–avant-
garde in the Russian tradition of “holy foolishness” (iurodstvo).48 According to him,
the avant-garde had been a “deliberate self-humiliation of art,” understood as a
“religious act.” While the avant-garde of the 1920s had chosen utopia as its basis,
it became antiutopian in the second period of its development (that is, the Sots Art
that emerged after the Thaw), smashing the idols of its former faith. Not unlike Li-
povetsky, Kuritsyn assumed that Russian modernism had “merged” with socialist
realism, which is why he used postmodernist and postsocialist as synonyms. He was
in agreement with Groys, who had claimed that postmodernism emerged through
continuity, succeeding socialist realism. The missing link for Kuritsyn was Sots Art:
“From physics we know that a closed system that does not consume energy from
the outside is doomed to entropy, chaos, degeneration, and in the same way socialist
realism over time turned into Sots Art, a parody of itself.”49
New and/or postmodernist literature highlighted how much the abyss between
various critical camps had deepened since the onset of perestroika. A larger number
of critics (not only nationally or religiously motivated fundamentalists, but liberal
“men of the sixties” as well) persisted in their stubborn rejection of postmodernism
as a whole. A minority among them was prepared to accept the existence of other
literature, describing and systematically studying it. However, even these critics pro-
ceeded from entirely different concepts of literature, which meant that their opinions
were anything but unanimous.
The opponents of postmodernism blamed other literature for the decline in cul-
ture that was underway in the country. Postmodernism’s perceived focus on negative
phenomena turned other literature into the main culprit of the moral decline and the
ever-greater disorientation with regard to values. For example, Dmitrii Urnov, the
then editor in chief of the journal Voprosy literatury, objected to Sergei Chuprinin in
the context of a polemic on the pages of Literaturnaia gazeta with an article entitled
“Plokhaia proza” (Bad Prose).50 According to him, other literature was bad, man-
nered, and unoriginal, and its popularity was only due to the fact that it had been
previously banned or difficult to access. Other than that other literature was “degen-
erate modernism . . . the thousand-fold echo of the prose of Nabokov,” something the
critic spotted, for example, in the prose of Sasha Sokolov. Venedikt Erofeev’s short
novel Moskva-Petushki received the label “awkward nonsense” (neumelaia bessmyslitsa).
Similarly, the liberal critics Karen Stepanian and Lev Anninskii accused other
literature of being hedonistic, egocentric, focused on self-realization, and superfi-
cial—a literature that aestheticized chaos. Stepanian wrote that during the period of
Stagnation it had been understandable and justified if writers refused to express their
opinions and judgments, preferring a neutral position instead, as it had been the only
way for them to avoid the ideological dictate. But in view of the dangers that hu-
manity was facing such indifference on the part of the writers seemed irresponsible
in the new situation: “To help people live is the highest goal of the writer. . . . The
lack of willingness (or ability) to provide answers . . . gives rise to such characteristic
features . . . as the absence of wholeness, completeness. The text breaks off in the
middle of the sentence because there is no general concept, no idea.”51
One noteworthy element of the discussion about other literature was the curi-
ous combination of traditional Soviet attitudes and recently acquired “anti-Soviet”
views in critical consciousness. The arguments were that postmodernism had been
“imported” from the West and was doomed to failure in the near future as it was
only represented by a sad handful of intellectuals, and anyway the phenomenon was
alien to genuine Russian culture.52 A typical example of this kind of argument, char-
acteristic of the “fundamentalist” critics, was Aleksandr Kazin’s article “Iskusstvo i
istina” (Art and Truth).53 Kazin described postmodernism as an anti-Russian model
of culture, subsuming the entire literary underground under this concept. He did not
distinguish between modernism, avant-gardism, and postmodernism—in his eyes
all these schools were importing Western issues to Russia and merely creating an
illusion of pluralism. In the absence of the preconditions for pluralism of culture—
namely the universal accessibility of culture’s material and spiritual products—lit-
erary schools like postmodernism satisfied the refined taste of an elite minority to
whose educational level they corresponded. Russia had no feeding substrate for
this and similar products of Western individualism. Undoubtedly, Kazin regarded
postmodernism as a great evil compared to the shortcomings of the Soviet model
of culture. Claiming that postmodernism was the last stage in the self-destruction
of culture, he contrasted it with socialist realism, which he considered to be at least
a serious cultural model based on values. The critic called on readers to preserve the
positive values of Russian culture: collectivism, readiness for self-denial and self-sac-
rifice, religious sentiment. Religious sentiment he discovered in the ancient culture
of monasticism and iconography, the teachings of Tolstoy, the literature of socialist
realism (citing Fadeev’s Molodaia gvardiia as an example), and finally even in the “in-
nate spirit of Soviet petty bourgeois philistine consciousness.” According to Kazin,
these traditions are based on the same features, that is, a striving for intelligibility to
the people, higher ideals, asceticism, self-sacrifice, and disregard for material well-
being. Talking about the Soviet ideal of the unity of state, writers, and people, Ka-
zin emphasised the “conciliarity” (sobornost’) that allegedly existed in the Soviet era,
even if only in a rudimentary and distorted form. In Kazin’s writing, ideologemes

borrowed from the prerevolutionary, religious philosophical heritage, taboo only
a short time ago, merged with Soviet thinking and gave rise to a new “Orthodox
Christian Marxism” on the basis of which he planned to erect a solid building of
national culture, having purged it of all things “alien.”54
Another example that illustrates the style of the fundamentalists’ polemic was
Renata Gal’tseva’s paper at the conference “Literature and Religion” in September
1991 and published in Literaturnaia gazeta under the title “Sem’ zleishikh dukhov”
(Seven Very Evil Spirits). For Gal’tseva, the literature of postmodernism was a “sa-
tanic absurdity” of the “new aliens” (novye prishel’tsy) who specialize in “criminal de-
viations” and “fabricate fear and sell it as goods, although they don’t know any fear
themselves.”
The main target of the fundamentalists’ annihilating criticism became Valeria
Narbikova; her texts were called “the gospel for perverts” (evangelie dlia izvrashchen
tsev) and declared incompatible with the spirit of Russian literature: “Literature has
always striven after something greater than the simple reflection of life; the Russian
tradition has always tried to bring truth into life in order to increase the prevalence
of the good and of beauty.”55
Most critics saw the only future for literature in the renewal of traditional real-
ism. Even Mark Lipovetsky pointed to the productivity of postmodernism for the
Russian realist tradition and, like other critics, claimed that any productive future
development of literature was only possible if it returned to its life-affirming, hope-
instilling source, that is, to an extended realist mode—a literature with both plot
and protagonists: “The relativist consciousness that has become the norm creates a
postmodern situation that is all-encompassing and that makes it essentially impos-
sible for ‘pure’ realists, such as V. Makanin, L. Petrushevskaya, and F. Gorenshtein,
to survive without using colors from the postmodernist palette. . . . I am convinced
that in the near future the most interesting findings in Russian literature are to be ex-
pected from realism, a psychological realism that has been renewed and fertilized by
the postmodernist experience but remains fundamentally traditional in its poetics.”56
One of the most zealous defenders of a radical break with tradition and the abo-
lition of all kinds of taboos in relation to both modernism and postmodernism was
Viktor Erofeev. In his choice of topics for critical articles and in his own literary
work Erofeev focused on the anomalous and the negative, committed to a radical
subjectivism that knows no limits. But in his prayers for the dying that he read, with
a good degree of cynicism, not only for Soviet literature, but for all the “great litera-
ture” of Russia and in his propensity for sacrilegious provocation that borders on the
obsessive, one can make out the voice of a disappointed romantic who deplored not
least the loss of humanist values in literature or, more broadly speaking, literature’s
function as a metaphysical instance.57
In opposition to such views some critics thought that the epoch of Russian post-
modernism signified not only the end of literature, but also its new beginning. This
was most strongly expressed by Viacheslav Kuritsyn, who stated that postmodern-
ism was the highest stage of cultural evolution: “precisely [postmodernism] is the
last and, on an intracultural scale, the most topical aesthetic stage.”58 Or: “Today
postmodernism is the most lively . . . element of contemporary culture, and among
its best images we can find a literature that is simply outstanding.”59
If the literature that had received the name other prose had not yet become in-
dependent and risen above Soviet literature, but instead perseveres in an aesthetic
protest against it, one ought to regard the literature of Sots Art, conceptualism, and
its post-Soviet followers as the only really free and, consequently, postmodern litera-
ture, Kuritsyn opined. To put it differently, the critic assumed congruence between
the aesthetically cutting edge and the most progressive cultural and social tendencies
and allocated postmodernism the first rank within the literary hierarchy of values.
The reactions to other literature and postmodernism show that the majority of
critics, regardless of worldview or their belonging to different political camps and
generations, proved unable to answer the challenge posed by new literature, as they
had no appropriate new evaluation criteria. This state of affairs worsened with the
increasing signs of crisis and collapse in literary life. Only a few critics were open
to the perception of new phenomena and studied and accepted new literature, but
even then only those works that remained within the mode of new realism and al-
lowed for the authors’ ethical points of reference to be clearly identified. It is in the
process of opposing the dominance of this approach that a number of young critics
and former literary outsiders gradually began in the late 1980s–early 1990s to lay the
foundations for a new literary criticism, distinct from late Soviet criticism through
an attitude toward literature that was free from the burden of ideological polariza-
tion and exhibited a greater focus on aspects of formal aesthetics. These critics elabo-
rated new theoretical and methodological concepts and criteria, broadened the idea
of literature itself, and opened up to Western theories and conceptions in literature.

The epoch of perestroika turned out to be critical for the system of literature
and criticism that had formed during the Soviet era. With the abolition of censor-
ship, party and ideological control, and, together with that, government support,
the entire former institution that had guaranteed the functioning of literature and
its authority became subject to disintegration and transformation. The definitions
of “literariness,” the principles and forms of literary critical analysis, interpretation
and evaluation, the system of literary communication and interaction, as well as the
circles of readers and their interests all became problematic. The phenomenon of lit-
erature (“real,” “genuine,” “high”) lost its previous certainty and the predominant
part of even the most educated Russian public switched to the consumption of liter-
ary mass genres.
The literary community became fragmented, clubs and groupings became its
main forms of association. The field of literature was increasingly marked by differ-
ent borders, which were being drawn and defended by different social and cultural
figures—fashionable “stars,” publishers, advertisers, and so on and no longer only by
literary critics, schoolteachers, and experienced librarians.
In a paradoxical way literature became independent, often against its will. But
in this process it lost a considerable amount of its institutional distinctness, while

writers and critics lost significant elements of their own collective identity, which
had previously been provided from outside—through pressure from the authorities
or loyalty to them or partial avoidance or skillful maneuver and opposition.
All these factors provided a new context for the work of literary historians,
theorists, and critics. They had to come to terms with the new situation and their
own new autonomy, to find new addressees for literary communication and ways of
interacting with them, as well as new principles for their work and foundations of
their authority, which had become rather fragile. The alternatives open to them were
either the acceptance of their notorious social marginality (some kind of a new going
underground) or a consistent cultivation and universalization of one’s own subjectiv-
ity into principled values and stances. Neither strategy was something the majority
could accept for themselves.
 THE ALTER EGO
13

ÉMIGRÉ LITERARY CRITICISM FROM
WORLD WAR II TO THE END OF THE
SOVIET UNION
CATHARINE THEIMER NEPOMNYASHCHY
The Second Wave: Preserving the Old in the New World
World War II marked a watershed in the history of the Russian emigration and
fundamentally altered the conditions and institutions that gave shape to its intellec-
tual life. The conflict brought a second wave of emigration from Russia. Consider-
ably smaller than the first, postrevolutionary wave, the second wave was made up of
displaced people separated from their predecessors by decades of Soviet experience
and, as a rule, less well educated and cosmopolitan. As the American historian of
the emigration John Glad has put it: “While the second wave included a number
of intellectuals, this group did not possess the ‘critical mass’ essential to maintain
a cultural tradition abroad on the scale of either its predecessors or its successors in
exile.”1 Members of the second wave were nonetheless among the first to begin the
process of reestablishing émigré publishing in postwar Europe, notably the creation
in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Meyerhoff in 1945 of the publishing house Posev
and the periodicals Posev and Grani.2
More significantly for the history of émigré literary criticism though, the war
shifted the center of gravity of the emigration westward, to the United States as first-
wave émigrés fled the European cataclysm. They were, of course, part and parcel of a
larger flow of refugees from Europe, including some of the leading thinkers of their
time. Thanks to this influx of displaced talent, postwar America, flush from victory
269
270  CATHARINE THEIMER NEPOMNYASHCHY
on the world stage, was an extraordinary intellectual melting pot. The years fol-
lowing the war, moreover, witnessed the emergence of Soviet studies and the rapid
growth of American universities. Demand for specialists in Russian language and
literature in the academy was further fed by the onset of the Cold War and the es-
calating arms race. While only a handful of educational institutions in the United
States had taught Russian language and literature before the war, Russian émigrés
would play a major role in the rapid expansion of Russian and Soviet studies in the
1950s and 1960s and in shaping the education of the first large generation of Ameri-
can Slavic scholars.
Emblematic of the emigration’s move to the West was the founding of Novyi
zhurnal in New York in 1942 by Mark Aldanov and Mikhail Zeitlin.3 The journal
represented a direct link with the prewar émigré tradition in that, as its title was
meant to suggest, it was conceived as a new beginning in the New World for the
longest lived of the first-wave émigré journals, Sovremennye zapiski. In fact Novyi
zhurnal, which remains in existence to the present day, would go on to outstrip its
forerunner, surviving longer than any other émigré journal. The journal’s editors
remained true to the mission of its predecessor, and of mainstream prewar émigré
journals and criticism as a whole, to preserve what they considered to be genuine
Russian culture, its values and its texts, from the destruction and betrayal they were
perceived to have undergone in the Soviet Union. The journal’s approach to literary
criticism was thus conservative and largely isolated from Western literary critical
and theoretical trends.
Writing at the beginning of the 1970s, the first-wave émigré Roman Gul’, edi-
tor of Novyi zhurnal from 1966 to his death in 1986 and himself a prolific literary
critic, divided the history of the journal up into four periods—from the founding
of the journal to the end of World War II, from the end of the war to the Thaw,
from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, and from the mid-1960s into the 1970s. The
latter three of these periods arguably serve as an effective outline of the evolution
of Russian émigré culture as a whole during the postwar period, which witnessed
the gradual fading of the aging and passing first wave and the appearance of the first
harbingers of the third wave. With the cessation of hostilities in Europe, the journal
reestablished contact with émigré cultural figures who had remained in Europe and
published critical articles, memoirs, and documentary materials by and about major
literary figures of the prerevolutionary period and the first wave of emigration, in-
cluding Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Veidle, Zinaida Gippius, Boris Zaitsev, and Marina
Tsvetaeva. The later periods outlined by Gul’ brought an increasing turn away from
the isolation of emigration to a more active interest in literary events in the USSR,
culminating in a further émigré period, unforeseen by Gul’: the return of émigré
literature and criticism to the Soviet Union during glasnost.
The Cultural Intermediaries Jakobson and Nabokov
While Novyi zhurnal existed of and for the Russian diaspora, some of the lead-
ing lights of the Russian emigration in the postwar United States found themselves
THE ALTER EGO  271
at the center of the intellectual and literary life of their new home country and in-
clined more and more toward an American audience. The two towering, although
very different, figures in this respect were Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Nabokov,
both of whom held teaching positions at major American universities and soon be-
gan publishing in English.4 Although this chapter is concerned primarily with liter-
ary criticism, both Jakobson’s and Nabokov’s outstanding achievements as theorists,
scholars, and commentators deserve a brief discussion.
Jakobson represented a true living link to the short-lived flowering of Russian
formalism and incipient structuralism in Russia in the years immediately preceding
and following the Russian Revolution in 1917, the legacy of which he brought to the
United States by way of the Prague Linguistic Circle, which he was instrumental in
founding after his emigration from Russia. Despite the fact that Jakobson had al-
ready played pivotal roles in two of the most important moments in the evolution of
literary theory in the twentieth century, it was in the United States—where, while
teaching in New York, he encountered fellow refugee Claude Levi-Strauss and,
later, during his time at Harvard, also the revolutionary linguist Noam Chomsky—
that Jakobson wrote some of his most influential literary theoretical works. His best-
known articles in this context are “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of
Aphasic Disturbances” (1956) and “Linguistics and Poetics” (1960). Both articles are
founded on and amplify the fundamental premises of Jakobsonian structuralism, an
approach heavily indebted to Saussurian linguistics and deeply committed to the in-
terdependence of the study of language and literature.
Nor can Jakobson’s role in the history of Slavic studies in the United States be
underestimated. He made a number of very significant contributions to the study of
Slavic literature specifically during the United States period of his career. Notable in
this respect was the edition of Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Lay of the Host of Igor) that
Jakobson produced in collaboration with the émigré historian and Cornell professor
Marc Szeftel, which includes Jakobson’s argument in refutation of the French scholar
André Mazon’s contention that the work was a forgery.5
Vladimir Nabokov’s contribution in the context of the history of literary criti-
cism was, of course, of a very different order from that of Jakobson and dates primar-
ily to the early years after his move to the United States, before the financial success
of Lolita and his subsequent works allowed him to retire from teaching to his retreat
in Switzerland. Nabokov’s role in this context was above all that of a translator in the
broadest sense of the word, and it was focused in those intense years of activity in the
early 1950s when Nabokov was simultaneously teaching Russian and Western lit-
erature at Cornell University and working on his translation of and notes to Eugene
Onegin and completing work on Lolita, all projects that in different ways addressed
the liminal status of the émigré between languages and cultures. Probably his most
telling works in this respect were three articles all of which were, in a large sense,
appendages to the Onegin project: the “Notes on Prosody,” “On Translation,” and
“Abram Gannibal,” which should be read together with his magisterial notes on his
translation of Pushkin’s novel in verse. What is perhaps most characteristic of these
works is the way in which Nabokov’s literary scholarship feeds off a tension between
poetry and pedantry. The following passage from “Notes on Prosody,” certainly
Nabokov’s driest scholarly effort, offers a case in point:
As with all modulations in iambic meter, the beauty of tilt, especially of duplex
tilt, which is such an admirable and natural feature of English iambic pentameter,
and gives such allure to the rare lines in which Russian poets use it, lies in a
certain teasing quality of rhythm, in the tentative emergence of an intonation
that seems in total opposition to the dominant meter, but actually owes its subtle
magic to the balance it tends to achieve between yielding and not yielding—
yielding to the meter and still preserving its accentual voice.6
A distinguished cohort of other Russian and East European émigré figures, al-
though less well known to the larger public, made substantial contributions to the
growth of Slavic studies in the United States and, specifically, to creating and medi-
ating a canon of Russian literature for the American audience. Notable in this respect
were Victor Erlich, Marc Slonim, Gleb Struve, and Vladimir Markov.7 For decades
a pillar of the Yale University Department of Slavic Languages, Victor Erlich wrote
the classic volume, Russian Formalism, which remains the definitive work on the his-
tory and conceptual foundations of the formalist movement. Marc Slonim and Gleb
Struve published what were among the earliest English-language histories of Soviet
literature, and Struve’s Russkaia literatura v izgnanii (1956) remains an authoritative
source on the history of Russian émigré literature before World War II. UCLA pro-
fessor Vladimir Markov’s dual-language (parallel Russian and English texts) Modern
Russian Poetry: An Anthology with Verse Translations, including Markov’s invaluable in-
troduction, unquestionably broadened the scope of Russian poetry studied by West-
ern Slavists, as did his pathbreaking history of Russian futurism.
In evaluating the legacy of this generation of émigré scholars and critics as cul-
tural intermediaries it is essential to remember the political climate in which they
were operating. The Cold War, especially during the McCarthy years, politicized
interest in all things Russian. While it is understandable that émigré writers and pe-
riodicals tended to take decisive political stances against the Soviet system, it is no
less true that émigré academics played an essential role in keeping the study of Rus-
sian literature above the political fray, as well as reclaiming and giving due attention
to writers whose names had been relegated to oblivion in the Soviet Union of the
time.
The Thaw and Tamizdat
The dramatic changes that took place within the Soviet Union during the
Khrushchev years altered the landscape of émigré criticism. On the one hand, as
the official literary process in the USSR showed new signs of life during the Thaw,
émigré critics understandably turned their attention to works being published in the
metropolis to an extent that had not been the case during the Stalin years, when,
viewed from the émigré West, official Soviet culture appeared to be a wasteland un-
worthy of serious aesthetic consideration. On the other hand, literary works written
in the Soviet Union but unpublishable there began appearing in the West. Émigré
critics and journals played a key role in the appearance and reception of tamizdat (lit-
erally “publication there”)—first, by publishing “uncensored” works in the original
language to be consumed both by émigré readers and by Soviet readers who received
them as contraband smuggled back over the Soviet border from abroad;8 second, by
entering into critical discussions of the aesthetic and political significance of newly
appearing works, categories that all too often became irredeemably conflated; and,
third, by introducing new Soviet talents to Western audiences.
In defining the phases of emigration outlined earlier, Gul’ observed of the sec-
ond phase: “Everything, of course, began with Doctor Zhivago, which broke a win-
dow into Europe.”9 Indeed Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the most notorious
and telling case of tamizdat publication. The role of the émigré community in the
reception of the novel must be viewed against the background of the ideologically
charged reaction in the Soviet Union and in the Western press to the appearance
of the novel in 1957 and to the subsequent award to Pasternak of the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1958. Perhaps most telling in this respect is the fact that even in
this overheated atmosphere, essays on Doctor Zhivago produced by émigré critics in
Russian for émigré publications unquestionably rank among the best early scholar-
ship on the novel. A case in point is provided by a sensitive reading of the novel by
Marc Slonim in Novyi zhurnal (1958). Slonim opens by predicting that émigré readers
and critics will be “disappointed” by the novel if they “expect from it an exposé of
communism”: “there are no attacks on the communist regime nor any obvious con-
demnation of the social and political system reigning in Russia at the present time. .
. . There are generally few polemics or responses to contemporary events. But—no
matter how paradoxical it might sound—the social significance of Doctor Zhivago
resides precisely in the fact that it is not a political novel and in that it, in essence, is
directed as much against politics as War and Peace is directed against history.10
Slonim juxtaposes Doctor Zhivago to the reigning Soviet socialist realist para-
digm for the novel, which mandated simplicity in plot construction, characteriza-
tion, and language, the eschewal of all passions but the political, and an allegiance
to what Slonim terms “naive realism”: “Doctor Zhivago is beyond this formula and
form.” In Slonim’s view, far from being a sterile “formalist,” Pasternak remains
true to life not by copying it, but by tapping it as a source of “emotions, sensations,
thoughts, which give form to an organic, intuitive, and not cerebral vision of the
world.”11
Fyodor Stepun, in an article that appeared the following year, also in Novyi
zhurnal, defended Doctor Zhivago against its critics, both Soviet and Western, on re-
lated grounds.12 Proposing that the appropriate contexts in which to read the novel
are the symbolism and idealist philosophy that dominated Pasternak’s aesthetic and
intellectual sphere in his youth, Stepun argues that Doctor Zhivago departs fundamen-
tally from the traditional Russian and European novel and that traits of the novel
that have been dismissed as artistic flaws are in fact innovations that lie at the root of
the novel’s force. They are, moreover, symptoms of what Stepun construes as Paster-
nak’s apolitical, personalist conception of history, “quite reminiscent of Berdyaev’s
historiosophic schemes with their distinction between the two planes, history and
metahistory.” While it is not surprising that Stepun, himself a professor of philoso-
phy, would cast the novel in the framework of intellectual history, his article serves
as a reminder of the often close connection between religious thought and literary
theory in the twentieth-century Russian tradition. By the same token, both Slonim
and Stepun address the most basic problem haunting émigré criticism of the period:
that, given the terms in which the function of literature and literary criticism were
cast in the USSR, even adopting an avowedly apolitical stance was almost inevitably
interpreted as a form of political opposition by Western and Soviet commentators
alike.
The Third Wave in the United States
The 1970s brought a third wave of emigration from the USSR to the West, a
generation of émigrés born and bred in the Soviet system. The emigration was pre-
dominantly made up of people claiming the right to Jewish repatriation in Israel,
although a large number of those granted exit visas from the USSR made their way
to the United States. A far smaller group allowed or forced to leave the USSR during
the Brezhnev years consisted of politically “inconvenient” writers and intellectu-
als, whose oppositionist stance to Soviet officialdom made their continued residence
in their homeland undesirable to the authorities. Perhaps the first of these was the
tamizdat author Valery Tarsis, who was permitted to travel to England only shortly
after the Sinyavsky and Daniel trial, in February 1966, and had his Soviet passport
confiscated while abroad, leaving him in exile. The next fifteen years saw such liter-
ary luminaries as Joseph Brodsky (1972), Andrei Sinyavsky (1973), Alexander Sol-
zhenitsyn (1974), Eduard Limonov (1974), Sasha Sokolov (1975), Sergei Dovlatov
(1978), Vasilii Aksenov (1980), and Vladimir Voinovich (1980) forced into emigration.
Since the émigrés who made up this exodus from the USSR were by birth, educa-
tion, and life experience products of the Soviet regime, it is not surprising that the
criticism and intellectual attention of this third wave of emigration revolved pri-
marily around cultural life within the USSR. Thus the role of the writer and the
function of literature in relation to the political life of the metropolis became a para-
mount preoccupation of émigré literary criticism of this period. At the same time,
the keen interest in the West toward Russian writers perceived as opponents of the
Soviet regime, enhanced by the often dramatic circumstances that sent major liter-
ary figures into exile, gave at least the best-known émigré writers the possibility,
largely unavailable to writers of the first two waves, of finding readerships for their
works in translation as well as serious reception from the growing cohort of profes-
sional Western Slavists. Thus, we need to view the history of third-wave literary
criticism, both the institutions and figures that most visibly represented it, in terms
of overlapping readerships: English-language readers in the West and Russian-lan-
guage readers both in the Soviet Union and in the emigration.
Periodicals and Publishers
A significant number of leading voices in émigré literature and criticism came to

take up residence in the United States.13 While a certain incompatibility in views and
experience between this Soviet, predominantly Jewish, emigration and its predeces-
sors was only to be expected, the fresh influx of Russian readers and writers gave
renewed life to such preexisting publications as Novyi zhurnal and the New York-
based newspaper Novoe russkoe slovo. Third-wave newspapers founded in the United
States include Novyi amerikanets (1981–1984, edited by Sergei Dovlatov in 1981–1982,
a period during which the critics Aleksandr Genis and Pyotr Vail’ contributed some
170 articles) and the Los Angeles-based Panorama (for which Vail’ and Genis served as
columnists from 1985–1992). Also worthy of note are the Third Wave (Tret’ia volna)
Publishing House founded in 1976 by the art collector Alexander Glezer and its jour-
nal, Strelets (1984–1999). While begun in Paris, Glezer’s operation moved with its
founder to the United States (Jersey City, New Jersey) in 1980 and continued opera-
tions there until moving to Moscow in 1992 after the collapse of the USSR.
Given the greater importance of Western audiences to the critical context of
the third wave, it is fitting to acknowledge the unprecedented and exceptional role
played in creating, disseminating, and shaping critical reception of the émigré liter-
ary canon by Ardis Publishers, founded in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by the
American Slavists Carl and Ellendea Proffer. Launched as a home-based, “cottage”
enterprise, by the mid-1980s Ardis had grown into “the largest publisher of Russian
literature in the original and in English translation outside the Soviet Union.”14 Aside
from publishing hundreds of works of Russian literature and literary criticism, Ardis
also produced the journal Russian Literature Triquarterly (RLT), of which twenty-four
issues in all appeared in 1971–1991. The exposition of editorial purpose that appeared
in the first issue of RLT serves as a fitting policy statement for the Ardis enterprise as a
whole: “We will not publish articles on literary politics or similar cold-war criticism
of either the American or Soviet variety. This is a literary journal, not a political one.
It is unique for our field in that it is a private publication with no institutional back-
ing or affiliation. The contents reflect the tastes of the editors, the needs of English-
speaking readers, and chance.”15
True to its stated mission, Ardis and RLT published works by nineteenth-cen-
tury classics along with those by Silver Age poets, by neglected or repressed Soviet
writers, and by Russian émigrés from the 1920s to the contemporary period. Ar-
dis (which drew its name from the family estate, Ardis, in Nabokov’s novel, Ada,
or Ardor: A Family Chronicle) became Nabokov’s Russian-language publisher, as well
as publishing the books of third-wave writers, such as Aksenov, Yuz Aleshkovsky,
Andrei Amalrik, Brodsky, Voinovch, Anatoly Gladilin, Dovlatov, Igor Efimov, Li-
monov, and Sokolov.16 Ardis, in fact, has been credited with having “discovered”
Aleshkovsky, Dovlatov, and Sokolov, among others.17 While the vast majority of
literary critical works published by Ardis and RLT were authored by American
scholars of Russian literature, these publications played an important role in medi-
ating the reception of émigré literature with the American reading public. Critical
works by émigrés may have been fewer in number, but were nonetheless notable.
Among the press’s publications were Anatoly Gladilin’s incisive memoir of Soviet
literary politics, The Making and Unmaking of a Soviet Writer (1979), Vladimir Paper-
nyi’s Kul’tura “dva”: Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1932–1954 (1985; English translation 2002
as Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two), and 60-e: Mir sovetskogo cheloveka (The
1960s: The World of Soviet Man; 1988) by Pyotr Vail’ and Aleksandr Genis, the lat-
ter two works in particular reflecting the increasing interest in cultural studies and
transdisciplinary theory of a new generation of literary scholars.
While Ardis, in terms of personnel, was largely made up of Americans, there
was significant involvement by émigrés as well, notably Igor Efimov, whose Hermit-
age Publishers, which began its life in Ann Arbor and then moved to New Jersey and
later to Pennsylvania, may with some justice be seen as a spin-off of Ardis. Like Ar-
dis, it published works by both émigré and Soviet authors, including the first collec-
tions of poetry by Lev Losev and Irina Ratushinskaya, as well as scholarly criticism.
From the point of view of the history of literary criticism in emigration, Hermitage
deserves particular note for publishing Vail’ and Genis’s books, Sovremennaia russkaia
proza (Contemporary Russian Prose, 1982) and Rodnaia rech’ (Native Speech, 1990).
This uncommonly gifted duo stood at the forefront of an emerging generation of
émigré critics and occupied a unique position in their ranks.18
Vail’ and Genis first began their coauthorship in 1976 while working as journal-
ists in Latvia and continued it after their emigration to New York (Genis in 1977 and
Vail’ in 1978) until 1990, when they decided to go their own separate ways. In the
course of their collaboration, their freewheeling essay style radically challenged the
line between criticism and literature. The essays collected in the volume Sovremen
naia russkaia proza—largely devoted to evocations of the works of major authors,
both Soviet and émigré—track what the authors see as a new direction in Russian
literature in the 1970s, as the authors state from the outset: “Ever more frequently
disbelief in the possibility of positive change, skepticism, pessimism came to replace
the civic zeal of the liberal ’60s. Correspondingly the character of literature changed:
antiheroes began to edge out the positive ideal, thematics distanced themselves from
real life, form became more complex. This remarkable phenomenon—Russian liter-
ary decadence of the ’70s—is the object of the present book.” They devoted their first
chapter to Solzhenitsyn, only to conclude that: “Contemporary Russian literature is
developing not under the influence of Solzhenitsyn. His method, constructed on the
pathos of the positive ideal, his archaic, often artificial language, his system of images
extremist in its expressivity—all of this has proven to be unproductive.”19
In Rodnaia rech’ Vail’ and Genis play out this position in the very structure and
texture of their prose, mimicking the form of a conventional Soviet school textbook
containing essays on the very canonic prerevolutionary writers who would be cov-
ered in such a text, but in whimsical, parodically playful terms. The words of one
reviewer give a sense of the work’s ambivalent reception: “This project of reread-
ing the cornerstone texts of the Russian tradition, of restoring the writerly status of
the currently readerly texts cannot but appeal to a student of Russian culture. At the
same time one must not fail to recognize the potential danger of such an approach.
By surrendering to their own frivolous game of interpretations . . . , Vajl’ and Genis

sacrifice—more often than not—well-argumented presentation in favor of rhetoric
for rhetoric’s sake.”20
Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky
Of course the two towering literary figures of the third wave in the United
States were the Nobel Prize winners Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky,
both of whom wrote works that simultaneously made important contributions to
the émigré critical tradition, while at the same time illuminating the aesthetic un-
derpinnings of their own artistic practices. Aside from his controversial literary
memoir, Bodalsia telenok s dubom (The Oak and the Calf )—for which he was accused of
ingratitude because of his less than flattering portrayal of Novyi mir editor Alexander
Tvardovsky21—Solzhenitsyn authored two substantive literary critical articles while
in emigration. I will focus on one of the two here and return to the other later in this
chapter.
In his article published in English in the New York Times Book Review under the
title, “The Relentless Cult of Novelty and How It Wrecked the Century,”22 Sol-
zhenitsyn addresses a fundamental issue of his own view of art: the problem of
innovation versus tradition. Accepting from the outset the uniqueness of artistic
creativity, Solzhenitsyn nonetheless cautions: “At the same time the artist must not
forget that creative freedom can be dangerous, for the fewer artistic limitations he im-
poses on his own work, the less chance he has for artistic success. The loss of a re-
sponsible organizing force weakens or even ruins the structure, the meaning and the
ultimate value of a work of art” (“Relentless Cult of Novelty,” 3). Inveighing against
postmodernism as a symptom of a world historical crisis, as a latter-day revolution-
ary avant-gardism that implicitly threatens to bring another destructive revolution,
Solzhenitsyn contends that: “This relentless cult of novelty, with its assertion that art
need not be good or pure, just so long as it is new, newer, and newer still, conceals an
unyielding and long-sustained attempt to undermine, ridicule, and uproot all moral
precepts” (3). Solzhenitsyn’s equation of aesthetic avant-gardism with political revo-
lution, of stylistic play with a failure of civic responsibility, not only harks back to
the traditional role of the Russian writer as a prophet for his time, but also to the
deep polarization of émigré criticism between two competing aesthetic stances, a
point to which we shall return shortly.
Joseph Brodsky’s place in the history of émigré literary criticism must be
viewed within the context of the fact that, like Nabokov, he came to adopt the lan-
guage of his new country and wrote many of his critical essays in English and, argu-
ably, primarily for the English-language public. If Solzhenitsyn spoke to the West as
something of a prophet of doom from the East, Brodsky, a poet of intimate and mul-
tilayered voice who openly acknowledged his affinities to the world poetic tradition
and to British and American poets in particular, largely remained above the émi-
gré political fray and, as his appointment to the post of Poet Laureate of the United
States in 1991 testifies, established himself as a force in American belles lettres.
Brodsky’s Nobel lecture in 1987 adumbrated themes that would recur in his es-
says published in the collections Less Than One (1986) and On Grief and Reason (1995).
There he suggests that the mode of the poet in conceiving and writing about litera-
ture is not that of a theoretician: “A man of my occupation seldom claims a system-
atic mode of thinking.”23 There also he postulates that “language and, presumably,
literature are things that are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form
of social organization” and that a poet “is language’s means toward the continuation
of its existence” (“Uncommon Visage,” 47, 56).24 Yet if language is the poet’s mode
of being (and vice versa), it is the equation of ethics and aesthetics that determines the
poet’s calling to the realm of privacy, intimacy, and individuality:
For aesthetics is the mother of ethics. The categories of “good” and “bad” are,
first and foremost, aesthetic ones. . . .
Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic experience is
always a private one. Every new aesthetic reality makes one’s experience even
more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary (or
some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then a form of
defense against enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly literary taste, is
less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to
any version of political demagogy. (49)
The imprint of the experience of exile is arguably discernible in Brodsky’s essays
in his preoccupation—which tellingly he shares with Nabokov—with the relation-
ship between space and time. In the essay “Flight from Byzantium,” a meditation on
his visit to Istanbul, written in Greece (which is for Brodsky the indisputable point of
origin of Western civilization) after he has fled “from Byzantium,” Brodsky lays out a
paradigm for the complex intersection of his own corporeal and poetic emigration.25
He suggests that the Emperor Constantine, moving to the East to found the “Second
Rome,” exemplifies the “linear principle” (“Flight to Byzantium,” 429) that implic-
itly drives tyrants to “the delirium and horror of the East” (403) and in time moves
north to the Third Rome, Muscovy. The Eastern ornament—“the dependence of
this ornament on the length of the line”—exemplifies the occupation of space, while
ornamentation in the West is temporal (433). Brodsky, for his part, maintains that
“space to me is, indeed, both lesser and less dear than time” because “an awareness of
time is a profoundly individualistic experience” (435).26 So, while Constantine con-
quered and was conquered by the East, Brodsky fled to the West, from space to time,
perhaps finding poetic reconciliation in the transformation through estrangement
of space into place, into “an imagined city,” like his admired Constantine Cavafy’s
Alexandria.27 In the essay on his native city of St. Petersburg, formerly Petrograd
(1914–1924) and Leningrad (1924–1991), “A Guide to a Renamed City,” Brodsky pos-
tulates the transformed city as a metaphor for poetic emigration at the intersection
between place and time: “If it’s true that every writer has to estrange himself from
his experience to be able to comment upon it, then the city, by rendering this alienat-
ing service, saved them the trip.”28 Emigration is thus the very medium of the writer.
Yet, by the cosmopolitan choice of poets about whom he writes—ranging from Osip
Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Tsvetaeva to Cavafy and W. H. Auden—Brod-

sky claims the poet’s home in world culture and, by implication, a privileged yet
respectful position as intermediary between East and West.
Kontinent, Sintaksis, and the Battle for Russian Literature
While, as we have seen, émigrés and publishing enterprises housed in the

United States made a rich contribution to the critical culture of this generation, the
third wave was defined above all by the periodicals it created. Periodical publications
sprang up in various centers of emigration, notably, for instance, the literary journal
Vremya i my in Israel, and older publications—like the newspaper Russkaia mysl’ in
Paris and the journals published by Grani and Posev in Germany—adapted to the
new situation posed by the flood of émigré literati. No matter where they lived, the
majority of writers and critics published internationally. Yet probably the most dra-
matic defining trait of third-wave literary criticism for the émigré audience was its
contentious polarity, its often vituperative polemics between diametrically opposed
aesthetic and political positions. Viewed in this light, the intellectual center of the
third wave came to reside first and foremost in Western Europe, specifically in the
journals Kontinent and Sintaksis.
What remains to the present day the most prominent “thick” journal (although
smaller in format than the traditional “thick” journal), which describes itself as a
“literary, sociopolitical and religious” journal, brought into existence by the third
wave is the journal Kontinent. Founded in 1974 with the writer Vladimir Maksimov
as editor in chief, Kontinent began as an ambitiously ecumenical enterprise, includ-
ing major Western writers and intellectuals as well as such prominent émigrés as
Andrei Sinyavsky, Viktor Nekrasov, and Alexander Galich on its editorial board.
Andrei Sakharov was the only member of the board residing in Russia. Although
Solzhenitsyn was not listed officially as a member of the board, he published in the
first issues, and the journal remained “in the Solzhenitsyn camp.”29 The journal in
its inaugural issue—containing contributions from Solzhenitsyn, Eugène Ionesco,
Andrei Sakharov, Brodsky, Milovan Dzhilas, Sinyavsky, and art historian Igor’ Go-
lomshtok, among others—presented the emigration as a united front ranged against
the Soviet adversary. The journal announced as its basic premises four uncompro-
mising guiding principles: “1. UNCONDITIONAL RELIGIOUS IDEALISM;
2. UNCONDITIONAL ANTITOTALITARIANISM; 3. UNCONDITIONAL
DEMOCRATISM; 4. UNCONDITIONAL ANTIFACTIONALISM.”30 The
very title, “continent,” invoked a unified pan-European coalition: “we strive to cre-
ate around ourselves a united CONTINENT of all the forces of antitotalitarianism
in the spiritual struggle for human freedom and dignity. Moreover, we in Eastern
and Western Europe, are two halves of a single CONTINENT, and we must listen
to and understand one another before it is too late” (“Ot redaktsii,” 5–6). It is perhaps
not surprising that a unified front proclaimed in such absolutist terms would prove
too fragile to hold together for long. Nor is it surprising that a journal adopting from
the outset such a strong religious and political stance would end up distinguishing
itself in the literary sphere more by the quality of the works of fiction and poetry
it published than by its generally traditionalist and tendentious literary criticism.
Many issues of the journal in fact lacked a critical section altogether.
Already by 1978 the tenuous unity of the emigration, putatively heralded by the
appearance of the first issues of Kontinent, had shattered. Sinyavsky resigned from the
editorial board of the journal and, with his wife Mar’ya Rozanova as editor, founded
the journal Sintaksis, named after the first samizdat literary journal published by
Aleksandr Ginzburg in the early 1960s. In Sintaksis Sinyavsky continued to write
articles elaborating his conception of the nature of literary creation as well as deeply
engaged essays on the politics of émigré culture, tending to publish the former under
his pseudonym Abram Tertz and the latter under his own name.31 Sinyavsky also
published important works of literary scholarship with the publishing house Sintak-
sis that was run, like the journal of the same name, by Rozanova out of the couple’s
home in a Paris suburb. Originally conceived as a forum for Sinyavsky’s own writ-
ings, somewhat on the model of Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, from the start the
journal Sintaksis, like Rozanova’s publishing enterprise, printed not only Sinyavsky,
but works by others—whether they resided in emigration or in the USSR—who felt
excluded or alienated by what they perceived to be the mainstream tendency toward
ideologically charged realism and/or nationalist rhetoric. Among those important
émigré literary commentators who published in Sintaksis were Efim Etkind, Igor’
Golomshtok, Vail’ and Genis, and Boris Groys.32
In the polemics that raged primarily between Kontinent and Sintaksis, the con-
ception of literature and literary language elaborated by Sinyavsky and like-minded
contributors to Rozanova’s journal was fundamentally antithetical to the realist aes-
thetic espoused not only in the Soviet Union (under the guise of socialist realism),
but also by the mainstream of the emigration clustered around Maksimov’s Kontinent
and the followers of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. At the heart of what became a bitter
public dispute, ostensibly literary but with inescapable political implications, stood
the assumption on the part of the Maksimov and Solzhenitsyn camp of a rigid con-
tinuity between language, self, and nation. The fundamental ethical-aesthetic rift
between the two journals blew up in a particularly revelatory fashion in the reaction
to the publication of Sinyavsky’s Progulki s Pushkinym (Strolls with Pushkin) in the same
year in which Sintaksis was founded. At the bottom of the scandal was Sinyavsky’s
conception of literature, which I examine in the following section.
Andrei Sinyavsky, Abram Tertz, and the Power of Metaphor
Whatever controversy greeted the publications of Andrei Sinyavsky, alias

Abram Tertz, he was without question a foremost literary scholar of the third wave
of emigration. Sinyavsky had published noteworthy articles and books of literary
criticism and scholarship while still in the Soviet Union, but those works, although
constituting attempts to expand the bounds of the permissible in official Soviet cul-
ture, inevitably had to adapt to the obtaining rules of discourse and methodology.
Sinyavsky’s émigré works, liberated from restrictions imposed by the watchful
eye of the Soviet censorship, develop the transgressive approach to literature ear-
lier given form in his tamizdat works published in the West under the pseudonym
Abram Tertz and in two works he wrote while imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp:
Progulki s Pushkinym (Strolls with Pushkin) and V teni Gogolia (In the Shadow of Gogol).
Strolls with Pushkin and In the Shadow of Gogol stake out the territory of what Sin-
yavsky termed “fantastic literary scholarship” ( fantasticheskoe literaturovedenie), under
which rubric his most significant émigré essays on literature most properly belong.
The entire concept harked back to Sinyavsky’s famous call for a “phantasmagoric
literature with hypotheses in place of a purpose” in the concluding paragraphs of his
first Abram Tertz tamizdat essay, “What Is Socialist Realism?” Since both the Push-
kin and the Gogol works, in a sense, emigrated with Sinyavsky in that they appeared
in print only in emigration and, more important, since they present an aesthetic and
theoretical continuum with Sinyavsky’s émigré works, I include a brief consider-
ation of them in this chapter.
Strolls with Pushkin and In the Shadow of Gogol, like most of Sinyavsky’s émigré
works, blur the line between literature and metaliterature to a much more pro-
nounced extent than did his earlier works. Riffing on Jakobson, let me suggest that
while most writing about literature is predominantly metonymic, most postreal-
ist literature, whether poetry or prose, favors the metaphoric pole, and Sinyavsky’s
Pushkin and Gogol books are built virtually entirely on the play of metaphor,
rather than on the conventions of traditional “contiguous” scholarly discourse. In
constructing his works according to a logic of metaphorical association, Sinyavsky
deploys a fundamentally transgressive strategy to reclaim the “fathers” of Russian
literature—and their readers—from the stultifying officialese of establishment liter-
ary scholarship.
Sinyavsky’s book-length studies written in emigration were compiled in col-
laboration with Mar’ya Rozanova from Sinyavsky’s lectures at the Sorbonne. While
his camp works seek to rescue the mythic progenitors of modern Russian literature
from the numbing weight of their canonic status, his book on Vasilii Rozanov,
“Opavshie list’ia” V. V. Rozanova (V. V. Rozanov’s “Fallen Leaves”), tellingly attrib-
uted to the staid Professor Sinyavsky rather than to the renegade Abram Tertz, serves
as an eloquent apologia for one of Russian modernism’s most eccentric authors. Sin-
yavsky to some extent finds a precursor for his own transgressive approach to litera-
ture, embodied in the thief Abram Tertz, in Rozanov’s fragmentary, aphoristic, and
contradictory texts. In Ivan-durak: Ocherk russkoi narodnoi very (Ivan the Fool: An Es-
say on Russian Popular Belief; 1991), on the other hand, Sinyavsky, again publishing
under his own name, expounds on the archetypal character of the Russian folktale,
revisiting the relationship between life and art and the magical power of the word.
Also during his émigré period, Sinyavsky published a number of important ar-
ticles on literature—often under the Tertz pseudonym and primarily in Sintaksis.
These articles have yet to receive the attention they merit; here, I focus on what I
believe to be two of the most important of these essays, especially as surveyed within
the context of the not so delicate balance between literature and politics in the third
wave of emigration. As it happens, these two essays frame Sinyavsky’s émigré writ-
ings in that they constitute his earliest article published in emigration and the final
essay published in his lifetime.
“Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii” (The Literary Process in Russia), the writer’s
first major literary critical publication in emigration, appeared in the inaugural issue
of Kontinent only shortly after Sinyavsky’s emigration from the USSR. Although in
the intervening years the article has received less critical consideration than has that
author’s seminal tamizdat essay, “What Is Socialist Realism?” “Literaturnyi protsess
v Rossii” is arguably no less insightful nor is it less important to the history of Rus-
sian literary criticism than the earlier essay. Sinyavsky published the article under
the Tertz pen name, borrowed from a legendary Jewish thief from Odessa. After the
author’s emigration to France, the pseudonym served no longer as a mask but rather
as an emblem of Sinyavsky’s aesthetic theoretical stance. Not only does Sinyavsky
structure “Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii” around the metaphors of the writer as
criminal and Jew (the latter of which was to become, as we shall see, the most vexed
metaphor for the writer and intellectual in third-wave émigré criticism), but in so
doing he for the first time articulates the centrality of these metaphors to his concep-
tion of what he terms “the literary process.” Asserting from the outset that all true
literature is forbidden, criminal, Sinyavsky (Tertz) goes on to develop the metaphor
of the writer as pariah, scapegoat for all of Russia’s ills: “The Jew is an objectification
of Russia’s original sin, of which it constantly tries to purge itself and cannot.” He
concludes: “Every writer of Russian (origin) who does not want at the present time
to write by decree is a Jew. He is a monster and an enemy of the people. I think that
if now (finally) they were to begin to slaughter Jews in Russia, first of all they would
massacre writers, members of the intelligentsia not of Jewish origin, who somehow
do not fall under the rubric of ‘one of us.’” These metaphors of the writer as criminal
and Jew, as deployed by Sinyavsky, give shape to an understanding of literature fun-
damentally antithetical not only to Soviet “aesthetics,” but, as it turned out, to the
prevailing émigré aesthetic as well.
The Scandals over Strolls with Pushkin
Mar’ya Rozanova has remarked in a private conversation with me that “the

emigration is a drop of blood taken for analysis from the motherland,” affirming the
essential continuity, already noted in this chapter, between émigré and Soviet cul-
tural reflexes. The similar reaction provoked by the publication of Strolls with Pushkin
in emigration in 1975 and by the appearance of a brief excerpt from the work in the
Soviet Union more than a decade later would seem to validate her observation. More
important from the point of view of the present study, opponents of Sinyavsky’s
work, as well as its defenders, wrote what must be considered landmark works for an
understanding of the history of émigré criticism and its relationship to the underly-
ing assumptions uniting it with writing on literature in the Soviet Union.33
Notably, the two critical assaults on Strolls most worthy of our attention here
were launched by prominent members of the first and third waves of emigration
respectively, suggesting that shared aesthetic assumptions crossed generational as
well as geographical and ideological boundaries. “Progulki khama s Pushkinym” (A

Boor’s Strolls with Pushkin) by Roman Gul’, appeared in Novyi zhurnal (with Gul’
as editor of the journal) in 1976. The title plays on the homonymic relationship be-
tween the Russian word for “boor” (kham) and the biblical Ham, who gazed on and
failed to conceal his father’s nakedness. The gist of the argument in the article is that
Sinyavsky in Strolls with Pushkin has in a vulgar fashion violated the necessary de-
corum of literary language, threatening the very foundations of civilization: “I am
not using the term kham in an abusive sense,” writes Gul’. “That would be unwor-
thy. I am using it in the biblical sense—as the cynicism of man and mockery of that
which in human society should not be mocked if society does not want to turn into
a herd of orangutans.”34 Resonating with Sinyavsky’s own oft reiterated refrain that
his differences with both the Soviet authorities and the émigré cultural establishment
were “stylistic,” Gul’ makes it clear in the course of his argument that what he finds
unsettling, even dangerous about Strolls is what he considers its inappropriate use of
purportedly vulgar language, a symptom for Gul’ of the general degeneration or
“boorification” of Soviet culture. Most disturbing for Gul’ is the fact that Sinyavsky
adopts this unseemly style—“Directly out of the thieves’ barracks of Dubrovlag!”
(“Progulki khama s Pushkinym,” 128)—in a work ostensibly about Pushkin: “The
name . . . of Pushkin . . . for me is holy” (123). In sum, in Gul’’s words, “Tertz writes
impudently, without any responsibility before the reader” (127).
The implications of Gul’’s allegations become even clearer when we examine
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s review of Strolls with Pushkin.35 Solzhenitsyn’s article on
Strolls, “ . . . Koleblet tvoi trenozhnik” ( . . . Shakes Your Sacrifical Altar), published
in 1984, draws its title from Pushkin’s lyric, “To the Poet” (1830):
Are you satisfied [with your work]? Then what matter if the crowd abuses it
And spits on the altar where your fire burns,
And in childish playfulness shakes your sacrificial altar.
Solzhenitsyn then ranges Sinyavsky with the ignorant crowd, with those who
fail to comprehend the higher calling of the poet. He thus echoes Gul’ in accusing
Sinyavsky of shirking his civic responsibility as a litterateur in supposedly taking
Pushkin too lightly. He also follows Gul’ in castigating Sinyavsky for his use of
thieves’ slang in writing about Pushkin, which he tropes as being equivalent to re-
lieving oneself in a church. Solzhenitsyn expresses dismay not just at the language,
but at the structure of Sinyavsky’s text, its “emptiness” and apparent lack of direc-
tion, which, he finds, is fundamentally destructive: “It is not a construction, but as
if burrows had been gnawed through Pushkin and mostly on a lower level, and the
system of burrows is so confused that toward the end we, together with the essayist,
barely remember the beginning and the whole path” (“ . . . Koleblet tvoi trenozhnik,”
136). Sinyavsky’s “empty” Pushkin and “directionless” (besputnyi) text are in polar
opposition with Solzhenitsyn’s Pushkin, who is a serious political thinker, conscious
of his responsibility to the nation and suspicious of democracy and the “passion for
novelty” (147), an enduring gauge of Russia’s spiritual health: “Russian literature as a
whole was Christian to the extent that it remained . . . faithful to Pushkin” (150). Just
as Gul’ views Strolls with Pushkin as a sign of Soviet cultural degeneracy, so Solzhenit-
syn views it as symptomatic of the perilous freedom of emigration: “could we have
naturally expected that the new criticism, barely freed from the unbearable repres-
sion of Soviet censorship, that the first thing for which it would employ its freedom
would be a strike against Pushkin? With our current belated experience we shall
answer: yes, that is precisely what we should have expected” (151). Strolls represents
for Solzhenitsyn an “aesthetic nihilism” tantamount to the “revolutionary disrespect
for the classics” (151) of the Russian radical critics of the 1860s, precursors of the Bol-
shevik Revolution. Deploring the “all-embracing irony, play and liberty with the
self-sufficient New Word” of Sinyavsky and his ilk, Solzhenitsyn suggests that they
threaten all that is “lofty and pure” in the Russian literary tradition” and therefore
the very foundations of the Russian nation (152).
It is indeed telling that the reception of Strolls with Pushkin in the USSR echoed
its earlier reception in the émigré community. It was only in early 1989, when glas-
nost was well underway and the taboo on publishing the works of living émigré
writers in the USSR began to lift, that a fragment of the work appeared. A four-page
excerpt from Strolls with Pushkin was published in the journal Oktiabr’ in April of that
year. While it initially passed virtually without notice, the virulence of the response,
when it did come, more than made up for its delay. It is revealing that the onslaught
in fact began in June with the publication of Gul’’s earlier article on Strolls, bowdler-
ized of criticisms of Soviet culture. Not only did the publication of Gul’’s article
signal a significant correspondence between poles of literary polemic in emigration
and in the homeland, but, as events were to unfold, it appeared as a harbinger of the
fact that the emigration itself and its “returning literature” were to become central to
the institutional and ideational transformation of Soviet literature in its final years.
Two articles, first published in the West and written by the mathematician Igor
Shafarevich, who had earned a reputation as a dissident by publishing an article in
the collection From under the Rubble (Iz-pod glyb), edited by Solzhenitsyn in the early
1970s, set the tone for the debate. The article “Rusofobiia” (Russophobia) appeared
in the conservative émigré journal Veche and was shortly thereafter reprinted in the
Russophilic Soviet journal Nash sovremennik, another indication of the continu-
ity between émigré and Soviet literary polemics.36 Shafarevich’s diatribe is aimed
largely at émigré publicists, whom he accuses of Russophobia, defining it as “the
view according to which the Russians are a nation of slaves, who have always wor-
shipped authority, who hate everything foreign and hate culture, and Russia is an
eternal breeding ground for despotism and totalitarianism, dangerous for the rest
of the world” (“Rusofobiia,” 173). Realizing Sinyavsky’s metaphor elaborated in
“Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii,” Shafarevich traces this threatening Russophobia to
“Jewish national sentiment” (188) and claims that all members of the liberal intel-
ligentsia, émigrés first and foremost, are either Jews or Jewish sympathizers. The
second article, “Fenomen emigratsii” (The Emigration Phenomenon), appeared in
another outlet of the Russophile camp, the newspaper Literaturnaia Rossiia, in Sep-
tember 1989.37 In this article, Shafarevich sees the émigré literary works “returning”
to the USSR, with Strolls with Pushkin as his primary example, as dangerous “toxins”
threatening the health of the nation.
While the uproar over Strolls with Pushkin peaked in the autumn of 1989 and
subsided soon after, Sinyavsky in a sense pronounced his final word on the subject
in what was his last major publication before his death, “Puteshestvie na Chernuiu
rechku” (Journey to the Black River).38 “Puteshestvie na Chernuiu rechku” was
written in the wake of the return of Sinyavsky and his writings to Russia beginning
in 1989 and was published in Paris in the thirty-fourth issue of Sintaksis, which ap-
peared in 1994. As the title indicates, the essay, something of a sequel to Strolls with
Pushkin, revisits Pushkin from the vantage point of the site of the poet’s fatal duel,
and the duel to the death as a metaphor for the encounter between writer and reader
becomes the central metaphor of the text: Could it be “that every novel should re-
semble a rapier?” (“Puteshestvie na Chernuiu rechku,” 51).
One Literature or Two?
In a sense the uproar over Strolls with Pushkin, first in emigration and later in
the USSR, provides an answer of sorts to a prime question debated by scholars of
émigré literature in the 1970s and 1980s: was Russian literature one literature or
two? In fact, this question gave title and structure to two of the major conferences
involving third-wave émigré literary figures, both of which resulted in published
volumes of articles.39 The first enterprise, “Odna ili dve russkikh literatur?” (One or
Two Russian Literatures?), was held in Geneva, 13–15 April 1978 under the auspices
of the Literature Division of the University of Geneva. The participants included
major Western and émigré scholars, among them Georges Nivat, Efim Etkind, Lazar
Fleishman, Michel Aucouturier, Wolfgang Kasack, Andrei Sinyavsky, and Mar’ya
Rozanova. Nivat lays out the questions addressed at the beginning of his introduc-
tion to the published volume: “One or two Russian literatures? Should we speak of
a new literature, of émigré literature, of an émigré poetics? Does the fundamental
character of literature change in exile? Exile as an element of a new poetics? (Odna ili
dve russkikh literatur?, 5).
The second conference, entitled “Russian Literature in Emigration: The Third
Wave,” brought together at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles,
14–16 May 1981 an impressive group of émigré writers, including Andrei Sinyavsky,
Vasilii Aksenov, Vladimir Voinovich, Viktor Nekrasov, Sergei Dovlatov, Sasha
Sokolov, Eduard Limonov, Naum Korzhavin, Anatoly Gladilin, Dmitry Bobyshev,
and Yuz Aleshkovsky, and Western scholars to consider a related set of issues. At
both conferences, seminal comments were made by the opening speakers. In Geneva,
Efim Etkind, comparing the contemporary Russian situation to the long-standing
processes leading to the splitting off of Canadian and Australian literatures from the
British metropolitan tradition, contended that the appearance of an independent na-
tional literature out of an emigration depended on the concomitant creation of a
new nation or state. Etkind cited what would turn out to be the prophetic words of
Gleb Struve on the Russian emigration: “Russian literature abroad is a temporary

literature diverted to the side of the flow of general Russian literature, a literature
that—when the time comes—will pour into the general stream of that literature”
(Third Wave, 16).40 In the same spirit, Sinyavsky, lamenting the lack of a “broad and
qualified literary criticism” (28) in the emigration, pointed to the fundamental differ-
ences between the role and potential of the literature of the third wave and that of its
predecessors in relationship to the literature of the homeland:
Our readers are not only here, but, perhaps, primarily in contemporary Russia,
yes, and reasoning more broadly, the current emigration is much more tightly
linked to the metropolis than in the past. Our tasks include strengthening
bridges, the building, when possible, of new ones, and literary criticism could
serve as one form of such vital communication. But not in the guise of passing
sentences and evaluations—“I like it or don’t like it”—as any reader can read in
our press. Here we would need real criticism, with multifaceted, most important,
very concrete analysis of literary phenomena on different sides of the barriers
that have been erected. (30)
In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the return of émigré litera-
ture and literary scholarship to Russia, it is possible to draw some general conclusions
about the relationship of émigré criticism to Soviet writing about literature. Most
significantly, as has been emphasized throughout this chapter, it is clear that, despite
the gulf of ideology and censorship that lay between them, the émigré and Soviet
“streams” shared essential presumptions borne of faith in the primacy of high litera-
ture, its commitment—even in increasingly oblique and contested artistic forms and
with equally contested messages—to sociopolitical utility and its inviolable freedom
from market forces. This belief would be reduced to tatters by the radical changes in
the structure of Russian culture precipitated by the end of the socialist regime.
 POST-SOVIET LITERARY
14
CRITICISM
ILYA KUKULIN and MARK LIPOVETSKY
Liberal Criticism and Identity Crisis
The 1990s were a decade when, for the first time in seventy years, Russian lit-
erature and criticism (outside of émigré or unofficial semi-underground circles) were
able to develop without the censor’s interference. Most assessments of the literary
output of this era (ranging from Andrei Nemzer’s “remarkable decade” to Alla
Latynina’s “literary twilight”) agreed that the dissolution of “the literary process”—
that is, the dissolution of a common ground where a variety of critical discourses
intersect—was due to a dearth of acknowledged leading figures and aesthetic ten-
dencies. The result was a shrinking critical space and a growing mutual disengage-
ment among the various subcultures.1
The segmentation of what was once a single critical field was undoubtedly con-
nected to changes in the status of literature, which lost the role it played in the Soviet
era (and to a certain extent in the nineteenth century). Literature in the 1990s ceased
to serve as the central arena in which—due to the absence of political freedom—
various scenarios of modernization were conceptualized and critically analyzed and
in which strategies of social behavior among the intelligentsia took shape.2 It must
be acknowledged that the colossal success of literature and literary journals during
perestroika owed much to the energizing of this literary function.
287
288  ILYA KUKULIN AND MARK LIPOVETSKY
It is significant to note that the “war of the journals” between the liberal and
nationalist camps drew to a close at the end of 1991. “Patriot” critics remained ac-
tive as authors and have retained control over journals such as Nash sovremennik,
Moskva, Molodaia gvardiia, and newspapers such as Den’ (after 1993, Zavtra), and its
literary supplement Den’ literatury, and even, after 2001, over Literaturnaia gazeta,
which returned to its conservative political outlook after the writer Iurii Poliakov
had become its editor in chief. Despite this, their pronouncements of the mid-to-late
nineties (as opposed to the late eighties) drew no reaction whatsoever from the critics
of Znamia, Novyi mir, or Oktiabr’. The struggle between liberals and “patriots” was
meaningful within the context of Soviet official discourse and was in actuality an
attempt at maintaining influence during the transformations of the late-Soviet and
perestroika era. The liberals’ victory, however, was Pyrrhic: it deprived them not
only of an adversary, but also triggered an identity crisis, which necessitated a more
concrete and socially and culturally significant position within liberal discourse. In
this sense the crisis of post-Soviet liberal criticism stemmed from the crisis of the
erstwhile Soviet intelligentsia.3
The absence of analytical criteria in the encounter with the more recent mani-
festations of cultural life resulted in the entire spectrum of critics of the middle and
older generations choosing the path of what Boris Dubin termed “ressentiment”—a
one-dimensional attack on all new literary phenomena as anticultural. This position
was put forth by such well-known critics as Alla Latynina, Lev Anninskii, Benedikt
Sarnov, and others. Obviously, the “ressentiment” was varied and mutable. Be that
as it may, this point of view in its purest form was found in the position articulated
by Stanislav Rassadin (the title of his column in the liberal Novaia gazeta was, charac-
teristically, “Starodum”—literally “An Old-Fashioned Thinker” and also a character
from Denis Fonvizin’s classicist comedy Nedorosl’). This critic dismissed the con-
ceptual poetry of Dmitry Prigov as “graphomania” and compared the work of the
postmodernists to the Bolshevik destruction of culture, only finding positive words
for the works of some former nonconformist writers such as Fazil’ Iskander, Bulat
Okudzhava, Iurii Davydov, and Semyon Lipkin.4
A sharp division between “thick” journal and newspaper, or later, at the end of
1990s, Internet-based criticism emerged. Whereas “thick” journal criticism at-
tempted to refine an analytical tradition of sociological (real’nyi) criticism, in par-
ticular the version whose methodology was worked out in the 1960s and 1970s, those
critics who became newspaper or Internet columnists (Aleksandr Ageev, Aleksandr
Arkhangel’skii, Nikolai Aleksandrov, Dmitrii Bykov, Lev Danilkin, Kirill Kobrin,
Boris Kuz’minskii, Viacheslav Kuritsyn, Andrei Nemzer, and Mikhail Zolotonosov
among others), tended to minimize the role of analysis and interpretation, preferring
to offer explicitly subjective and emotionally compelling assessments of current lit-
erature. For the most part this was dictated by the format of the popular press; when-
ever these critics published in other formats, their analytical skills were obvious.
Such a transformation had a twofold effect. On the one hand, the “columnization”
of criticism led to a strengthening of the ludic and the purely literary components
within the critical discourse. On the other hand, the role of “columnist,” lapsing into
POST-SOVIET LITERARY CRITICISM  289
habit, contributed to the radical monologization of the critical pronouncement, which

was transformed into peremptory and unsupported judgments.
Thus over time there emerged two fundamental (but continually disintegrating)
types of critical self-identification—or, more precisely, two fundamental strategies
for reallocating the symbolic capital accrued in the 1990s. Originating in the 1970s
and 1980s, these two types can be defined as ideology-based and impressionist criti-
cism, respectively, with each undergoing significant mutations in the post-Soviet
context.
The New Ideological Criticism
This trend was above all associated with the “thick” journals, although among
its leaders were some newspaper and Internet critics, such as Nemzer, Ageev, and
Pavel Basinskii. Critics of this stripe tended to speak from the point of view of some
sort of ideological “us.” And although the boundaries of this “us” were not always
sharply defined, it was clear that, for instance, Nataliia Ivanova, Aleksandr Ageev,
Sergei Chuprinin, and Nikita Eliseev shared views on literature and culture that
were close to those of the liberal intelligentsia that placed its faith in the values of lib-
eral modernization and the civil society. The position of Irina Rodnianskaia, Renata
Gal’tseva, Basinskii, and Evgenii Ermolin—all very different from one another—
articulated the ideology of the “traditional Russian intelligentsia.” These critics and
the “reference group” they represented resolutely refused to accept anything associ-
ated with Soviet culture and chose the route of return to the traditional foundations
of Russian culture (predominantly premodern), to the classics and Christian religios-
ity, still seeking an acceptable compromise between modernization and traditional
values. Finally, there were critics who interpreted contemporary literature through
the prism of criteria elaborated within the unofficial culture of the 1970s–1980s; one
may mention Mikhail Aizenberg, Viktor Krivulin, Mikhail Berg, as well as their
younger colleagues, first and foremost, Dmitrii Kuz’min, as well as such analysts of
the underground literature as Vladislav Kulakov.
The example of Andrei Nemzer, without exaggeration a key figure in the criti-
cism of the 1990s, is particularly instructive. Since 1991 he has almost single-handedly
compiled a detailed chronicle of contemporary literature that aims to reflect every
significant literary (and cultural) event.5 Nemzer has aligned his position with the
views of the Moscow-St. Petersburg philologists of his generation (that is, those
who were university students in the 1970s and began their professional careers in the
late 1970s and early 1980s) who demonstratively turned away from Soviet literature
and focused on Russian classical literature, often refracted through the interpreta-
tive prism of the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School. Nonetheless, Nemzer’s stance has
been sharply opposed to the “ressentiment” of the 1990s: in his body of work he has
not only methodically detailed how Russian literature remains vital, but has backed
up this assertion with the most rigorous philological criteria, overtly advancing the
great traditions of nineteenth-century literature. In his magazine essays and numer-
ous (more than one thousand) reviews Nemzer places contemporary Russian litera-
ture in a wider historical context, seeing its post-Soviet existence as an “awakening

from the dream of timelessness” and a return to history.
Nemzer takes a centralist position regarding literature and culture, equally op-
posed to antiliberalism, libertarianism, xenophobia, postmodernism, “ressenti-
ment,” and the rupture of cultural ties. Those writers Nemzer considers closest to his
cultural ideal—particularly Andrei Dmitriev, Aleksei Slapovskii, Marina Vishne
vetskaia, and Ol’ga Slavnikova—work in the terrain of traditional psychological
realism, developing recognizable themes and motifs, and for the most part have no
pretensions to effecting an aesthetic revolution. Nemzer’s choices are founded not
just on analysis and interpretation, but also on the assumption of internal harmony
between the critic and the literary work. From this point of view the paraphrase—at
times as emulation, at times as parody—has become the definitive element of his
style, growing over time close to an openly subjective criticism.
The New Critical Impressionism
This trend sees the decisive significance of literature not in its place in some sort
of collective system of values, but rather in its opposition to any such system. The
engagement of the “new impressionists” with literature can be thought of not as a so-
cial or aesthetic diagnostic, but rather as an existential response that breaks through
the discursive conventions of Soviet literary criticism. It is likely that Arkadii Be-
linkov and Andrei Sinyavsky played the most important role in the formulation of
this type of criticism in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s this tendency was taken up
and refined by samizdat and émigré critics, foremost among them Pyotr Vail’ and
Aleksandr Genis, authors of a number of books, including Sovremennaia russkaia proza
(Contemporary Russian Prose; original title, Sovetskoe barokko [The Soviet Baroque],
1987). By the 1990s, Genis, who had remained in the United States, had become one
of the most perspicacious post-Soviet critics publishing in Russia. Genis painted a
picture of the critic as a distinctive, stylistically inimitable author. Not so evident in
his articles, the existential dimension of Genis’s critical method is clearly manifest in
his best-selling “phiolological novel” Dovlatov i okrestnosti (Dovlatov and Environs,
1999). The book about well-known Russian émigré writer Sergei Dovlatov fuses
reminiscences with analysis of Dovlatov’s poetics; for Genis, it is another occasion
to “talk about oneself” (later he include this “philological novel” in the volume of
his collected works titled “Personal”). The book is written according to the prin-
ciples which the critic has identified in Dovlatov’s prose: contradictions laid bare but
still irresolvable; a combination of the illusion of precision on the level of expres-
sion with the normality of absurdity in content; the impossibility to separate order
from chaos. Genis leans onto the “genre memory” of modernist metafiction (Viktor
Shklovsky, Konstantin Vaginov, Vladimir Nabokov) but radically changes its se-
mantics. In the end, Dovlatov i okrestnosti is about freedom from the individual project
of destiny and literature, freedom attained through intentional errors and openness
to the unorganized and chaotic material that is being produced all the time by the
long indistinguishable interweaving of literature and life. The very notion of lit-
erariness gets modified in the process: literariness ceases to present evidence of the
authorial powers of imagination and consciousness, but instead arises as the result of
the author giving up his dominant position in the text, and man—his aspiration for
order in life.
The work of the author and critic Aleksandr Gol’dshtein (1957–2006) represents
a further development of this approach, founded upon the marriage of the existen-
tial and the ethical, coupled with an assiduous interest in artistic innovation. The
intensity of the inner life, as depicted in Gol’dshtein’s work, and the scale of the
philosophical issues that he has grappled with in the study of literature have them-
selves become a cultural phenomenon in Russia. In 1997 he published in Moscow
Rasstavanie s Nartsissom: Opyty pominal’noi ritoriki (Parting with Narcissus: Toward a
Commemorative Rhetoric), based on his articles of the mid-1990s published in Israel,
where he lived since 1990. The book caused a literary sensation. Gol’dshtein dubbed
twentieth-century Russian literature “Narcissus,” thus emphasizing that its isolation
from outside cultural processes is the work of the censor’s pen, as much as it is the
outcome of a voluntary “surrender of position,” the result being a culture that refuses
to engage in dialogue and closes ranks around domestic problems. This process, ac-
cording to Gol’dshtein, is embedded in Soviet literature and plays a significant role
in the uncensored avant-garde. Gol’dshtein saw the task of Russian literature as ac-
complishing a transition from “Narcissus” to “Orpheus,” that is, to see and celebrate
not just itself, but the world around it.
Alongside the two critical discourses (ideological and the impressionist) that
rose to prominence in the 1990s, a third strategy emerged during this period—we
will call it neoacademic. Following in part the structuralist and philological criticism
of the 1970s and 1980s, critics of this stripe have found the sources of symbolic capi-
tal for their opinions in scientific discourse, methodologically derived from modern
theory, ranging from Freud to postmodernism. The most representative figures of
this genre are Mikhail Epshtein (who synthesizes postmodern theory with Rus-
sian religious philosophy6), Mikhail Ryklin (who writes on contemporary cultural
phenomena from the point of view of poststructuralist theories of the unconscious,
above all the schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari7), Igor’ P. Smirnov (who has
used the tools of postmodern philosophy to focus on Sorokin, Mamleev, Pepper
shtein, and other contemporary authors8), Mikhail Zolotonosov and Boris Para-
monov (who have since introduced psychoanalytic methodology to newspaper and
radio criticism9), Mikhail Berg (author of the book Literaturokratiia, in which contem-
porary literature is seen through the theoretical prism of Pierre Bourdieu), Andrei
Zorin (who has implicitly applied Clifford Geertz’s theory of culture to the analysis
of conceptualism in post-Soviet cultural praxis10), and a host of other authors. Most
of them have been published at one time or another in the journals Novoe literaturnoe
obozrenie (NLO) (since 1992), Novaia russkaia kniga (2000–2002), and Kriticheskaia massa
(since 2003). This critical strategy has extended its reach throughout the entire post-
Soviet period, gaining new social and cultural significance in the 2000s.
Throughout the first half of the nineties, ideological criticism remained domi-
nant. Despite a sharp drop in sales and distribution, the “thick” journals continued
to serve as the primary source for new or aesthetically innovative or ambitious lit-
erature in the eyes of the intelligentsia—particularly those of the older generation—
for most of the early nineties. By the late nineties (that is, after the 1998 economic
and political crises), however, all this was swept aside by the increasing influence
of impressionist criticism. This critical tendency emerged mostly in newspapers and
on the Internet but expanded to “thick” journals. A purely commercial, “glossy
magazine” treatment of literary topics was nurtured. And all the while antiliberal
ideological criticism, coupled with an intensive neoacademic discourse as its coun-
terweight, shared the stage.
Main Critical Discussions of the 1990s
An almost complete absence of a more serious discussion among its constituent

publications was a feature of the liberal criticism of the 1990s. The positions of jour-
nals such as Novyi mir, Znamia, Oktiabr’, Kontinent, Voprosy literatury, or Zvezda have
been independent and amorphous (“anything, except fascism,” as Znamia editor in
chief Sergei Chuprinin has described it), and hence disputes, when they emerged,
have often taken place among critics who, as a rule, published in the same journals.
At any given time an issue of a publication will contain essays that express diametri-
cally opposed views on a given work or trend. Periodically, nonconfrontational dis-
putes have taken place around individual works such as Georgii Vladimov’s General i
ego armiia (The General and His Army), Vladimir Makanin’s Kavkazskii plennyi (The
Captive of the Caucasus), a meditation on homoeroticism and the war in Chechnya,
or his novel Andergraund, ili Geroi nashego vremeni (Underground, or A Hero of Our
Time), or the poetry of Boris Ryzhii.11
More parochial discussions have taken place concerning the large number of
literary prizes that have appeared since the nineties—it was estimated that by 2006
there were more than three hundred literary prizes in Russia, most prominently the
Russian Booker (Buker) Prize for best Russian-language novel, the Anti-Buker, the
Apollon Grigor’ev Prize, and the Andrei Belyi Prize. In the post-Soviet era, the in-
troduction of such prizes has been a means of identifying “important” writers and
contexts and of restructuring the literary space on all levels. In the late 1990s, the
attention devoted to the prize phenomenon turned into disenchantment. In many
cases, a jury’s decision would elicit exasperation. By the 2000s, however, the assump-
tion of a “prize default” (as Nataliia Ivanova put it) has come to predominate. It is
obvious that the “default” Ivanova refers to is social rather than financial, the result
of eroded public trust in the institutions of literature and the incentives for literary
work.
A deeper “systemic” confrontation can be traced throughout the liberal criti-
cism of the 1990s in the debate over postmodernism and realism that took place over
the course of the entire decade and resulted in a schism in the liberal camp—not a
radical schism, but a significant one all the same. The topic of the debate was not
what postmodernism is but rather how it fits into the context of twentieth-century
Russian culture.
Defenders of the realist tradition have gravitated toward Novyi mir and Konti-
nent, where the most acerbic arrticles of Gal’tseva, Rodnianskaia, Basinskii, Ermolin,
Rassadin, Valerii Serdiuchenko, and others have appeared, offering denunciations of
postmodernists and postmodernism in general as harmful to Russian culture. Those
critics who regarded postmodernism as a productive phenomenon in the national
culture initially gravitated toward such newspapers as Nezavisimaia gazeta and Segod-
nia (Boris Kuz’minskii, Kuritsyn, Paramonov, Dmitrii Bavil’skii, and others), and
such “thick” magazines as Znamia (Mikhail Aizenberg, Genis, Elena Ivanitskaia, Na-
taliia Ivanova, Novikov, Bakhyt Kenzheev, Karen Stepanian, and Epshtein), Oktiabr’
(Leonid Batkin, Berg, Ivanitskaia, Kuritsyn, and Epshtein), Zvezda (Genis, Para-
monov, and Epshtein), and Druzhba narodov (Bavil’skii, Berg, Oleg Dark, Ivanova,
Kuritsyn, Vladimir Novikov, and Mikhail Novikov); over time this field of criti-
cal discourse gradually moved toward NLO, Novaia russkaia kniga, and Kriticheskaia
massa.
The first summation of the traditionalist demonization of postmodernism was
found in the journal Kontinent, gathering in 1997 essays by Gal’tseva, the neocon-
servative philosopher Iurii Davydov, Ermolin, and Rassadin, who rebuked it for
a catalogue of faults, including: postmodernism undermines meaning rather than
producing it, choosing not to explore the chaos of society and the individual but
heightening the chaos in culture, and in doing so it becomes itself anticultural; post-
modernism rejects the ideal and the absolute (religious or moral), the realization and
approximation of which has always been the “value center” of Russian culture, both
religious and secular; postmodernism has inherited the radical—read: avant-garde
and “Bolshevik”—tendencies in culture and history; and postmodernism is anti-
humanist and coldly rationalist. This attitude toward postmodernism has been sup-
ported by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s authority: his “Otvetnoe slovo na prisuzhdenie
literaturnoi nagrady amerikanskogo kluba iskusstv” (A Reply to the National Arts
Club) as published in Novyi mir in 1993.12
Rodnianskaia developed a more consistent philosophical critique of postmod-
ernism from this paradigm. In essay after essay she elaborated a representation of
postmodernism as one of the “subversive forces of today,” a turning “against the hu-
man face, and, moreover, against Beauty as an incarnate, perceptible ‘divine’ attri-
bute of man in the world.”13 The more sharply the presence of postmodern aesthetics
in Russian literature was felt, the sharper became the critical reaction.
The most radical position in the critical war against postmodernism was ad-
vanced by Pavel Basinskii, who not only regarded postmodernism as anticulture, but
could not accept any possible future synthesis of realism and postmodernism, a topic
of critical discussion in the mid-1990s.14 Basinskii has imbued realism with a religious
significance, one that eschews compromise with other cultural idioms. According
to his conception, Russian literature has been endowed with a religious mission
that is capable of grasping the divine, and realism is Russian culture’s chief religious
discourse. Unwilling to accept current cultural mainstream, Basinskii has coined
a traditionalist imperative of the artistic quality whose most important criteria are
“tenderheartedness” and “the pathos of bounds” (pafos granits). Furthermore, he has
called for the introduction of aesthetic censorship by the publications that identify
themselves with traditional culture and has hinted at the necessity of “using law” to
protect Russian culture from postmodernism.
As for postmodernism’s proponents, their views are fairly contradictory and
do not constitute a single critical discourse. The Znamia critics (for example Karen
Stepanian), while inclined to accept postmodernism as an objective cultural reality,
have regarded it as a manifestation of crisis and have persistently sought out its symp-
toms in order to overcome its condition.15 In his philosophy of the postmodern, Ep
shtein has offered the inverse of the traditional Russian view of literature as a quest
for the transcendental signified (a via negativa rather than a “positive” sermon). Vik-
tor Erofeev has supplied a similar inversion, albeit one applied to moral categories
and essayistic in its “methodology” (that is, more belletrist than critical): if tradi-
tional Russian literature had faith in its own mission to search for the basis of all
that is good, then Erofeev, employing and simplifying the ideas of Georges Bataille,
advances a “literature of evil,” in which he would place such disparate writers as
Varlam Shalamov, Victor Astafiev, Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Sergei Dovlatov, Evgenii
Kharitonov, Vladimir Sorokin, Viacheslav P’etsukh, Valerii Popov, Iuliia Kisina,
and some other neo–avant-garde writers of the younger generations.16. In his 1990s
writings, Boris Groys limited himself to the work of “first-wave” conceptualists of
the 1970s, effectively excluding not only Sorokin and other successors to conceptu-
alism in the visual arts, but ignoring most contemporary Russian literature.17 Even
Kuritsyn, one of the most ardent evangelists for Russian postmodernism, in his book
Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm (Russian Literary Postmodernism, 2001), after an in-
troductory overview of the various accounts of postmodernism and an enumeration
of its aesthetic manifestations, constructed his analysis from an amalgam of discrete
essays and reviews, linked associatively and subjectively rather than conceptually
and logically. Kuritsyn closed with a disquisition on the rise of a rather strange sort
of “post-postmodernism,” feigning exhaustion with the “terror of the minorities”
and proposing a rejection of irony, a “de-ideologized” restoration of the “grand
style” and an artistic orientation toward consumer taste and consumer interest.
The debate over postmodernism revealed a conflict between two uncomfort-
ably joined conceptions of culture in the liberal discourse. One conception was hi-
erarchical, founded upon a cult of tradition. The other was nonhierarchical, but it
nonetheless assumed a constant struggle among a number of contradictory hierar-
chies, and also a reflection on the foundations of the debate. This latter conception, a
fundamentally secular one, was inadequately articulated; more precisely, its articula-
tion required another idiom (or idioms) free of the ideological overtones that char-
acterized the intelligentsia of the 1970s and 1980s.18 Even more saliently, the 1990s
revealed that the methods of sociological (“real”) criticism, which treats literature as
a reflection of social problems, were inapplicable to the interpretation of the modern-
ist and postmodernist literature, whether produced in Russia, in the emigration or
underground, or literature in translation, which occupied a greater place in the liter-
ary marketplace.
The rapid growth in mass-market literature, that is, literature traditionally
unanimously dismissed by critics as low grade and insufficiently “literary,” was an-
other issue. Throughout this entire period, critics such as Nataliia Ivanova, Roman
Arbitman, Ol’ga Slavnikova, and Tat’iana Cherednichenko, as well as such famed
cultural sociologists as Boris Dubin and Lev Gudkov, perspicaciously analyzed mass
culture as a social symptom, and found a number of explanations in mass-market
literature for the neoconservative turn in Russian society in the second half of the
1990s.19
For instance, Nataliia Ivanova analyzed, in essays collected not only in her
Nostal’iashchee (Nostalgic/Real/Present, 2002) but in an entire array of journal
and Internet publications, a wide spectrum of cultural products: from Aleksandra
Marinina’s detective novels to television serials, from representations of holidays to
trends in construction design, and political ads, as well as oscillations in the politics
of the publishing industry.20 Such an analysis enabled her to detect the formula of a
new cultural and political mainstream in post-Soviet culture: “The stylistic hybrid
of the aesthetics of the Soviet past and the post-Soviet present is a nostalgia for the
present moment [nostal’iashchee]. This stylistic hybrid, or, more accurately, this sty-
listic centaur, has turned out to be amazingly vital, but month after month and year
after year it has continued to condense, leaving behind the pure pleasure of immer-
sion in the collective Soviet style, albeit one that is ideologically vacuous.”21
Similarly, Dubin (who regularly publishes not only as a literary scholar but also
as a sociologist and translator), has analyzed post-Soviet “action novels” and mass-
market historical fiction, uncovering within these genres the fundamental features
of “negative identity” (in the words of sociologist Lev Gudkov): the vanishing point
where the post-Soviet mass attitudes and the neoconservative policies of president
Vladimir Putin meet.22
This method is a departure from the traditional sociological criticism of the
sixties and seventies, in that it is the products of the “hyper-reality of simulacra”
(Baudrillard) that are being analyzed: media and mass cultural mythologies, visual
symbols, and cultural praxis. In other words, sociological criticism in all these cases
assimilates the postmodernist representation of contemporary culture, rebuking
“literature-centrism.” As is indicated by the work of Dubin, Ivanova, and other crit-
ics who have launched a close analysis of mass culture, it is these conditions that most
effectively permit the adoption of the methods of “real criticism” as a sociocultural
diagnostic.
The Diary Discourse
The social mode of literature’s existence changed radically in the latter half of
the 1990s for many reasons, foremost among them the emerging crisis of liberal ide-
ology.23 We can sum up this change with a term from Dubin and Gudkov, who first
diagnosed the problem: the collapse of the “thick journal civilization.” Owing to
economic stabilization and the lifting of fixed duties on the book trade in 2001, a
situation has arisen where most new literature could be made available in book form
without a lengthy wait. Moreover, as Dubin noted in 1997, the journals could hardly
be regarded as the expression of any particular aesthetic or social point of view, but
as a kind of substitute for presses, trying to catch up with the cultural process but
lagging ever more hopelessly behind: “It is not here where events and reputations are
being created now.”24
Thanks also in part to a sharp increase in the number of prizes and the wide-
spread practice of author readings, the business of literature became far more intense
in the late 1990s. This contributed to a critical shift away from journals to newspa-
pers, especially as the decade drew to a close.25
Such changes in the critic’s role coincided with noticeable changes in the Rus-
sian media landscape that took place in the 1990s. Crucially, during 1996–1997 Inter-
net-based literary resources began to take shape.26 One of the best-known Internet
publications of the period, Russkii zhurnal (RZh), was launched in 1997 under the
auspices of the Effective Politics Foundation, an institution close to the centers of
power and charged with analysis of political and technological problems. RZh stated
its goals as “diagnosis and therapy of the cultural sphere of post-communist Rus-
sia.”27 Until the turn of the millennium, when nationalist and statist viewpoints be-
gan exerting significant influence on it, RZh remained a perceptive and culturally
significant resource, offering debates on the main issues in cultural and political life
in contemporary Russia.
The new critical style, rife on the Internet, originated in the arts section of the
newspaper Segodnia (as represented by Boris Kuz’minskii, Arkhangel’skii, Andrei
Kovalev, Modest Kolerov, Kuritsyn, Nemzer, Oleg Shishkin, and others). It un-
derwent hypertrophy in the “writers’ columns” of RZh. The most famous literary
column in the RZh, “Kuritsyn-weekly,” moved to RZh in 2000 from the author’s
website, Sovremennaia russkaia literatura s Viacheslavom Kuritsynym (Contemporary
Russian Literature with Viacheslav Kuritsyn), which began in 1998 as a section of
the website of Marat Gel’man’s postmodernist art gallery.28 In December 2000 RZh
launched “Golod” (Hunger), the column of critic and political journalist Aleksandr
Ageev, and in May 2001 “Bykov-quickly,” the column of writer and critic Dmitrii
Bykov, a subtitle that punned Kuritsyn’s, with whom Bykov engaged in a lively ex-
change of polemics, periodically lapsing into ad hominem attacks.
Those critics who rose to prominence in print adopted new strategies when
shifting to the Internet. In “Kuritsyn-weekly” its author served as chronicler of cul-
tural life, rather than as critic-ideologue, the role he had played in the early 1990s.
In his column Kuritsyn set for himself the task of classifying events as indicators
of cultural innovation, irrespective of his own personal sympathies. At the same
time, he published “Writing 100,” a list of authors he considered to be the most in-
teresting in contemporary Russian literature. In a manifesto, published on the Marat
Gel’man gallery website on 17 December 1998, and still accessible as column zero of
the “Kuritsyn-weekly,” he identified his new goal as the consolidation of the literary
landscape.
Kuritsyn seemed to take quite seriously—and to consider proper cultural phe-
nomena—works such as Aleksandr Prokhanov’s novel Gospodin Geksogen (Mr. Hexo-
gen), a nationalistic book with a clear anti-Semitic bias that praises the Soviet-era
KGB, and the hysterical, second-rate poetry of Timofei Frezinskii, winner of the
first Russian poetry slam. Such an unreflective attitude was at odds with the task of
the Kulturträger and was responsible in part for the failure of Kuritsyn’s project (after
ending his column in 2002, he left criticism for seven years, turning instead to “pure”
prose).
Aleksandr Ageev’s (1956–2008) project “Golod: Prakticheskaia gastroentero
logiia chteniia” (Hunger: A Practical Gastroenterology of Reading; 2000–2004, 103
columns in all) represented another approach to the Internet column and the task
of analyzing contemporary culture. The author explained the title as the result of
having begun the column shortly after undergoing abdominal surgery, when he was
forbidden for a few days to eat or drink; there was, of course, a metaphorical dimen-
sion to “Golod” as well—the hunger for literary novelty. Ageev’s aim in his columns
was to depict the everyday life of the intellectual alongside his immediate reactions
to (literary) culture: discovering an old book, a new edition, or even a newspaper or
magazine essay.
Ageev also used his “Golod” column to declare a war on “entropy,” which he
defined not as the break-up of literary space, but as the gradual disappearance of the
notion of literature as a reproducible cultural and institutional organization, con-
stantly at work, and the substitution of borrowed myths for individual responsible
judgments. Ageev’s position was not dogmatic: even while serving as apologist for
“thick” journal literature, he confessed in numerous columns to his love for classic
Western rock music, a taste that in the USSR was regarded as “countercultural” and
passed practically unmentioned by such journals. Ageev refused to regard the seven-
ties as an era of Stagnation, pouring abuse on the “sixties generation” (for example,
people such as Andrei Tarkovsky) and defending the liberal image of culture and
politics. (As a rule, the fiercest critics of “the sixties” are usually also opposed to lib-
eralism: in contemporary Russia liberalism is associated with the ideologically more
relaxed 1960s.) Sensitive, skeptical, and open-minded individuals, Ageev and Kurit-
syn were nonetheless able to forge a new genre, one that broke with both traditional
impressionist criticism and the “thick” journal house style.
The journalist, poet, novelist, and critic Dmitrii Bykov regarded his own col-
umn—due in part to his conscious antithesis to these authors and in part to personal
inclination and temperament—first and foremost as political punditry, but from the
perspective of the writer. In his “Bykov-quickly” column, Bykov focused on such
themes as the moral collapse that had taken place, according to him, among the con-
temporary Russian intelligentsia, and the commonalities between liberals and im-
perial nationalists, the chief opponents in Russia’s current social debates.29 Bykov
was interested, above all, in the revision of old reputations rather than the creation
of new ones. As a rule, he limited himself to the safely dead, to authors of the older
generation, or on occasion to the neglected or (he felt) misinterpreted (from the ob-
scure 1920s poet Igor Iurkov to the perennial “enfant terrible” Eduard Limonov).30
Bykov was at his sharpest witted and most engaged, when writing about heroes
gone out of fashion—authors once regarded as “au courant” now half-forgotten or
dismissed. He had mulled over his own debt to such writers (for example, Ernest
Hemingway, Evgeny Evtushenko, and Bella Akhmadulina) and tried to explain

why they have fallen out of favor. He would discuss specific works and poetics, but
this analysis is secondary to the revision of a reputation. The most important goal in
Bykov’s biography of Boris Pasternak, which appeared as part of the series “Zhizn’
zamechatel’nykh liudei” (The Life of Remarkable People) and received the 2006
Bol’shaia kniga (Great Book) Prize, is to refute the consensus (in Bykov’s opinion)
that Pasternak is an “anti-Soviet” writer and to offer an interpretation of Pasternak’s
biography as a quest for a common language (but not reconciliation) with the state
and society.
Besides the Internet, another important vehicle for social communication in the
late nineties was the glossy “lifestyle” magazine. While such magazines began ap-
pearing in Russia in the early nineties, their portrayal of a well-rooted subculture of
Russian glamour had evolved into a legitimate media form by the end of the decade.
The literary reviews in most glossies are generally short and lack a distinctive point
of view, but exceptions do exist. The best-known critic publishing chiefly in glossies
is Lev Danilkin, in charge of the “Knigi” (Books) section of the weekly magazine
Afisha; he claims he represents the taste of the new middle class, the yuppies of Mos-
cow, St. Petersburg, and other Russian metropolises (Chuprinin ironically calls him
“client-centered”). Afisha has a wide readership, and by the early 2000s books praised
by Danilkin could expect a sharp uptick in sales. Danilkin’s reviews are effusive,
surfeited with metaphors and allusions to celebrities and brand names. Despite this,
he has a clearly expressed interest in social and political problems in literature as well
as in existential questions, as traditionally understood in the Soviet liberal criticism
of the 1970s. This traditionalist quality is notable in Danilkin’s books Parfianskaia
strela (The Parthian Arrow) and Numeratsiia s khvosta: Putevoditel’ po russkoi literature
(Numeration from the Rear: A Guide to Russian Literature), the revised collections
of his 2005 and 2008 essays respectively, and especially in his biography of Aleksandr
Prokhanov, Chelovek s iaitsom: Zhizn’ i mneniia Aleksandra Prokhanova (Man with an
Egg: The Life and Opinions of Aleksandr Prokhanov, 2007).
“Patriotic” Criticism
After suffering a seeming fall from grace in the cultural mainstream after 1991,
since 2000 and the neotraditionalist turn of the Putin era calls on the part of “edu-
cated society” for an imperialist-nationalist discourse have served as a sign that the
“patriots” had not been wasting time, but they were able to modify their ideology,
moving toward late Stalinism’s “struggle against cosmopolitanism” and a late-Soviet
“Russophilia,” thus leaving their mark on the new cultural contexts and finding fol-
lowers in the post-Soviet generation of literati.
In contrast to the criticism of the 1960s–1980s, the “patriots” of the 1990s and
2000s have been completely open regarding their position, leaving nuanced literary
cultural polemics behind to mount an ongoing defense of the Russian nation, state,
and culture against the “malevolent hands of Jews and pro-Jewish liberals in the pay
of the West.” This worldview is highly typical, and not only in Russia, as an expres-
sion of a marginalized opposition to modernization and globalization: within it, im-

perialist, xenophobic, and even (quasi) postcolonial discourses are paradoxically knit
together (the Russian nation as object of European and pro-Western colonization).
However, a schism that had heretofore been covered up in the struggle against “the
common enemy” emerged in the ranks of the “patriotic” camp in the 1990s, due in
part to opportunities to express views “as straightforwardly as possible” and in part
to the crisis in the “patriotic movement” that followed its removal from power in
1991 and the rout of the nationalist opposition in 1993.
The rift in the “patriotic” camp opened with the publication of a five-part tirade
in Molodaia gvardiia by Tatiana Glushkova entitled “‘Elity’ i ‘chern’’ russkogo patrio-
tizma: Avtoritety izmeny” (The “Elites” and “The Rabble” of Russian Patriotism:
The Authorities of Treason).31 Glushkova accused Solzhenitsyn, in a tone reminiscent
of Soviet-era propaganda, of sanctioning “every American-Zionist crime against
Russia—past, present, and future.”32 Correspondingly, such prominent nationalists
as Vadim Kozhinov, Vladimir Soloukhin, Vladimir Krupin, and Valentin Raspu-
tin were criticized for praising Solzhenitsyn as a Russian patriot, Igor Shafarevich
(author of the infamous treatise Russophobia) for his contacts with both Sakharov
and Solzhenitsyn, and Leonid Borodin for his dissident—that is, anti-Soviet—past.
“The righteous,” wailed Glushkova, “would never go against the GREAT NA-
TION. This criterion for righteousness can never be revoked.”33
Glushkova’s invective against nationalism’s intellectual leaders were symptom-
atic of the division of the movement into camps of “red” and “white” patriotism.
“Red patriots” (in addition to Glushkova, there were Vladimir Bushin, Iurii Bon
darev, Aleksandr Zinov’ev, Mikhail Alekseev, Mikhail Lobanov, Viktor Rozov, Fe-
liks Kuznetsov, and in red patriotism’s revamped version, Aleksandr Prokhanov and
Eduard Limonov) considered the Soviet, or more accurately, the Stalinist empire the
greatest achievement of Russian nationalism and were prepared, in line with presi-
dent Putin (or rather he in line with them), to call the break up of the USSR “the
greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.”34 “Red patriotism” as-
pired to the Soviet National Bolshevism of the 1940s and 1950s, uniting xenophobia
and anti-Westernism with the dogma of Soviet ideology.35 Of course, this discourse
assumed different forms in the 1990s: Aleksandr Prokhanov saw Soviet imperialism
as a form of radical modernization of technology and civilization, albeit national in
scope, while Eduard Limonov was drawn to the radicalism of the Soviet discourse
for its critique of liberal values and institutions of power.
“White patriotism,” on the other hand, regarded the Russian Orthodox empire,
which was destroyed by the Bolsheviks, as the authentic ideal for Russia’s historical
path. From the “white patriots’” point of view, all Soviet history was a deliberate an-
nihilation of Russian culture and Orthodox (and only Orthodox!) spirituality at the
hands of Jews and the cosmopolitan intelligentsia, in envy of the Russian people and
incapable of understanding their values. This view was most saliently deployed by
Igor Shafarevich and Vadim Kozhinov (particularly in the latter’s book Velikaia voina
Rossii [Russia’s Great War, 2005]) but was also perceptible in Solzhenitsyn’s Dvesti
let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together), the historical fiction of Leonid Borodin,
Vladimir Lichutin, Viktor Likhonosov, and Vladimir Maksimov, the late films of
Nikita Mikhalkov, particularly Sibirskii tsiriul’nik (The Barber of Siberia, 1999), and
the canvases of Il’ia Glazunov. If the white emigration, for “red patriots,” was an un-
acceptable betrayal of the (Soviet) homeland, white patriots published and promoted
the works of the most conservative and monarchist-minded or even crypto-fascist
Russian émigrés (such as Ivan Il’in, Ivan Solonevich, and Pyotr Krasnov). If read-
ing Tikhii Don (And Quiet Flows the Don) as an anti-Soviet novel made red patriots
indignant, white patriots created a new cult of Sholokhov as the writer who first told
the truth about the plight of the people beneath the alien heel.36 If “reds” avoided
criticizing Lenin due to his stature as founder of the Soviet state, to “whites” he was
a Russophobe and cosmopolite who brought into power an anti-Russian elite, albeit
one that was subsequently liquidated by Stalin.37 And if reds considered Stalin to be
the absolute and unquestionable authority, whites reproached him for the collectiv-
ization policy but honored for the Terror (against the Old Bolshevik—read: Jew-
ish—elites) and for his victory in the Great Patriotic War and the postwar “struggle
against cosmopolitanism.”
Among the critic-ideologues of “white patriotism,” Stanislav Kuniaev, editor in
chief of Nash sovremennik and active as critic since the late 1970s, was the most promi-
nent. In his memoir Poeziia. Sud’ba. Rossiia (Poetry. Destiny. Russia, 2001), much of
which was first published in Nash sovremennik, Kuniaev unreeled his version of late-
Soviet and post-Soviet literary history. According to him, the true opposition to the
Soviet regime was mounted by patriot writers (above all the village prose writers
and the “quiet school” of poetry) who were subjected to repression and marginalized
for being the sole defenders of the nation, at a time when the regime was being de-
fended by the liberal intelligentsia, liberal writers (Russophobes all), and especially
Jews—Boris Slutsky, Evgeny Evtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Grigorii Baklanov,
Vasilii Aksenov, David Samoilov, Aleksandr Mezhirov, Iurii Trifonov, Vitalii Ko-
rotich, Iurii Chernichenko, Anatolii Strelianyi, Sergei Chuprinin, and others. Kuni-
aev reserved a special enmity for “turncoats,” such as Victor Astafiev.
In setting down his history of a nationalist “resistance,” Kuniaev emphasized
that the Central Committee of the CPSU (especially its ideological division, and spe-
cifically Aleksandr Iakovlev and Al’bert Beliaev) constantly persecuted nationalists,
tacitly or openly supporting liberals or “Russophobes.” The essence of this ideologi-
cal and cultural struggle, which persisted, for Kuniaev, into the post-Soviet era, was
summed up by “the Russian-Jewish question,” so formulated: “Who, in the main,
is meant to rule Russia—the Russian people that makes up the state or a small, but
well organized and economically powerful Jewish element (prosloika)?”
If the patriotic discourse of “whites” and “reds” evolved from the nationalist
criticism of the 1970s and 1980s (in Nash sovremennik and Molodaia gvardiia, respec-
tively), the conservative stance of Vladimir Bondarenko constituted a relatively
recent post-Soviet phenomenon. Bondarenko had started as a critic in the late seven-
ties and early eighties, and was known initially as a propagandist and ideologue for
the so-called generation of the forty-year-olds (sorokaletnie) that included Vladimir
Makanin, Anatolii Kim, Ruslan Kireev, Anatolii Kurchatkin, and, to an extent,

Prokhanov.
Bondarenko’s essays of the mid-nineties were characterized by an active engage-
ment with “the virus of Russophobia,” which he identified in the work of Abram
Tertz, Vasilii Grossman, Nabokov, Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Erofeev, postmodern-
ism in general, the journal Znamia, and Astaf’ev’s fiction (in a review of Astafiev’s
novel Prokliaty i ubity [The Cursed and the Slain], he scolded the author for subvert-
ing the “statist ideal” in his depiction of the Second World War). At the same time,
Bondarenko attacked such pillars of the nationalist movement as Petr Palievskii,
literary scholar and deputy director of the Institute of World Literature (IMLI), ac-
cusing him of cowardice and insufficient zeal in the struggle with the “occupying re-
gime” and declaring: “We dream of a new empire. A more enlightened and civilized
one. The Soviet empire is dead. Long live the new empire!”38
In the post-Soviet period Bondarenko’s tendentious critical output (between
1992 and 2006 he published a dozen books alongside his regular newspaper appear-
ances) was marked by an endless patience for the aesthetics of nationalist criticism,
taking an interest in those writers dismissed as traitors to the “national idea,” or even
in those taken to task for the sins of avant-gardism, or liberalism, or Jewry. He as-
sumed the role of “anthologist” of the nationalist movement, standing athwart in-
creasing internal disagreements. His Plamennye reaktsionery: Tri lika russkogo patriotizma
(Flaming Reactionaries: The Three Faces of Russian Patriotism) was particularly no-
table in this regard: consisting of three sections (“The Red Face,” “The White Face,”
and “The Russian Face”), it featured highly respectful interpretations of “red” and
“white” patriotism, accompanied by lengthy interviews with many of their leading
representatives. The third section offered a “synthetic” nationalism highlighting the
need for ideological accord. Bondarenko was unable to explain what united Pushkin
and Belov, Rasputin and Kuniaev, Balashov and Lichutin, Iurii Kuznetsov and Lev
Gumilyov, Aleksei Balabanov and Tatiana Doronina (among the heroes of his book),
apart from a “love for the Russian people.” Nevertheless, Bondarenko was obviously
searching for an underlying unity to the various strains of Russian nationalism,
which he saw as “a quest for a strong étatism founded upon traditional and religious
values.”39 He added, “Russia’s historic path is conservative in outlook” (Plamennye
reaktsionery, 8–9), and the foundation for this conservatism is the Russian Orthodox
Church. (None of this, according to Bondarenko, contradicted Soviet ideology.40)
Thus during the first post-Soviet decade Bondarenko substantially transformed
the rhetoric of “patriotic” criticism. He methodically put forth the argument that the
imperial ideal, hostility to “Russophobe” intelligentsia, nationalism, and anti-Sem-
itism were all intimately associated with every striking new artist to emerge during
the period, including those Jewish by origin. At the same time, he demonstrated
the “openness” of the “national canon” not just to the adherents to the aesthetics
of gloomy traditionalism, but also to the avant-garde, the modernist, and even the
postmodernist—to any sort of experimental work at all. According to Bondarenko,
it was not aesthetics but “statist thinking” that mattered. He also advanced the idea
that “our literature develops along its reactionary wing” and “only in Russia has a
reactionary avant-garde emerged” (Plamennye reaktsionery, 6), and hence the imperial
and ultranationalist ideology is sui generis, not on loan from the West, and presents
Russia’s natural avenue to aesthetic innovation. Of course, these ideas are carelessly
presented and do not withstand comparison with interpretive textual criticism.
Nonetheless, Bondarenko’s version of neonationalism became more popular in the
twenty-first century and influenced—with radically different impulses—the evolu-
tion of some younger liberal critics.
New Schisms
In the early twenty-first century Russian liberal criticism underwent its deepest
schism of the entire post-Soviet era. The main source of the schism was the question
about the relationship between xenophobia and anti-Westernism in literature and
ideology; less apparent were questions about the relationship to the 1990s as a stage in
the development of Russian letters and the relationship to the aesthetic innovations
of the early 2000s.
The first great scandal was precipitated by the cultural legitimation of the
far-right novelist and pundit Aleksandr Prokhanov. Prokhanov was known in the
seventies and eighties as the author of novels celebrating the clandestine activities
of the KGB and Soviet imperialist interventions in various countries—Nicaragua,
Mozambique, Cambodia, and so forth. The style was reminiscent of 1940s Stalinist
socialist realism, with a thin veneer of the English-language spy novel in the spirit
of John Le Carré. After the publication of Prokhanov’s Iadernyi shchit (The Nuclear
Shield, 1984), a work of punditry, in which he argued in favor of the necessity of
strengthening the Soviet military forces, he was awarded the sobriquet “Nightin-
gale of the General HQ” by liberal critics. In the nineties Prokhanov became edi-
tor in chief of the ultranationalist paper Zavtra, where he published ideologues and
writers who called the Russian government “agents of Zionism” and an “occupy-
ing regime,” foisted upon Russia by the West. Small presses in small runs published
his novels, which now soaked in nostalgia for an omnipotent Cold War-era KGB.
Prokhanov’s position rapidly changed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He began
to appear regularly on television talk shows as a political pundit, and in 2002 his
novel Gospodin Geksogen (Mr. Hexogen), scarcely distinguishable in its ideological
orientation and artistic quality from his earlier work was published by Ad Margi-
nem, a house specializing in translations of French poststructuralist philosophy and
Russian experimental prose. That same year Prokhanov was awarded the highly en-
dowed National Bestseller Prize for his novel. Prokhanov’s subsequent novels have
been published by even more prestigious publishers (such as Amfora [Amphora] and
Ul’tra-Kul’tura [Ultra-Culture]) in rather large print runs.
Remarkably, throughout Ad Marginem’s preparations for Gospodin Geksogen’s
publication, from the signing of the contract through publication and the awarding
of the prize, these events were closely watched and favorably discussed in the liberal
newspaper Ex Libris NG, whose contributors were predominantly younger critics.41
The apotheosis of this propaganda campaign was an essay by the journalist Dmit-
rii Ol’shanskii, “Kak ia stal chernosotentsem” (How I Became a Black Hundred), in
which he unyoked himself from his “liberal past,” proclaiming himself a nationalist
and a supporter of ruthless imperial étatism, denouncing Russian literature of the
nineties as “liberal, Booker-prize carrion,” and, as a statement of his new faith, clos-
ing with the words: “The best Russian writer of 2002 is Aleksandr Prokhanov.”42
Danilkin was even more assiduous proselytizer for Prokhanov, publishing a collec-
tion of interviews with the novelist and, in the magazine Afisha, covering the public-
ity event that Prokhanov and his Ad Marginem publishers, Aleksandr Ivanov and
Mikhail Kotomin, mounted in the industrial center of Lipetsk.43
Observers of the Gospodin Geksogen affair understood or sensed that the point
of Danilkin’s propaganda was intended not only to promote a best-selling book
or scandalous author, but it was an attempt at rearranging the cultural space as a
whole. What Prokhanov’s public triumph really represented was a clear expression
of broader tendencies that spread throughout Russian culture in the late 1990s and
early 2000s: a strengthening of xenophobic sentiment and rising “great power” nos-
talgia. Such revanchist tendencies have now been coupled with a wider interest in
new modes of consumption and a new Western, postmodern everyday lifestyle. As a
result, a number of authors who combined nationalist, xenophobic, and isolationist
rhetoric with the motifs of technological modernization and a belief in media and
political and technological omnipotence obtained a far greater significance than be-
fore. Such a combination that once would have seemed impossible has become rife in
mass-market fantasy literature, rock music, film, and other cultural spheres.
The scandal surrounding Prokhanov’s novel was not only a symptom of the re-
turn of “traditional” nationalists (both critics and novelists) to the active cultural cen-
ter, but it served as catalyst for the formation of other groupings, for younger critics
of a modernizing bent with ambitions of assuming the role of intellectual leaders and
arbiters of taste: Danilkin, Ol’shanskii, Pirogov, and others. They disliked the amor-
phousness and fragmentation of the literary sphere of the 1990s with its concomitant
lack of social significance and role for literature. To them the emergence of an array
of ambitious and energetically written novels with pretensions to solving the prob-
lems of Russia’s past and present (for example, the novels of Prokhanov, Bykov, and
Aleksei Ivanov) was and remains indicative of the birth of a “normal” literature.
This turn was primarily anti-intellectualist. It is telling that Danilkin, not only
in his writings on Prokhanov but also in his assessment of Russian culture as a whole,
borrowed Ad Marginem publisher Aleksandr Ivanov’s pithy phrase “the Russian
chthon” (a neologism from the word chthonic)—a sort of analogue to “Russian mel-
ancholy” but associatively linked with the visceral and the soil, as the highest value
of the nationalists, and charged with the “nation-building” energy.
The literary and cultural production that has passed unnoticed by the “chthonic”
critics became the focus for yet another group of critics in opposition to both nation-
alists (young and old) and “thick journal liberals.” These were critics, who, much
like Aizenberg, Krivulin, L’vovskii, and Aleksandr Skidan (Gol’dshtein shared their
views to a certain extent), regarded themselves as the inheritors of the uncensored
Russian literature of the twentieth century, with aesthetic coordinates determined

by modernist tendencies in foreign literatures. In contrast to the liberal critics who
came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, the attitude of this grouping to Soviet literature
was negative, and the early twenty-first-century legitimation of ultranationalist ide-
ology was seen by them not as a triumph of postmodernism, but as the triumph of
a revanchist nostalgia for Soviet culture.44 A position close to theirs was taken by
the young academic critics of the new generation: Irina Kaspe, Aleksandr Chant-
sev, and Iuliia Idlis (also known as a poet), who, as a rule, were all well acquainted
with twentieth-century foreign literatures. The new uncensored poets and young
academic critics (to draw a sharp distinction between the two is impossible, they con-
stitute a single community) published in the same journals—above all, in NLO and
Kriticheskaia massa.
The strategy of young academic criticism was to survey contemporary cultural
production throughout its most various and widest contexts. The starting point they
assumed was anchored in unofficial and émigré literature rather than Soviet: young
academic critics did not reject Soviet literature outright (as their opponents claimed),
but read it in the “shadow” of unofficial and émigré culture, drawing a new map of
twentieth-century Russian literature. Equally, for them the contrast between recent
Russian and foreign literature was content- rather than value-based. Finally, repre-
sentatives of the young academic school of criticism single-mindedly sought out and
analyzed connections between Russian literature and other forms of cultural activ-
ity: mass media, the visual arts, theater, cinema, and so on.

As we have seen, the ideological tenets of Soviet criticism were no longer man-
datory in the twenty-first century; in the Putin era such ideological formations as
“liberal traditionalist” or “antiliberal yuppie” were not only possible, but also per-
ceived as logically connected phenomena. However, despite the novelty of such
ideological “welding,” polemics between camps and tendencies continued. We find
advocates for “chthonic,” neomythological, and large-scale novels that are ideologi-
cally motivated and aim for immediate social impact; on the other hand, we also find
young academics who write about experimental poetry and “difficult” prose and
who try to predict literary developments to come. Each group understands literary
success differently. The former locates it in immediate social resonance, the latter in
covert influence on processes of cultural and mental transformation over time. The
former appeals to the emerging middle classes, young yuppies, socialites, and so on;
the latter, overwhelmingly to university students, intellectuals, and members of the
artistic community.
It is difficult to say whether the contemporary disposition of critical trends is
just another guise of the long-standing intellectual struggle between Slavophiles and
Westernizers, traditionalists and modernists, and nationalists and liberals, or whether
a new, inchoate polarity is emerging in twenty-first-century Russian literary criti-
cism. Regardless, it is impossible not to agree with Dubin’s diagnosis, one applicable
to post-Soviet criticism, albeit formulated in a different context: “It is hard to es-

cape the suspicion that wherever unchanging or relentlessly repetitive structures of
chronic conflict occur, they are in their own way traumatic.”45 The final word refers
in the context of post-Soviet literary criticism to the recurring trauma of modern-
ization and the responses it elicits—not only ideological, but also aesthetic, cultural,
and social.
 POST-SOVIET LITERARY STUDIES
15

THE REBIRTH OF ACADEMISM
NANCY CONDEE AND EUGENIIA KUPSAN
Paradigmatic Shifts
In the 1990s, three fundamental shifts took place in Russian academic and intel-
lectual cultures, contributing to formations that were at the same time disruptive
and newly determinate of one another. The first of these shifts concerned the forum
for scholarship. As argued in the preceding chapter, journal culture for the academic,
metropolitan intelligentsia in the decade following 1991 gradually ceased to be posi-
tioned at the very center of intellectual debates. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the
period is this: the moment when the ideological and logistical conditions permitted
the launch of independent periodicals, responsive to the increasing diversity of read-
ership, was historically the same moment when journal culture—for infrastructural
reasons, but also in the realm of ideas—ceased to hold the same centripetal power to
pull together ongoing debates.
Yet it cannot be argued that the era of “thick” journals had passed. As Andrei
Dmitriev remarked, “Russian thick journals are a familiar, organic, cultural idio-
syncrasy . . . like the monarchy in England,” and no major writer, with the exception
of Vladimir Sorokin, had moved into cultural visibility without passing through the
crucible of journal debates.1 A key counterweight was the activity of new publish-
ing houses—Vagrius, Ad Marginem, and (later) NLO2—as well as older publish-
306
POST-SOVIET LITERARY STUDIES  307
ing companies, such as Molodaia gvardiia, which were able in the 1990s to produce
monographs and edited volumes with greater alacrity than in the Soviet period.
An unintended consequence of this speed and flexibility, however, was an in-
frastructural glitch: the book-publishing industry had no corresponding rate of re-
sponse for announcements, discussion, and review on the pages of the major “thick”
journals. As Lev Gudkov points out, if in the 1970s most major publications could
expect some critical assessment in the periodical press—by Gudkov’s estimate, a rel-
atively high 12 percent of all publications received reviews—then by the end of the
1990s a mere 0.02 to 0.05 percent of published books received reviews.3 Through the
1990s, the interdependency of journal and book publication at each stage of circu-
lation—production, distribution, consumption, review—would undergo profound
changes vis-à-vis each other, as well as with respect to Internet publishing.4
A second shift of the immediate post-Soviet period concerned the profile of par-
ticipants in contemporary debates. The end of Soviet cultural restrictions permitted
a freer circulation of texts by émigré scholars, as well as their tighter integration into
Russian intellectual life (in seminars, conferences, collaborative research projects),
even as Russian-based scholars began to appear more frequently in Western schol-
arly journals and symposia. Losing its ideological character, the “Russian scholar”
thereby became a more loosely defined participant in the intellectual economy, a
bearer of linguistic and cultural markers untethered to geography or ethnicity. It is
an open question whether the term Russian scholar is not already an empty category.
A third shift in the 1990s concerned the diversity of ideological positions, prom-
ising greater cohesion within intellectual subcultures, even as it eroded professional
cohesion, except as marketplace. While the Soviet century had been marked by a
strong tendency to understand culture as a set of eternally bifurcating practices (lib-
eral and conservative; urban and village prose; unofficial and official, and subdistinc-
tions, such as dissident culture and parallel culture), the late twentieth century and
the early years of this century saw the emergence of intellectual clusters with only
attenuated concern for the research assumptions of other groups. If, for example,
Andrei Zorin sought a common theoretical substratum in Iurii Lotman and Clifford
Geertz (in, for example, his 2001 Kormia dvuglavogo orla [Feeding the Two-Headed
Eagle]), that effort need have little reverberation for Mikhail Epshtein, seeking com-
mon ground in dialogue with both Nikolai Berdyaev and Carl Jung. Similarly, the
discursive universe established by Mikhail Zolotonosov, engaging in analysis of lit-
erary texts informed by Freudian psychoanalysis (Slovo i telo [Word and Body, 1999]),
need not share any metacoordinates whatsoever with Mikhail Berg’s Literaturokratiia
(Literaturocracy, 2000), engaged with the sociological categories of Michel Bour-
dieu: different theoretical abstractions coexisted in parallel debates.
These three structuring elements (forum, participants, and ideological diversity)
will inform this effort to make sense of the scholarly universe after 1991. Our inter-
ests are less about who’s who than some preliminary remarks about the functionality
of new knowledge systems, their emergent rules of inclusion and exclusion, and the
ways in which material culture, including the changing fate of journals as temporary
residences for emergent knowledge practices, informs that knowledge.
308  NANCY CONDEE AND EUGENIIA KUPSAN
Let us return then briefly to the first of these shifts mentioned above, the state
of journals and their changing relation to post-Soviet publishing houses. The year
1990 saw the founding of Mikhail Berg and Mikhail Sheinker’s Vestnik novoi liter-
atury (1990–1996), “the first legal Soviet journal of ‘second culture,’” a distinction
attributable to the 12 June 1990 law “O pechati i drugikh sredstvakh massovoi in-
formatsii” (On the press and other means of mass information), ending censorship
and exclusivity of state publishing.5 Together with the older Mitin zhurnal, Vestnik
novoi literatury became a significant platform for postmodernist writing, publishing
such key figures as Dmitry Prigov, Viktor Krivulin, Evgeny Popov, and Viacheslav
Kuritsyn. In contrast to Mitin zhurnal, Vestnik novoi literatury was a de facto (if not lit-
erally de anno) post-Soviet periodical, born in the USSR’s last year. It is here—in the
nuanced differences between the late Soviet Mitin zhurnal and the (for all but months)
post-Soviet Vestnik novoi literatury—that we might look for the emergence of the new
literary journals.
Berg is a useful figure in this argument because in his work, both as editor and
as a scholar and critic, we might trace the transition from Soviet nonconformity
(through his participation in debates on postmodernism) to an eventual attempt
by the end of the century to move beyond postmodernism to a new theoretical ru-
bric. By 2000, his Literaturokratiia took as its analytic field the period from the 1960s
through the 1990s, a sociocultural space of contention among writers for status and
power. Postmodernism, far from the emancipatory script welcomed by alternative
culture in the late 1980s, had become for Berg by the end of the 1990s the object of
study as a kind of chip played by cultural figures in a bid for cultural heft.
Berg’s Vestnik novoi literatury was by no means the only early periodical to re-
spond to this historical shift. Prose writer Aleksandr Davydov, former editor of the
1989 almanac Vest’, together with St. Petersburg poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko,
established Kommentarii (1991–), a post-Soviet elite “journal of future consciousness”
that strove for intellectual engagement with issues of postmodernism, taking Znamia
as its point of departure.6 In its effort to “grapple with postmodernism and the chal-
lenges it posed to a literary system unprepared to account for it” (quotation from a
personal conversation with Aleksandr Davydov), Kommentarii would occupy a niche
distinct from that of Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (NLO, 1992–), soon to appear on the
horizon.7 While NLO would set out to be primarily a philological journal that might
also publish work on or by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, or Georges Bataille,
Kommentarii is a theory journal that may also publish literature.
Early scholarship on postmodernism brought a striking range of assumptions
to bear on that cultural practice. Mikhail Epshtein engaged in a search for a basis
to recover a latent unity, a quest for parallels linking the early twentieth-century
cultural heritage with late-twentieth-century postmodernism. From his Paradoksy
novizny (The Paradoxes of Novelty, 1988) through his Vera i obraz (Faith and Image,
1994) to his Postmodern v Rossii (Postmodernism in Russia, 2000) and onward, Epsh-
tein knitted together Vasilii Rozanov’s and Nikolai Berdyaev’s mystical philosophy
with a revision of Derrida’s deconstructionist practices. A recurrent concern is reli-
gious philosophical consciousness, and yet, at the level of textual analysis—examin-
ing such diverse practices as Ilya Kabakov’s installations and Venedikt Erofeev’s short
prose—Epshtein provides a vocabulary for understanding new directions among a
wide range of contemporary figures.
A radical contrast to Epshtein’s postatheist spirituality and search for new unity
is Mark Lipovetsky’s research on postmodernism. In his Russkii postmodernizm (Rus-
sian Postmodernism, 1997), his English-language Russian Postmodernist Fiction (1999),
and Paralogii (Paralogies, 2008), Lipovetsky draws, on the one hand, on debates relat-
ing to chaos theory and, on the other, on poststructuralist thinkers (Michel Foucault
and Jean-François Lyotard) to offer readings of texts by Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov,
Venedikt and Viktor Erofeev, Evgeny Popov, Tatyana Tolstaya, and others. Rus-
sian postmodernism must be seen, Lipovetskii contends, as one of the responses to
the historical traumas of the twentieth century—principally, revolution and Stalin-
ism—a reaction linked to an awareness of metanarrative’s crisis and the dead end of
a cultural consciousness not only inadequate to withstand the historical catastrophes,
but also bearing responsibility for them.
Paschal Archetype, Positivism, and Beyond
If postmodernism—both as artistic practice and a set of analytic assumptions—

was a dominant concern for many of the newly emergent journals and monographs
of the early 1990s, it was not the only reaction to Soviet constraints. The vacuum left
by Soviet ideology was replaced in part by what might be described as a new kind of
orthodox rigidity. From the mid-1990s, this tendency—deriving from early twen-
tieth-century Russian religious philosophy, forbidden in the Soviet period, then in-
tensified by post-Soviet attention to issues of faith and the Church—crystallized as
a particular form of dogmatic discourse, in which literature’s virtues were vetted by
their correspondence to religious and ethical norms. Orthodox faith (whether or not
it was shared by the writer) came to define critical reaction to the author’s work: dis-
respect toward the Church or religion was censured as blasphemy. The artist’s or the
hero’s awareness of God (necessarily, an Orthodox God) was presented as the work’s
goal, while categories of ecclesiasticism (tserkovnost’), conciliarism (sobornost’), and the
paschal archetype (paskhal’nost’) became aesthetic, moreover, evaluative terms.
Noteworthy in this regard is the historical research of Ivan Esaulov, Iurii Mine
ralov, and Mikhail Dunaev; Mariia Virolainen’s and Valentin Nepomniashchii’s
work on Pushkin; Karen Stepanian’s on Dostoevsky; as well as such collective ef-
forts as the conferences “Evangel’skii tekst v russkoi literature” (The Gospel Text
in Russian Literature; Petrozavodsk, 1994–), “Russkaia literatura XIX veka i khris-
tianstvo” (Russian Literature of the Nineteenth Century and Christianity, 1997),
and the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ (IRLI-
RAN) four-volume Khristianstvo i russkaia literatura (Christianity and Russian Litera-
ture, 1994–2002).8
A radically different direction in the discursive transformation of literary schol-
arship is represented by the turn to new positivism, utterly incompatible with both
the “objective” truth claims of Marxism-Leninism and newly acquired Orthodox
understandings of truth. The positivist initiative of the 1990s found expression in

distinct ways across the three fields outlined above: publishing, scholarly profile, and
varied theoretical practices of the early to mid-1990s. Among journal responses to
new positivism, an outstanding example was Aleksandr Galushkin’s and Aleksandr
Rozenshtrom’s short-lived but invaluable De visu (1992–1995), with its focus on the
early twentieth century from symbolism through the instatement of socialist real-
ism.9 A goldmine of archival materials, bibliographies, and erudite scholarship, the
journal was one of the most interesting periodicals of this era.
Another aspect of the positivist turn in literary scholarship was the robust
growth in such genres as the encyclopedia and commentary. In addition to ency-
clopedias dedicated to individual writers (from Bulgakov to the Strugatsky broth-
ers), their number includes the six-volume biographical dictionary Russkie pisateli,
1800–1917 (Russian Writers, 1800–1917; edited by P. A. Nikolaev, 1989–1999); the
two-volume Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka (Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century
Russian Writers; edited by A. M. Panchenko, 1989–1999); and the one-volume bio-
graphical dictionary Russkie pisateli XX veka (Twentieth-Century Russian Writers;
edited P. A. Nikolaev, 2000). The last of these elicited a polemic for its inclusion of
“politically incorrect” authors, yet it remains the most convenient volume on the
twentieth century. Such a list is incomplete without two other contributions: An-
drei Krusanov’s three-volume chronicle of the Russian avant-garde, Russkii avangard:
1907–1932 (Istoricheskii obzor) (The Russian Avant-Garde, 1907–1932: A Historical
Survey; 1996–2003); and the multi-volume Literaturnaia zhizn’ Rossii 1920-kh godov:
Sobytiia, otzyvy sovremennikov, bibliografiia (The Literary Life of Russia in the 1920s:
Events, Contemporary Echoes, Bibliography; ed. A. Iu. Galushkin, 2005–).
Among the many commentaries, particular attention might be given Iurii
Shcheglov’s “reader’s companion” to Ilya Il’f and Evgeny Petrov’s famous Dvenadtsat’
stulev (Twelve Chairs) and Zolotoi telenok (Little Golden Calf ), as well as commentaries by
David Fel’dman and Mikhail Odesskii to the first complete version of Twelve Chairs
(1997). Two other invaluable contributions are Iurii Levin’s (1996) and Eduard Vlasov’s
(2007) meticulous commentaries to Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki.
The context of commentaries in many respects defined the scholarly trajectory
of Mikhail Gasparov (1935–2005), already recognized in the 1970s and 1980s for his
groundbreaking work on versification (especially his theory of the poetic meter’s se-
mantic “halo”). In the post-Soviet period, Gasparov produced work in history as
well as the methodology of literary scholarship, becoming an original ideologue
of the positivist direction in scholarship. In articles collected in his Zapiski i vypiski
(Notes and Excerpts, 2000), as well as in his later article “K obmenu mnenii o per-
spektivakh literaturovedeniia” (A Contribution to the Exchange of Views on the
Prospects of Literary Studies), Gasparov formulated an original ethics inhering in
the positivist approach to literary scholarship, contrasting itself as much to Mikhail
Bakhtin as to all possible forms of literature’s ideologization.10
No less sharply did Gasparov’s positivism delineate itself from postmodernist
methodologies. In Caryl Emerson’s characterization, Gasparov’s work was distin-
guished by a “fierce adherence to the principle—a principle steeped in secularization
and irony—of ‘distrust of the word.’ That distrust—Gasparov spoke of it already in

1979—was key to philology: it ‘disabused human beings of spiritual egocentrism,’ a
fairly natural condition of humanistic research.” For Gasparov, Emerson continues,
philology’s morality lies in the consciousness that “the written artifact, which I ana-
lyze at a given moment, was addressed in its own time not to me and was delivered
not in my language; and it consequently is indifferent to my values and is in no way
beholden to interpretation with an emphasis on my personal demands and needs.”11
Close to such philologists as Mikhail Gasparov and Vladimir Toporov was
Maksim Shapir (1962–2006), whose interests were likewise in the field of poetics. A
philologist, historian, and theoretician of science, founder and chief editor of Philo-
logica, a journal of Russian theoretical philology, Shapir worked on the creation of a
universal theory of verse, turning his attention to the most diverse systems of verse
construction from syllabic to vers libre, from Simeon Polotskii to Sots Art.
One beneficial outcome of this turn to positivism was a trove of new research
on nineteenth-century literature.12 While the late-Soviet period had had no dearth
of outstanding scholarship, for example, on Pushkin—Iurii Lotman’s Aleksandr Ser-
geevich Pushkin (1983) or Natan Eidel’man’s Pushkin: Iz biografii i tvorchestva, 1826–1837
(Pushkin: From His Life and Work, 1987)—the next decade saw such meticulous
new scholarship as Oleg Proskurin’s Poeziia Pushkina, ili, Podvizhnyi palimpsest (Push-
kin’s Poetry, or the Mobile Palimpsest, 1999). Proskurin’s analysis of the historical
and textual encounters of Pushkin with Vasilii Zhukovsky and Konstantin Batiush-
kov contributed to this already rich field. His account of the movement in Pushkin’s
later work toward the developed, individual subject caused less controversy than his
portrayal of Vladimir Lenskii as Eugene Onegin’s poet pornographer; still, the work
as a whole, as well as his subsequent Literaturnye skandaly pushkinskoi epokhi (Liter-
ary Scandals in the Age of Pushkin, 2000) marked the ascent of a new generation
of Pushkin scholars. Among older scholarly projects, Mstislav Tsiavlovskii’s Vokrug
Pushkina (Around Pushkin, 2000), based on diaries (1928–1965), brought to light a
painstaking account of all available historical information on Pushkin’s epoch, as
well as portraits of contemporaries.
The return to positivist research unencumbered by an assigned ideological
position enabled scholars to explore the darker sides of literary classics. Elena Tol-
staia’s study of Anton Chekhov (Poetika razdrazheniia [Poetics of Irritation], 2002)
runs sharply counter to the worshipful treatment of the chrestomathic playwright:
her Chekhov is a misanthrope, at times an anti-Semite and a compulsively spiteful
man. Reconstructing key aspects of Chekhov’s relation to Dmitry Merezhkovsky,
Zinaida Gippius, and lesser-known Silver Age figures such as Ieronim Iasinskii, the
work focuses on Chekhov’s middle period (1888–1895). Tolstaia looks anew at the
assumed opposition of late realism, where Chekhov was conventionally situated, to
emergent modernism, of which his work, she would contend, was a symptom.
The 1990s, moreover, provided a foundation for research on cultural figures
who had been problematic for Soviet orthodoxy. Dmitrii Bykov’s Boris Pasternak
(2005), for example, unlike a conventional biography, takes the reader through the
writer’s opus with attention to the poet’s own interiority. Roman Timenchik’s Anna
Akhmatova v 1960-e gody (Anna Akhmatova in the 1960s, 2005) blends narrative biog-
raphy with autobiographical references to his own meeting with the poet and appro-
priates aspects of her language patterns—ellipses, Aesopian speech, silence—in his
own framing of his subject matter.
Of the many new monographs on the early twentieth-century literature, wor-
thy of mention here are not only works of well-known scholars, issuing from the
major houses, but also works from regional or provincial presses, less likely to attract
notice, on such twentieth-century figures as Viacheslav Ivanov, Osip Mandelstam,
Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Isaac Babel.13
The Stalin era posed a uniquely difficult task for post-Soviet scholarship: what
kinds of new thinking could contribute to this murky and contradictory field? The
perestroika era had been rich in scholarship across many disciplines—from philology
to photography to museum studies—with an emphasis on documentary knowledge,
witnessing, and the poetics of exposure. Much postperestroika research turned, by
contrast, to social processes and patterns of subjectivity less rooted in individual
testimony.
Among the works of the 1990s that played a pivotal role in dismantling core
assumptions of totalitarianism in literature were Evgeny Dobrenko’s Formovka
sovetskogo chitatelia (1997; English translation, The Making of the State Reader, 1997) and
Formovka sovetskogo pisatelia (1999; English translation, The Making of the State Writer,
2001). Written at polemical crosspurposes to the dominant assumptions of Cold
War theorizing, Dobrenko’s studies argued inter alia that there was little need after
the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers to regulate literature from above
and outside; it had become a self-monitoring system. Dobrenko’s later work, Poli-
tekonomiia sotsrealizma (2007; English translation: Political Economy of Socialist Realism,
2007), positions that artistic doctrine as the central production apparatus for social-
ism, requiring the de-realizing of Soviet life and processing human experience so as
to support the spectacle of socialism seamlessly through diverse fields of literature,
photography, song, film, painting, biology, advertising, and other arenas of Soviet
discourse.
Dobrenko is among a cluster of scholars responsible for a profound recasting
of the Stalin period. Leading scholars in this field, anchored in the research of Vera
Dunham, Katerina Clark, and Hans Günther, have also drawn upon work with
an emphasis on visual culture, including by Boris Groys, Igor’ Golomshtok, and
Vladimir Papernyi.14 Other distinctive work, rooted in discourse analysis, includes
Israel-based Mikhail Vaiskopf’s Pisatel’ Stalin (Stalin as Writer, 2001), which turns to
the leader’s collected works for its primary investigation, examining Stalin’s speech
practices, its Christian, pagan, and folk-mythological references; its conceptions of
“we” and “they,” “we” and “I”; his system of dualities (faith and faithlessness, whole
and part). Vaiskopf discovers an impoverished vocabulary and syntactic range but a
rich symbolic universe that situates Stalin as a distinct discursive subject.
While less attention has been devoted to literature of the Thaw and Stagnation
periods, new tendencies are nevertheless evident. Thaw culture first received striking
reconceptualization in Pyotr Vail’ and Aleksandr Genis’s Shestidesiatye: Mir sovetskogo
cheloveka (The 1960s: The World of Soviet Man, 1988; reprinted by NLO in 1996).
Relying on a broad range of material from periodical publications, as well as personal
reminiscences, the authors draw upon Barthian mythologies in their description of
the Soviet sixties, from Gagarin to Solzhenitsyn; Khrushchev to Hemingway; Ev-
tushenko to America, in combination with the cult of Cuba. Describing these and
other phenomena of Thaw culture, the authors come to a disquieting conclusion:
“Perhaps the history of the sixties was the history of the transformation of one meta-
phor (‘communism’) to another (‘empire’)” (278 in the 1996 reprint).
On the whole (and in contrast to scholarship on the Stalin period), interest in
these two epochs was focused on personalia, especially authors marginalized in offi-
cial Soviet culture. Thus, literary scholar and critic Vladimir Novikov, author of the
first critical monograph on Vladimir Vysotskii (V Soiuze Pisatelei ne sostoial [I Haven’t
Been a Member of the Writers’ Union], 1989), published Vysotskii (2005), a biography
narrated in direct speech, periodically shifting to internal monologue. While this
technique leads to a reduction of critical reflexivity, it nevertheless represents an ex-
perimental effort at reconstructing the bard’s inner world. A similarly subjectivized
biography of another 1960s idol is Dmitrii Bykov’s Bulat Okudzhava (2009), written
four years after his Boris Pasternak.
Lev Losev’s Iosif Brodskii (2008)— a contribution (like Novikov’s Vysotskii and
Bykov’s Pasternak) to Molodaia gvardiia’s series, “Life of Remarkable People”—
spanned biography and literary analysis, tracing the poet’s development from one of
Akhmatova’s “orphans” to the first U.S. Poet Laureate born abroad. Boris F. Egorov’s
assessment of Iurii Lotman provided a much-needed account of his contribution to
twentieth-century culture, including such sensitive subjects as Lotman’s relationship
to Marxism.15
Valuable contributions to the study of Stagnation culture were the collection
Semidesiatye kak predmet istorii russkoi kul’tury (The 1970s as Subject of the History of
Russian Culture, 1998) and Stanislav Savitskii’s Andergraund (Istoriia i mify leningrads-
koi neofitsial’noi literatury) (Underground: The History and Myths of Leningrad Infor-
mal Culture, 2002). On the basis of interviews and meticulous cultural archaeology,
Savitskii reconstructs the infrastructure of the Leningrad underground, tracing such
subjects as the history of publication (or rather nonpublication) of Andrei Bitov’s
Pushkinskii dom (English translation: Pushkin House, 1987).16 Similarly relying on in-
numerable interviews, but focusing on individual authors’ portraits, Vladislav Kula-
kov’s Poeziia kak fakt (Poetry as Fact, 1999) is an account of Moscow’s underground
poets of the 1950s–1980s.
One of several efforts at a broader conceptualization of Thaw and Stagnation
literature was the textbook by Naum Leiderman and Mark Lipovetsky, Sovremennaia
russkaia literatura: 1950-90-e gody (Modern Russian Literature: 1950s–1990s, 2003). In
their survey of a single, unified context comprised of official Soviet literature, un-
derground, and émigré literatures, the authors suggest that in all three environments
one might trace the development of shared aesthetic tendencies: modernism, shifting
in the 1970s–1980s underground and in post-Soviet literature to postmodernism; the
realist tradition, mutating into a distinct hybrid of modernism and realism (“post-
realism”); and socialist realism, which degrades during Thaw and Stagnation in its
official version, but transforms itself into a liberal “socialist realism with a human
face” in the nationalist-realist novel of the 1980s.
A markedly different approach to literature was launched by those scholars who
turned to intertextuality as a seminal methodological approach. In his Bluzhdaiush-
chie sny (Floating Dreams, 1992) and later in Izbrannye stat’ti (Selected Articles, 2005),
Alexander Zholkovsky provides a close intertextual reading of works ranging from
the classical cannon (Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy) to the Soviet period (Zoshchenko,
Mandelstam, Bulgakov, Olesha) to late and post-Soviet literature (Limonov). “Bad
writing”—the normative deviations of a Khlebnikov or Limonov—and hybridiza-
tion—as in the uneasy compatibilities of Zoshchenko or Okudzhava—combine to
reveal a network of references and common, base texts contributing to modernism’s
rich reverberations across historical periods. By the late 1990s, Zholkovsky was ap-
plying this approach to the life-creating strategies of the Russian modernists, re-
vealing profound similarities between the positions of nonconformist writers and
the discourses of totalitarian power, most convincingly in Akhmatova’s and Zosh-
chenko’s writings.17
Mikhail Vaiskopf offers a different variant of intertextuality, concentrating pri-
marily on mythological and folkloric intertexts. In his volumes on Gogol (Siuzhet
Gogolia [Gogol’s Plot], 1993) and Mayakovsky (Vo ves’ golos: Religiia Maiakovskogo [At
the Top of My Voice: Mayakovsky’s Religion], 1997), as well as in Ptitsa-Troika i kole-
snitsa dushi (The Troika Bird and the Chariot of the Soul, 2003), Vaiskopf reconstructs
artistic worlds as a distinct form of a mythological system, intentionally or unin-
tentionally engaging with religious traditions. Thus, his book on Gogol, relying on
Proppian morphological analysis, singles out mytho-symbolic elements of Gogol’s
metasubject, exposing on closer examination a similarity with Gnostic teachings.
The analysis of Mayakovsky’s work similarly allows us to understand his postrevo-
lutionary aesthetic as a Bolshevik theology of Godmanhood, linked with a negation
of traditional religious myths.
In yet a different mode of intertextuality, Larisa Vol’pert’s Pushkin v roli Push-
kina (Pushkin in the Role of Pushkin, 1998) looks to French literature as an inform-
ing script for episodes in Pushkin’s biography. Pushkin’s performative practices are
likewise examined in Igor’ Nemirovskii’s Tvorchestvo Pushkina i problema publichnogo
povedeniia poeta (Pushkin’s Creative Work and the Problem of the Poet’s Public Be-
havior, 2003).
In Mikhail Iampol’skii’s work—primarily in Bespamiatstvo kak istok (chitaia
Kharmsa) (Unconsciousness as Source [Reading Kharms], 1998), intertextuality ac-
quires an entirely different meaning. At issue here is not the conscious dialogue be-
tween author and cultural context. Instead, elaborating on analogous research in his
earlier Pamiat’ Tiresiia: Intertekstual’nost’ i kinematograf (Tiresias’ Memory: Intertextu-
ality and the Cinema, 1993), as well as Babel’/Babel (1994), coauthored with Alexander
Zholkovsky, Iampol’skii concentrates on the act of reading: how the Kharmsian text
inscribes itself into fundamental cultural linkages, corresponding to and transform-
ing ancient and newly forged cultural meanings.18 His Demon i labirint (Demon and
Labyrinth, 1996), dedicated to an analysis of corporality, contains unexpected, even

provocational interpretations of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Eisenstein, and Borges. In more
recent work, Iampol’skii moves away from literature, shifting his focus to prob-
lems of representation and visual culture in a broader political context. Such works
as Vozvrashchenie Leviafana: Politicheskaia teologiia, reprezentatsiia vlasti i konets starogo
rezhima (The Return of Leviathan: Political Theology, the Representation of Power,
and the End of the Old Regime, 2004)—the first volume of the longer work Fizio
logiia simvolicheskogo (Physiology of the Symbolic)—retain an interest, traceable from
intellectual exchanges with Valerii Podoroga and other colleagues at the Institute of
Philosophy, in issues of power and violence, their corporeal traces and signs.
Re-professionalization of the Field
The mid-1990s marked a crisis for utopian journal projects with no prospect of
commercial success in an environment with as yet minimal foundation support. The
most extravagant gestures were journals devoted to a single author or—at the wid-
est scope—an author’s cultural context. Of these, the most interesting was Nikolai
Pan’kov’s Vitebsk-Moscow journal Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop (1992–2003; resumed
in 2009 in Ufa by Boris Orekhov), which described itself as “a journal of research
quests on the biography, theoretical legacy, and epoch of M. M. Bakhtin.” This
imaginative and erudite journal attracted some of the brightest members of Russia’s
intelligentsia and international Slavists, including Dmitry Likhachev, Sergei Aver-
intsev, Sergei Bocharov, Hans Günther, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Vladimir Bibler.19
Such single-author efforts were different from the growing and strategically
planned special-issue format, such as Literaturnoe obozrenie’s outrageously successful
November 1991 issue (reprinted by popular demand in 1992) on erotic literature, in
which no conventional lacunae were observed, and full spelling was provided for
vulgar words. Special issues soon became a regular practice for Literaturnoe obozrenie
until its eventual disappearance for financial reasons in 2001.
The privatization of the elite press brought a re-professionalization, new stan-
dards for (what earlier had been) unofficial culture, and new demands produced by
and within the emerging marketplace. Evidence of this new professionalization,
as haphazard as it was relentless, might appear diverse; yet the founding of pri-
vate schools, for example, was inseparable from the founding of private publishing
houses, independent bookstores, and private literary prizes, such as the Booker Prize
(December 1992).20 April 1992 saw the launch of Vagrius, the first large-scale, post-
Soviet publishing house. 21 In October 1992, the first private bookstore, 19 October
Salon, opened its doors at First Kazachii Lane and managed, despite its uninhibited
unprofitibility, to survive until 17 November 1997, soon followed by Gileia, Letnii
sad (Pleasure Garden), and Ad Marginem, which also served as an outlet for the Ad
Marginem book series, launched in 1992 by independently minded schismatics from
the Institute of Philosophy.22
These scholars unabashedly deviated from the Academy of Sciences to which
they were affiliated. Suffice it to quote philosopher Valerii Podoroga in the annual
almanac, Ad Marginem 93, on the tasks of the Ad Marginem group: “one of the goals
of this [almanac] collection—and we admit that it cannot but inspire us—consists
in injecting our guiltless, but ‘very scholarly’ and ‘very religious’ Soviet culture
with appropriate dosages of incomprehensibility. Even, perhaps as yet inadequate
dosages.”23
By the mid-1990s, French poststructuralism and psychoanalysis had already be-
come fields of intense debate in the metropolitan intelligentsia. Jacques Derrida had
visited Moscow in February 1990; his lectures, massively attended, were followed by
Mikhail Ryklin’s translations and commentary on the first Russian-language vol-
ume of his work, Zhak Derrida v Moskve: Dekonstruktsiia puteshestviia (Jacques Derrida
in Moscow: A Deconstruction of the Journey, 1993), which appeared within weeks
of a major Russo-French conference on psychoanalysis (Moscow, March 1993).
To be sure, psychoanalytically inflected works of literary scholarship had been
in circulation long before the early 1990s. A founder of Russian psychoanalysis (in-
deed, the founder of the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society in 1921), Ivan Ermakov had
been interested in potential linkages between culture and psychoanalysis. His work,
engaging questions on the Russian classical heritage including Pushkin, Gogol, and
Dostoevsky, continued to be republished through the 1990s.
Simultaneously, however, new research in this direction began to appear: first of
all, Aleksandr Etkind’s Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii (1993; English
translation, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, 1997) and Sodom
i Psikheia: Ocherki intellektual’noi istorii Serebriannogo veka (Sodom and Psyche: Studies
in the Intellectual History of the Silver Age, 1996). Grounded in a broad range of
material—from Viacheslav Ivanov to Trotsky, from Bulgakov to Bakhtin—Etkind
traces the transformation of ideas and practices linked to psychoanalysis in Russian
culture from 1900 to the 1950s. Written in a lively language and belonging as much
to intellectual history as to literary history, Etkind’s research has played a vital role in
the reinstatement of what had appeared to be lost links between Russian—and more
vitally, Soviet—culture and the psychoanalytic tradition. With the appearance of
Etkind’s work, it has become clear that Freud is as necessary for understanding Rus-
sian twentieth-century culture as is Marx or Nietzsche.
New work in the encounter of literature with psychoanalysis also included
Mikhail Zolotonosov’s Slovo i telo: Seksual’nye aspekty, universalii, interpretatsii russkogo
kul’turnogo teksta XIX-XX vekov (Word and Body: Sexual Aspects, Universals, Inter-
pretations of the Russian Cultural Text of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,
1999) and his Drugoi Chekhov: Po tu storonu printsipa zhenofobii (The Other Chekhov:
On the Far Side of the Misogyny Principle, 2007). In the first text, Zolotonosov at-
tends to specific, if eclectic texts ranging from a fairy tale by Kornei Chukovsky to
Soviet sculpture to Fedor Dostoevsky’s Devils. In the latter work, placing Chekhov’s
sexuality at the center of its analysis, Zolotonosov finds in that intra-psychic field a
rich source of interpretive material for the writer’s creative biography, in particular
his relationship to women. In a similar intersection of psychoanalysis and poststruc-
turalist practice, Igor’ Smirnov’s Psikhodiakhronologika: Psikhoistoriia russkoi literatury
ot romantizma do nashikh dnei (Psychodiachronologics: A Psychohistory of Russian
Literature from Romanticism to Our Days, 1994) is an effort to bring into dialogue
texts of the Russian classical heritage to Freudian categories of neurosis. The project
brings an intriguing interpretative schema to a strong grounding in the structuralist
orientation that was not untypical of the late Soviet intelligentsia.
A similar commitment to poststructuralism and psychoanalytic discourse may
be traced in foundational work by Valerii Podoroga and Mikhail Ryklin. While
Podoroga’s Fenomenologiia tela: Vvedenie v filosofskuiu antropologiiu (Phenomenology of
the Body: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology, 1995) might more prop-
erly belong to the field of philosophy than to philology, its impact across fields has
been significant, as has scholarship by Ryklin, most notably Terrorologiki (1992) and
Prostranstva likovaniia: Totalitarizm i razlichie (Spaces of Rejoicing: Totalitarianism and
Difference, 2001). Meanwhile, a periodical similarly on the cusp of philosophy and
culture, Elena Petrovskaia’s journal Sinii divan (2002–), is devoted primarily to con-
temporary philosophy, while engaging debates on visuality in art, cinema, and mass
media.
The “Unidentified Flying Object” Lands
NLO appeared on the landscape in late 1992. It was not the most auspicious of
times: over the next two years, for example, Novyi mir would see its print run re-
duced to one tenth of its peak figure in 1990.24 Despite a gradual influx of foreign
support from the Soros Foundation and other sources, the outlook was bleak.
Founded by Irina Prokhorova, NLO was the result of a schism at the Soviet
journal Literaturnoe obozrenie. NLO’s response to the crisis of post-Soviet humani-
ties was a modernizing project that sought collaboration with those disciplines seen
as contiguous to philology. On the one hand, the journal’s emphasis on philology,
which in literature-centric Russian and Soviet culture was in some respects the most
privileged discipline, had direct impact on the philologists themselves, an entire
generation of whom had already moved in the direction of anthropology, supplant-
ing an earlier naive sociologism of Soviet philological research. On the other hand,
the very flow through philology (rather than through art history or philosophy) re-
flected Western shifts in humanities thinking, specifically the linguistic turn. For
the first time in many decades, the gulf between Western and Russian scholarship
was reduced. NLO’s response to the global dynamic of contemporary thought in the
humanities allowed a common space for theorizing in sociology, philosophy, and
political science, as well as the other arts, yet sustained an emphasis on philology,
conceived as the theory and history of Russian literature from Mikhail Lomonosov
to Sorokin.25
Like early volumes of Kommentarii and the Ad Marginem series, early issues of
NLO often focused on francophone structuralist and poststructuralist theory, in part
due to the efforts of editor, translator, and contributor Sergei Kozlov.26 By late 1993,
NLO was a recognized contender in the field, like Vestnik novoi literatury and Kommen-
tarii, devoting considerable space to postmodernist and poststructuralist debates.27
Francophone poststructuralism was not, however, NLO’s sole preoccupation. A
counterweight was the regular contribution of sociologists for whom such historical
lineages as Hans Robert Jauss, and (more distantly) Max Weber and Émile Durkheim,
provided a different model for cultural analysis. If poststructuralism’s debates on
subjectivity, destabilized meaning, and a radically contingent account of history pro-
vided one opportunity to overwrite Soviet Marxism, then the insistent empiricism
of sociology (in particular, sociology of literature) provided another, very different
antidote, one that exposed the profoundly unempirical nature of Soviet materialism.
Some would argue that the sociology of literature had peaked in the 1920s in
work by Valerian Pereverzev, Vladimir Friche, Boris Arvatov, and Pavel Sakulin.
Reprisals against this school in the late 1920s led to its virtual disappearance until
the Thaw, when the sociology of literature was marked by two restraints, overcome
only in the 1990s. First, Thaw research was methodologically oriented toward read-
erly practices (what the reader reads; the reader’s social charge to the civic-minded
writer); second, it was often housed in institutionally less visible venues, such as
Lenin Library’s Sector for the Sociology of Reading.
Three figures in particular marked the transition from Thaw scholarship to the
current breakthroughs: Boris Dubin, Lev Gudkov, and Abram Reitblat, the first two
often collaborating as a research team (see their Literatura kak sotsial’nyi institut [Litera-
ture as a Social Institution], 1994; and Intelligentsiia: Zametki o literaturno-politicheskikh
illiuziiakh [The Intelligentsia: Notes on Literary-Political Illusions], 1995). Dubin’s
work—in such key texts as his Slovo-pis’mo-literatura (Word-Writing-Literature,
2001); his Intellektual’nye gruppy i simvolicheskie formy (Intellectual Groups and Sym-
bolic Forms, 2004); and his Na poliakh pis’ma: Zametki o strategiiakh mysli i slova v XX
veke (On the Letter’s Margins: Notes on the Strategies of Thought and Discourse in
the Twentieth Century, 2005)—includes a broad variety of topics, ranging from the
historical novels of the 1990s to patterns of mass reading, strategies, and habits, based
on the Russian Center for Public Opinion Research (VTsIOM).
Lev Gudkov’s key work includes his Negativnaia identichnost’ (Negative Identity,
2004), as well as the edited volume Obraz vraga (The Image of the Enemy, 2005), com-
prising broader studies of material from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centu-
ries (denunciations and posters; public speeches and private letters; questionnaires
and administrative documents) on topics such as the Masonic conspiracy, apart-
ment spies and informers, and polonophobia. While this research has provided an
invaluable resource of data and interpretive study in the sociology of contemporary
practices, contemporaneity has not been the only focus of this field. Reitblat’s Kak
Pushkin vyshel v genii (How Pushkin Became a Genius, 2001), for example, is oriented
instead toward the historical reception of Pushkin’s work and the ways in which cul-
tural norms of reading conditioned and favored one Pushkin over another in succes-
sive epochs.
Beyond NLO’s core theoretical dichotomy—the preoccupations of poststruc-
turalism and those of sociology of literature—contributors have explored work on
nearly (an issue to which we will return shortly) the entire panoply of semiotics, mi-
cro- and metahistory, symbolic anthropology, political philosophy, and reception
theory circulating more broadly in the international academic community.28
By 1994, the NLO enterprise had expanded beyond the journal to include a
publishing house, and (eventually) two additional journals. The first, the political
commentary Neprikosnovennyi zapas (1998–), was founded just before the 17 August
1998 default and set the ambitious task of modernizing the social sciences.29 As for
the second journal, Teoriia mody (2006–), the fashion quarterly is a rare instance in
which the charge of Russia’s “delayed development” would seem irrelevant: from its
outset, the research agenda of Teoriia mody was conducted in absolute real time with
global cultural studies. In addition to its three journals, NLO initiated two annual
conferences and an ongoing research project, Kultura povsednevnosti (Culture of the
Everyday).30
As might be anticipated, the intellectual provocations of poststructuralism and
postmodernism set off a flurry of criticism by the journal’s competitors, including
Znamia and Voprosy literatury, fueled in part by the fact that NLO was the best funded
of the post-Soviet intellectual journals. Some of the criticism leveled at NLO could
be ascribed to professional jealousy. To reduce the criticism to this motivation alone,
however, would be to miss the heat of battle, in which scholars associated with Vo-
prosy literatury in particular focused criticism on those colleagues perceived to be rep-
resentatives of Russian New Historicism.31
In his article in Voprosy literatury (“Bytovaia istoriia” [Everyday (Hi)story], 2002),
Shaitanov criticized methods of New Historicism in work by Aleksandr Etkind,
Oleg Proskurin, Andrei Zorin, and other middle-generation scholars for their rup-
ture with the traditions of Russian historical poetics, represented by the formalists,
Bakhtin, and Propp. In Shaitanov’s view, the New Historicist accent on subjectivity
and cultural narratives, moving beyond the limits of concrete historical texts, as well
as the application of analytic methods of literary scholarship to extra-literary texts
and practices, leads to: “limits of understanding that turn out endlessly broadened
and blurred. First ‘byt’ [everyday existence] conducted itself aggressively toward
literature and swallowed it whole; then byt itself was swallowed by the concept of
‘text.’ Literature seemed to get revenge: literariness domineers in this new cultur-
ological metaphorics, according to which everything is text. But literature pays for
this expansion with a loss of specificity that is on principle alien to the Russian philo-
logical tradition (and only to it?). . . . It is not possible to research ‘textual history’
credibly without taking into account the specificity of texts, its component parts.”32
Then, in his 2003 article, responding to NLO’s experimental issue, examining
transgressions beyond traditional philological boundaries, Shaitanov’s reproaches ac-
quired a distinct political character:
These concepts—postcolonialism, gender studies, the insistence on the rights
of each and every minority—were born of a political situation that no longer
exists in the world. It has not existed since September 11, 2001. Before that date,
it may have seemed as if the unconditional force in the contemporary world was
the democratic state on the Western model. . . . Now, everything seems much
more complex. The balance of forces has changed. Political correctness . . . was
destroyed at the very highest level of interstate relations. In 2003, the Man of
Culture must once again show that he knows how to be something other than
weak. I would suggest that this general change of situation should have an effect
on all those directions of research so recently fashionable and guaranteed by
grants.33
That which had seemed to be a methodological conflict—between the tradition of
Russian historical poetics and efforts by NLO scholars to inscribe literature into
broader cultural and social contexts—turned out to be an expression of political an-
tagonism between Russian models and the cultural liberalism of the West, whereby
the former was little differentiated from rhetoric recognizable in the West as right-
wing thought.
This antagonism was at times enacted as a conflict between scholarly genera-
tions; Znamia’s editor in chief Sergei Chuprinin, the leading figure in the (now) se-
nior generation of literary intellectuals, was periodically a formidable interlocutor.
Often circumspect toward what he has called “the NLO empire,” Chuprinin’s criti-
cisms of the “mladofilologi” (young philologists) were familiar: their resistance to ev-
erything Russian; their rejection of moral components characteristic of the Russian
legacy; their status as “foreigners in their own country.”34 All the same, amidst the
chaotic pluralism of 1990s, Znamia had more than held its own under Chuprinin’s
editorship and—to his credit—he was able to acknowledge to Russkaia mysl’ (29 Oc-
tober–4 November 1998) that “in the sixties we read Novyi mir; in the beginning of
perestroika—Ogonek; [and] now—NLO.”35
Yet, despite the criticism of NLO for interest in Western theory, of greater in-
terest to many foreign Slavists have instead been NLO’s articles devoted to little-
researched aspects of the literary process: poet and artist Evgenii Kropivnitskii, a key
figure in the Lianozovo group (NLO 5 [1993]); Thaw student poetry groups (NLO 14
[1996]);36 the 1919 Moscow Writers’ Union (NLO 11 [1995]); the 1960s SMOG poets
(NLO 20 [1996]); the notorious Third Section (NLO 40 [1999]); regional intellectual
life (NLO 50 [2001]); school compositions (NLO 80 [2006]); the poetics of smear cam-
paigns, such as Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the attack on the Metropol’ writers
(NLO 82 [2006]).37
And while NLO has been a welcome interlocutor in the international theory
debates, most interesting have been its lacunae. Some lacunae are puzzling: little
scholarly reconceptualization of Vladimir Propp; little interest in such interna-
tional figures as Peter Brook or Bruno Latour, to choose two disparate examples;
little engagement with hermeneutics (Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hans-Georg
Gadamer).38
Other lacunae are self-explanatory: largely missing are Western Marxism
(Louis Althusser, Terry Eagleton, and Fredric Jameson); post-Marxism (David Har-
vey, on the one hand, or Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, on the other); postcolo-
nial theory (Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha); Western
feminist or queer theory (Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Elaine Show-
alter);39 or the Marxist-inflected tradition of British cultural studies (Raymond Wil-
liams, Richard Hebdige, and Stuart Hall).40 The reasons need no belaboring. Indeed,
the Catch-22 is this: the post-Soviet intelligentsia, rid of Marx and able at last to
circulate in the “free international marketplace of ideas,” stumbles over him at every
turn—in Foucault, in New Historicism, and almost everywhere else—but not the
familiar Marx they had thrown off. Instead, it is some unrecognizable zombie Marx,
the Undead appearing over again in different forms.41
How is that academic, first-world Marx—repellent though he may be to for-
mer Soviet citizens—different from the Soviet, second-world Marx? And if nothing
of intellectual worth could be salvaged from a first-world Marx (whether the grim
determinist Marx of Althusser; the voluntarist Marx of Hobsbawm and Gramsci;
or the joyful, young Marx of university campuses), what would international de-
bates on literary theory be about? These questions haunt the contributors to Russian
intellectual debates at every turn. Moreover, they constitute part of other, histori-
cally postponed questions, simple but strategically unaddressed: throughout the late
twentieth century, why did so few Western intellectuals, founding their arguments
on Marxist theory, seek out contacts with the Soviet intelligentsia? What accounts
for their stubborn incuriosity about Soviet intelligentsia’s complex relation to the
eastern Marx, and how might the two Marxes comment on one another?
Life beyond NLO
It is worth noting, of course, that the modernization of humanities had begun

still in the Soviet era, certainly as early as Mikhail Romm’s newspaper Gumanitarnyi
fond (1989–1994). But by the late 1990s NLO had become the formative institute of
contemporary thought in the humanities, the first Russian journal of large scope to
move, on the one hand, beyond the borders of disciplinary insularity (in fact, Slavic
studies) toward broader methodological themes; and, on the other, beyond the bor-
ders of national insularity, developing tendencies inscribed in such publications as
Slavica Hierosolymitana and Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, aimed at the creation of an
international community of Slavists. With its initiatives and resources, whatever de-
tractors might argue, NLO had managed the most daunting task of all: the center of
learning in Russian culture had shifted fully back to Russia.
What about life beyond the pages of NLO? Some past efforts proved to be har-
bingers for later success: Gleb Morev’s Novaia russkaia kniga (1999–2002), though of
short duration, was the basis for his next venture, the wide-ranging Kriticheskaia
massa (2002-), whose funding is entirely domestic (a sensitive issue in postsocial-
ist Russia), largely from Art Pragmatica, headed by economist Aleksandr Dolgin.
Morev characterizes the differences between Kriticheskaia massa and NLO as three-
fold. First, its readership: while NLO targets philologists and secondarily the non-
professional intellectual, Kriticheskaia massa is aimed directly at a broader, educated
readership. Second, its range of topics is correspondingly wider, from architecture to
humanitarian issues. Third, while NLO is marked by (in Morev’s ironic inflection)
blagopristoinost’ (seemliness), Kriticheskaia massa seeks to provoke the reader.
Beyond this, one might distinguish at least three other directions in literary
scholarship. First, more traditional philological journals beyond Voprosy literatury,
such as Russkaia literatura and Filologicheskie nauki, formed in the 1960s and 1970s at the
intersection of formalism, semiotics, and Bakhtinian methodology, continue to find
substantial readership. The flagship journal of this literary scholarship remains, how-
ever, Voprosy literatury. The institutional mainstays of this neotraditionalism are the
Institute of World Literature (IMLI, Moscow) and the Institute of Russian Literature
(IRLI, St. Petersburg).
Second, folklore studies has undergone profound changes. On the one hand,
Sergei Nekliudov has formed a Moscow school of postfolklore, concerned with re-
search on new forms and genres of the contemporary (primarily urban) folklore of
anecdotes, street songs, horror stories and verses, graffiti, schoolgirl and recruit al-
bums, and naive literature. On the other hand—while postfolklore continues, on a
new level, the structuralist tradition—a St. Petersburg school of the morphology of
everyday life combines folklore with the methodologies more familiar to cultural
studies. First signaled with Konstantin Bogdanov’s research (Povsednevnost’ i mifolo-
giia [The Everyday and Mythology], 2001) and the annual conferences “Mifologiia
i povsednevnost’” (Mythology and the Everyday), this tendency is also represented
today by the historical research of Aleksandr Panchenko on Russian mystical sects
(Khristovshchina i skopchestvo: Fol’klor i traditsionnaia kul’tura russkikh misticheskikh sekt
[Khristovshchina and skopchestvo: The Folklore and Traditional Culture of Russian
Mystic Sects], 2002); Il’ia Utekhin’s volume Ocherki kommunal’nogo byta (Studies in
Communal Everyday Life, 2004); and Svetlana Adon’eva’s theoretical monograph
Pragmatika fol’klora (The Pragmatics of Folklore, 2004) and her anthropological
sketches (2001) on Soviet rituals and ritual sites (from the eternal flame to Grandfa-
ther Frost). Konstantin Bogdanov himself in recent work has gone beyond the bor-
ders of folklore studies to the field of Foucauldian archaeology, dedicated to medical
discourse in Russian culture and much that can be characterized broadly as exotica.42
Third, Russian feminist and gender studies has completed the stage of estab-
lishment and integration of Western theoretical models. From the end of the 1990s,
alongside the Kharkov journal Gendernye issledovaniia, containing research on gen-
dered aspects of Russian literature and culture, original scholarly works that are ded-
icated to historical research on gender discourse in Russian culture of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries have been offered by Oleg Riabov, Irina Savkina, Sergei
Ushakin, Irina Zherebkina, and others.43
New, “thick” journals, together with—or, more precisely, rousting with—the
survivors from Soviet days, provide a critical international forum for an exchange
of ideas at their most challenging pitch. The journalistic battles, such as the fracases
around New Historicism, are not a sign of disarray but of robust intellectual health.
Compared to the occasional peevish exchange in Times Literary Supplement or New
York Review of Books, frays such as that between Voprosy literatury and NLO are ben-
eficial for one’s circulation, in whichever sense one prefers. At stake in the debates of
the post-1991 journals and the mycelium of global scholars are two linked issues: the
role that contemporary culture might play in articulating critical social practices;
and the relationship of the intellectual elite to its own socialist past, as well as to the
international community of thinkers in their irreconcilable and volatile diversity.
APPENDIX
TRANSLATED TITLES OF RUSSIAN PERIODICALS
30 Dnei Thirty Days

Afisha Poster
Argumenty i fakty Arguments and Facts
Avrora Aurora
Beseda Conversation
Bezbozhnik Godless
Birzhevye vedomosti Exchange Record
Bol’shevik Bolshevik
Chasy Clock
Chisla Numbers
Chitatel’i pisatel’ Reader and Writer
Delo naroda People’s Cause
Den’ Day
Den’ literatury Literature Day
Den’ poezii Poetry Day
Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop Dialog. Carnival. Chronotope
Dni Days
Dom iskusstv House of Arts
Druzhba narodov Peoples’ Friendship
Ekho Echo
Evrei v SSSR Jews in the USSR
Filologicheskie nauki Philological Sciences
Gazeta futuristov Futurists’ Gazette
Gendernye issledovaniia Gender Studies
Gorn Hearth
Griadushchee Future
Grani Facets
323
324  APPENDIX
Gudki Factory Whistles

Gumanitarnyi fond Humanities Foundation
Inostrannaia literatura Foreign Literature
Internatsional’naia literatura International Literature
Iskusstvo kommuny Art of the Commune
Iunost’ Youth
Iuzhnoe slovo Southern Word
Izba-chital’nia Reading Hut
Izvestiia News
Khudozhestvennoe slovo Artistic Word
Khudozhestvennye izvestiia Arts Proceedings
Kniga i revoliutsiia Book and Revolution
Knizhnoe obozrenie Book Review
Knizhnyi ugol Book Corner
Kommentarii Comment
Kommunist Communist
Komsolmol’skaia Pravda Komsomol Pravda; Komsomol Truth
Kontinent Continent
Krasnaia gazeta Red Gazette
Krasnaia niva Red Cornfield
Krasnaia nov’ Red Virgin Soil
Krasnaia zvezda Red Star
Krasnyi ogonek (Small) Red Light
Krest’ianka Peasant Woman
Krest’ianskii zhurnal Peasant Journal
Kriticheskaia massa Critical Mass
Kuznitsa Smithy
Lapot’ Bast Shoe
Lef (Levyi Front Iskusstv) Lef (Left Front of the Arts)
Letopis’ Doma literatorov Chronicle of the Writers’ House
Lit’e Moldings
Literatura i iskusstvo Literature and Art
Literatura i marksizm Literature and Marxism
Literatura i zhizn’ Literature and Life
Literaturnaia gazeta Literary Gazette
Literaturnaia Moskva Literary Moscow
Literaturnaia Rossiia Literary Russia
APPENDIX  325
Literarturnaia ucheba Literary Schooling

Literaturnoe nasledstvo Literary Heritage
Literaturnoe obozrenie Literary Review
Literaturnye zapiski Literary Notes
Literaturnyi kritik Literary Critic
Literaturnyi Leningrad Literary Leningrad
Marksistsko-leninskoe iskusstvoznanie Marxist-Leninist Art History
Mech Sword
Mitin zhurnal Mitya’s Journal (after the founder, Dmitrii
Volchek)
Molodaia gvardiia Young Guard
Molot Hammer
Moriak Sailor
Moskovskie novosti Moscow News
Moskovskii komsomolets Moscow Komsomol Member
Moskva Moscow
Na literaturnom postu On Literary Guard
Na pod”eme On the Ascent
Na postu On Guard
Na rubezhe On the Line
Nash sovremennik Our Contemporary
Nashi dostizheniia Our Achievements
Neprikosnovennyi zapas Emergency Ration
Nezavisimaia gazeta Independent Gazette
Novaia derevnia New Village
Novaia gazeta New Gazette
Novaia Rossiia New Russia
Novaia russkaia kniga New Russian Book
Novaia zhizn’ New Life
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (NLO) New Literary Review
Novoe russkoe slovo New Russian Word
Novoe vremia New Time
Novyi amerikanets New American
Novyi grad New City
Novyi korabl’ New Ship
Novyi Lef New Lef (New Left Front of the Arts)
Novyi mir New World
Novyi zhurnal New Journal
326  APPENDIX
Obshchee delo Common Cause

Obvodnyi kanal Obvodny Canal (after the well-known
landmark in St. Petersburg)
Odesskie listki Odessa Leaflets
Odesskie novosti Odessa News
Ogonek (Small) Light
Oktiabr’ October
Otechestvennye zapiski Notes of the Fatherland
Pamiat’ Memory
Pechat’ i revoliutsiia Press and Revolution
Plamia Flame
Pod”em Ascent
Pod znamenem marksizma Under the Banner of Marxism
Poiski Search
Posev Sowing; Crops
Poslednye novosti Latest News
Postskriptum Postscript
Pravda Truth
Proletarskaia kul’tura Proletarian Culture
Proletarskaia literatura Proletarian Literature
Proletarskoe kino Proletarian Cinema
Propagandist Propagandist
Rabochii zhurnal Workers’ Journal
Rech’ Discourse
Rezets Chisel
Roman-gazeta Novel Paper
Rossiia Russia
Rossiia i slavianstvo Russia and Slavdom
Rul’ Rudder
Russkaia literatura Russian Literature
Russkaia mysl’ Russian Thought
Russkii sovremennik Russian Contemporary
Russkii zhurnal Russian Journal
Russkoe bogatstvo Russian Riches
Segodnia Today
Sever North
Severnaia pochta Northern Post
Sibirskie ogni Siberian Lights
APPENDIX  327
Sinii divan Blue Divan

Sintaksis Syntax
Sovetskaia kniga Soviet Book
Sovetskaia knigotorgovlia Soviet Book Trade
Sovremennik Contemporary
Sovremennye zapiski Contemporary Annals
Strelets Sagittarius
Teatr Theater
Teoriia mody Fashion Theory
Tvorchestvo Creation
Veche Popular Assembly
Vest’ Message
Vestnik Evropy Herald of Europe
Vestnik literatury Herald of Literature
Vestnik novoi literatury Herald of New Literature
Vestnik Russkogo Khristiianskogo Herald of the Russian Christian Movement
Dvizheniia
Vestnik zhizni Herald of Life
Vokrug sveta Around the World
Volia Rossii Russia’s Will; Russia’s Freedom
Voprosy filosofii Issues in Philosophy
Voprosy literatury Issues in Literature
Vozrozhdenie Revival
Vremya i my Time and Us
Vremia MN (Moskovskie Novosti) Time MN (Moscow News)
Vremia novostei News Time
Zaboi Coalface
Zavtra Tomorrow
Zemlia sovetskaia Soviet Land
Zhizn’ isskustva Life of Art
Zhizn’ krest’ianskoi molodezhi Life of the Peasant Youth
Znamia Banner
Znamia truda Banner of Labor
Znanie —sila Knowledge Is Power
Zveno Link
Zvezda Star
NOTES
Introduction: Toward a History of Soviet and Post-Soviet Literary Theory

and Criticism
1. David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1992), 27.
2. See Peter Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982),
13–14; René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 1–36.
3. Hohendahl, Institution of Criticism, 52.
4. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1991), 9.
5. Ibid., 87.
6. See Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold
War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 212.
7. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso,
1976), 20–21.
8. Hohendahl, Institution of Criticism, 82.
9. Boris Eikhenbaum, “Metody i podkhody,” Knizhnyi ugol 8 (1922): 14.
10. Quoted in Lidiia Ginzburg, Chelovek za pis’mennym stolom (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’,
1989), 354.
11. Efim Kurganov, Opoiaz i Arzamas (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo zhurnala “Zvezda,”
1998), 19.
12. Mikhail Ryklin, Svoboda i zapret: kul’tura v epokhu terrora (Moscow: Logos, Progress-
Traditsiia, 2008), 147.
13. See Elizabeth Bruss, Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
14. Worth mentioning among the studies on literary criticism of the 1920s written during
the 1960s–1980s are: L. A. Kishchinskaia, Bor’ba za teoreticheskie osnovy sovetskoi zhurnal’noi
kritiki, 1917–1932 gg. (Sverdlovsk: Ural’skii gos. universitet im. A. M. Gor’kogo, 1967); P. A.
Bugaenko, A. V. Lunacharskii i sovetskaia literaturnaia kritika (Saratov: Privolzhskoe knizh.
izd-vo, 1972); V. Akimov, V sporakh o khudozhestvennom metode: Iz istorii bor’by za sotsialisticheskii
realizm (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1979); G. Belaia, Iz istorii sovetskoi literaturno-
kriticheskoi mysli 20-kh godov: Esteticheskaia kontseptsiia “Perevala” (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo
universiteta, 1985); A. M. Korokotina, Problemy metodologii sovetskoi literaturnoi kritiki v 20-e gg.
(Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo Tomskogo universiteta, 1986).
15. See M. O. Chudakova, “Bez gneva i pristrastiia,” Novyi mir 9 (1988): 240–64; O. V. Fili-
monov, Vremia poiska i obnovleniia: Iz istorii sovetskoi literaturnoi kritiki, 20-e gody (Moscow: Znanie,
1989); E. S. Nezhivoi, Aleksandr Voronskii: Ideal, tipologiia, individual’nost’ (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
Vsesoiuznogo zaochnogo politekhnicheskogo instituta, 1989); G. Belaia, “O vnutrennei
329
330  NOTES TO PAGES XIV–5
svobode khudozhnika: iz opyta kriticheskoi mysli 20-kh godov,” in Kontekst: Literaturno-

kriticheskie issledovaniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), 128–57; Belaia, Don-Kikhoty 20-kh godov:
“Pereval” i sud’ba ego idei (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989); V. V. Eidinova, Stil’ khudoznika:
Kontseptsiia stilia v literaturnoi kritike 20-kh godov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991);
Svetlana Laine, Nikolai Bukharin—literaturnyi kritik (Moscow: Znanie, 1991); M. M. Golubkov,
Utrachennye al’ternativy: Formirovanie monisticheskoi kontseptsii sovetskoi literaturnoi kritiki, 20-e-30-e
gody (Moscow: Nasledie, 1992); E. G. Elina, Literaturnaia kritika i obshchestvennoe soznanie v
Sovetskoi Rossii 1920-kh godov (Saratov: Izdatel’stvo Saratovskogo universiteta, 1994); V. V.
Perkhin, Russkaia literaturnaia kritika 1930-kh godov (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo. S.-Peterburgskogo
universiteta, 1997); E. Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo pisatelia: Sotsial’nye i esteticheskie istoki
sovetskoi literaturnoi kul’tury (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1999); H. Günther and E.
Dobrenko, ed., Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000).
16. For a history of Soviet art criticism, see the collection Khudozhestvennaia kritika i
obshchestvennoe mnenie, ed. A. Ia. Zis’, et al. (Moscow: Rossiiskii institut iskusstvoznaniia, 1992).
17. On the whole, Koshelev’s harsh review of this book seems justified (see V. Koshelev,
“Novoe vino v starye mekha,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 69 [2004]: 286–91).
18. Closer to providing a more general account are Robert Stacy, Russian Literary Criticism:
A Short History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1974); Holger Siegel, Sowjetische Literatur-
theorie (1917–1940): Von der historisch-materialistischen zur marxistisch-leninistischen Literaturtheorie
(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981); Aleksey Gibson, Russian Poetry and Criticism in Paris from 1920 to 1940
(The Hague: Leuxenhoff, 1990, especially part two).
1. Literary Criticism during the Revolution and the Civil War, 1917–1921
The first two sections of this chapter were written by Stefano Garzonio, while the last five
sections are by Maria Zalambani. This chapter was translated from Russian by Adam Siegel.
1. See L. Fleishman, R. Khiuz, O. Raevskaia-Khiuz, eds., Russkii Berlin 1921–1923: Po
materialam arkhiva B.I. Nikolaevskogo v Guverovskom institute (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1983).
2. On literary life in Odessa during the First World War and the revolution, see the
memoirs of A. Bisk, “Odesskaia ‘Literaturka’” and K. Azadovskii’s essay “Aleksandr Bisk i
odesskaia ‘Literaturka’,” in Disapora: Novye materialy (Paris: Athenaeum; St. Petersburg: Feniks,
2001), 1: 95–141. Particularly important is V. P. Kupchenko’s contribution to the study of liter-
ary life in Theodosia and the Theodosian Literary and Artistic Circle (including M. Voloshin,
O. Mandelstam, A. Sokolovskii, E. Mindlin, V. Babadzhan, and others); see V. P. Kupchenko,
“Feodosiiskii literaturno-artisticheskii kruzhok,” Voprosy literatury 4 (1976): 311–14; as well as
his “Literaturnaia Feodosiia v 1920: Po materialiam gazety ‘Krymskaia mysl’,” De Visu 3–4
(1994): 82–89.
3. On the Moscow and Petrograd literary debates in 1917–1922, see A. Iu. Galushkin, ed.,
Literaturnaia zhizn’ Rossii 1920-kh godov: Sobytiia, otzyvy sovremennikov, bibliografiia, vols. 1.1 and
1.2 (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2005).
4. Bryusov wrote on the new poetry of Blok, Belyi, the acmeists, the imaginists, and
proletarian poetry; see Valerii Briusov, Sredi stikhov, 1894–1924: Manifesty, stat’i, retsenzii
(Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990).
5. Ivanov-Razumnik, O smysle zhizni: F. Sologub, L. Andreev, L. Shestov, 2nd ed. (St.
Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevich, 1910), 6.
6. See S. Hoffmann, “Scythian Theory and Literature, 1917–1924,” in Art, Society, Revolu-
tion: Russia, 1917–1921, ed. Nils Ake Nilsson (Stockholm: Amqvist & Wiksell International,
1979), 138–64.
7. Ivanov-Razumnik, “‘Misteriia’ ili ‘Buff’?,” Tvorchestvo i kritika: Stat’i kriticheskie,
1908–1922 (Petrograd: Kolos, 1922), 221–58.
8. Osip Mandel’shtam, “Utro akmeizma,” Sirena 4–5 (30 January 1919): 69–74.
NOTES TO PAGES 5–11  331
9. Mandel’shtam, “Gosudarstvo i ritm,” Puti tvorchestva 6–7 (1920): 75–76.

10. Mandel’shtam, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Art-Biznes-Tsentr, 1993), 1: 231. The essays
by Mandelstam mentioned here have been translated into English in their entirety in: Osip
Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, trans. Jane Gary
Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979).
11. Mikhail Kuzmin, “Emotsional’nost’ kak osnovnoi element iskusstva,” in Arena:
Teatral’nyi al’manakh, ed. Evgenii Kuznetsov (Petrograd: Vremia, 1924), 9–12.
12. See Nikolai Bogomolov and John E. Malmstad, Mikhail Kuzmin: Iskusstvo, zhizn’,
epokha (Moscow: Novoe literturnoe obozrenie, 1996), 245.
13. Teatr 11 (1923): 11.
14. Russian futurism consisted of three groupings: the cubo-futurists (V. Mayakovsky, D.
Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov, V. Kamenskii, and A. Kruchenykh); the ego-futurists (I. Severianin,
K. Olimpov, V. Gnedov); and the Tsentrifuga (Centrifuge) group (S. Bobrov, N. Aseev,
B. Pasternak). The latter two groups had an incomparably lesser resonance than the cubo-
futurists and a significantly smaller degree of representation in literary criticism.
15. See Russkii futurizm: Teoriia, praktika, kritika, vospominaniia, ed. V. N. Terekhina and A. P.
Zimenkov (Moscow: Nasledie, 2000), 62–63.
16. Gazeta futuristov (1918): 1.
17. Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Dva Chekhova” (1914), in Sobranie sochinenii v 12-ti tomakh
(Moscow: Pravda, 1978), 11: 27.
18. Osip Brik, “Drenazh iskusstva,” Iskusstvo kommuny 1 (1918): 1.
19. Brik, “Khudozhnik-proletarii,” Iskusstvo kommuny 2 (1918): 1.
20. Boris Kushner, “Iskusstvo kollektiva,” Iskusstvo kommuny 6 (1919): 2–3.
21. Proletkult’s idea derived, in part, from Bogdanov‘s belief in comradely cooperation and
in mending the rift between intellectuals and manual laborers.
22. P. I. Lebedev-Polianskii, ed., Protokoly pervoi Vserossiiskoi konferentsii proletarskikh
kul’turno-prosvetitel’skikh organizatsii (Moscow: Proletarskaia kul’tura, 1918), 15.
23. Pavel Bessal’ko and Fedor Kalinin, Problemy proletarskoi kul’tury: Puti i dostizheniia
proletarskoi kul’tury v osveshchenii rabochikh pisatelei (Petrograd: Antei, 1919), 12.
24. Kuznitsa 1 (1920): 3.
25. See Jutta Scherrer, “Les écoles du parti de Capri et de Bologne: la formation de
l’intelligentsia du parti,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 19, no. 3 (1978): 259–84; Scherrer,
“Pour l’hégémonie culturelle du prolétariat: aux origines du concept et de le vision de la
‘culture prolétarienne’,” in Culture et révolution, ed. M. Ferro and S. Fitzpatrick (Paris: Edtions
de l’Ecole des Hautes Ètudes en Sciences Sociales, 1989), 11–23.
26. Aleksandr Bogdanov, “Nasha kritika, stat’ia vtoraia: Kritika proletarskogo iskusstva,”
Proletarskaia kul’tura 3 (1918): 12–21.
27. A. O., “Zavod ognekrylyi,” Proletarskaia kul’tura 6 (1919): 41; see also “Ot redaktsii,”
Proletarskaia kul’tura 4 (1918): 35; A. O., “Dve retsenzii,” Proletarskaia kul’tura 3 (1918): 35–37.
28. Bogdanov, “Nasha kritika, stat’ia vtoraia,” 21.
29. Bogdanov, “Proletarskii universitet,” Proletarskaia kul’tura 5 (1918): 13.
30. Bogdanov, “Nasha kritika, stat’ia vtoraia,” 21.
31. Anatolii Lunacharskii, Izbrannye stat’i po estetike (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975), 125.
32. Vladimir Lenin, “Privetstvennaia rech’ na I vserossiiskom s’ezde po vneshkol’nomu
obrazovaniiu” (1919), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow, 1958-70), 58: 434, 433; Lenin,
“Iz rechi na III vserossiiskom soveshchanii zaveduiushchikh vneshkol‘nymi podotdelami
gubernskikh otdelov narodnogo obrazovaniia” (1920), O literature i iskusstve (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1967), 436.
33. Lunacharskii, “Pis’ma o proletarskoi kul’ture” (1914), Stat’i o literature v dvukh tomakh
(Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988), 2:204.
332  NOTES TO PAGES 12–16
34. Lunacharskii, Kul’turnye zadachi rabochego klassa (Moscow: VTsIK, 1918), 10–11.
35. Lunacharskii, “Nashi zadachi v oblasti khudozhestvennoi zhizni” (1921), Ob isskustve
(Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982), 2: 84.
36. Lunacharskii, “Sotsialisticheskii realizm” (1933), Izbrannye stat’i po estetike (Moscow:
Iskusstvo, 1975), 318–46.
37. Lev Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow: Krasnaia nov’, 1923), 137. For a full
English translation of Trotsky’s book, see Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1971).
38. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia, 143.
39. Lunacharskii, “Lozhka protivoiadiia,” Iskusstvo kommuny 4 (1918): 1.
40. Fedor Kalinin, “O professionalizme rabochikh v iskusstve,” in Pamiati F. I. Kalinina:
stat’i (Petrograd: Izd. Petrogradskogo proletkul’ta, 1920), 120.
41. V. Pletnev, “O professionalizme,” Proletarskaia kul’tura 7–8 (1919): 37.
42. Bogdanov, “Nasha kritika, stat’ia pervaia: O khudozhestvennom nasledstve,”
Proletarskaia kul’tura 2 (1918): 4.
43. Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii, “Poeziia sovetskoi provintsii,” Proletarskaia kul’tura 7–8
(1919): 4; on the problem of cultural legacy in Proletkult, see Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future:
The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley and London: University of California
Press, 1990), 130–37.
44. In the latter half of the twenties this line was dominant in the organizations of
proletarian writers, beginning with Kuznitsa and ending with Na postu; in 1927 RAPP
went public with the slogan “ucheby u klassikov” (learning from the classics). See L. Averbakh,
“Tvorcheskie puti proletarskoi literatury” (1928), in Tvorcheskie puti proletarskoi literatury
(Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928–1929), 1:21.
45. The role of literary criticism, at the same time an institution of interpretation and
censorship, is particularly visible in the example of the critic and literary scholar Pavel
Lebedev-Polianskii (the pseudonym of Valer’ian Polianskii, 1881–1948), one of the leading
Proletkult critics, who in the years 1918–1920 served as chairman of the Proletkult’s All-
Russian Soviet and as secretary of Proletkult’s International Bureau, only to become then
head of Glavlit from 1921–1930.
46. See the materials in Instituty upravleniia kul’turoi v period stanovleniia, 1917–1930-e gg.:
Partiinoe rukovodstvo, gosudarstvennye organy upravleniia, skhemy, ed. Karl Eimermacher, et al.
(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004).
47. “O revoliutsionnom tribunale pechati” (1918), in Tsenzura v Sovetskom Soiuze, 1917–1991:
Dokumenty, ed. A. V. Blium (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 7–9.
48. Arlen Blium, Za kulisami “Ministerstva pravdy”: Tainaia istoriia sovetskoi tsenzury, 1917–1929
(St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt, 1994), 49–54. It should be noted that, following
the tradition of tsarist censorship, from the outset professionals, that is, critics and literary
scholars, occupied the leading positions in the institutions of censorship, such as V. Vorovskii,
director of Gosizdat (1921–1924), and Lebedev-Polianskii, the first director of Glavlit
(1922–1930).
49. See Literaturnaia zhizn’ Rossii 1920-kh godov: Sobytiia, otzyvy sovremennikov, bibliografiia, ed.
A. Iu. Galushkin, vols. 1.1 and 1.2 (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2005), 1.1: 366; 403.
50. Maksim Gor’kii, Nesvoevremennye mysli (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 152.
51. Zinaida Gippius, “Krasnaia stena,” in Tsenzura v Sovetskom Soiuze, 1917–1991: Dokumenty,
ed. A. V. Blium (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 5.
52. See A. Galushkin, Zhurnaly “Vestnik literatury” (1919–1922), “Letopis’ Doma literatorov”
(1921–1922), “Literaturnye zapiski” (1922): Annotirovannyi ukazatel’ (Moscow: Nasledie, 1996).
53. Kniga i revoliutsiia 1 (1920): 1.
54. Boris Dubin, Intellektual’nye gruppy i simvolicheskie formy (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo,
2004), 63.
2. Literary Criticism and Cultural Policy during the New Economic Policy,
1921–1927
This chapter was translated from Russian by Josephine von Zitzewitz.
1. L. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1991),
189; for a full English translation of Trotsky’s book, see Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971).
2. See the report on the situation in the writers’ sphere by Ia. A. Iakovlev, deputy head of
the Central Committee’s press section, to Stalin, July 1922, quoted in Vlast’ i khudozhestven-
naia intelligentsiia: Dokumenty TsK RKP(b)–VKP(b), VChK–OGPU –NKVD po kul’turnoi
politike, 1917–1953, ed. Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond
“Demokratiia,” 1999), 39.
3. Letter by L. Trotsky to N. L. Meshcheriakov, head of the Central Committee’s Agitprop
and the State Publishing House (Gosizdat), dated 25 June 1922, in Bol’shaia tsenzura: Pisateli i
zhurnalisty v Strane Sovetov, 1917–1956, ed. L. V. Maksimenkov (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond
“Demokratiia”; Materik, 2005), 50.
4. Ibid., 46.
5. V. Lenin. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow: Gos. Izd-vo politicheskoi liteatury,
1958-66), 54: 265.
6. Quoted in Literaturnaia zhizn’ Rossii 1920–kh godov: Sobytiia, otzyvy sovremennikov,
bibliografiia, ed. A. Iu. Galushkin, vols. 1.1 and 1.2 (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2005), 1.2: 507.
7. Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 41–42, 736.
8. Lev Trotskii, “Vneoktiabr’skaia literatura: Literaturnye poputchiki revoliutsii,” Pravda
(3 October 1922): 2–3.
9. Quoted in Literaturnaia zhizn’ Rossii 1920–kh godov, 1.2: 328.
10. G. M. Adibekov, ed., Politbiuro TsK RKP(b)–VKP(b) i Komintern, 1919–1943: Dokumenty
(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 192.
11. Lev Trotskii, “Partiinaia politika v iskusstve,” Pravda (16 September 1923): 2–3.
12. A. Lezhnev, “Literatura i revoliutsiia. O knige tov. Trotskogo),” Prozhektor 9 (1924): 26.
13. Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 7 (1923): 16.
14. See Boris Eikhenbaum, “V ozhidanii literatury,” Russkii sovremennik 1 (1924): 285–87.
15. Karl Eimermakher, ed., V tiskakh ideologii: Antologiia literaturno-politicheskikh dokumentov,
1917–1927 (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1992), 297–98.
16. Ibid., 379.
17. See Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s article, “Ob iskrennosti v kritike” (1854).
18. Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow: OGIZ; Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi
literatury, 1952), 7: 341.
19. I. Lezhnev, “NEP—natsional’naia ekonomcheskaia politika,” Novaia Rossiia 2 (1926): 16.
20. Bol’shaia tsenzura, 112–13.
21. A. Cherkasskii, “‘Dni Trubinykh’—domashniaia kontrrevoliutsiia,” Komsomoliia 12
(1926): 66–67.
22. Abram Lezhnev, O literature: stat’i, ed. G. Belaia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), 70.
23. Ia. Iakovlev, “Gorbatogo tol’ko mogila ispravit,” Pravda (2 February 1922): 2; S.
Gorodetskii, “Zelen’ pod plesen’iu: Literaturnyi Peterburg,” Izvestiia (2 February 1922): 2.
24. Novaia Rossiia 2 (1922): 160.
25. See Konstantin Mochul’skii, “Serapionovy brat’ia,” Poslednie novosti (29 June 1922);
Mikhail Tsetlin, “Plemia mladoe (O “Serapionovykh brat’iakh”),” Sovremennye zapiski 12
(1922): 329–38.
26. Originally in Pravda (28 June 1922); reprinted in A. Voronskii, Izbrannye stat’i o literature
(Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1982), 286.
27. V. Kaverin, “E. T. A. Gofman: Rech’ na zasedanii Serapionovykh brat’ev, posviash-
chennaia pamiati E. T. Gofmana,” Kniga i revoliutsiia 7 (1922): 22–24.
28. See N. L. Brodskii and N. P. Sidorov, eds., Literaturnye manifesty: Ot simvolizma do
Oktiabria (Moscow: Agraf, 2001), 314.
29. Quoted in Literaturnaia zhizn’ Rossii 1920–kh godov, 1.2: 506.
30. I. Gruzdev, “Vechera Serapionovykh brat’ev,” Kniga i revoliutsiia 3 (1922): 110–11.
31. I. Sadof’ev, “Oktiabr’ i literatura,” Krasnaia gazeta (4 November 1922): 6.
32. N. Aseev, “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 7 (1922): 73–74.
33. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia, 64.
34. Quoted in “Serapionovy brat’ia” v zerkale perepiski, ed. E. Lemming (Moscow: Agraf,
2004), 61.
35. Konstantin Fedin, Gor’kii sredi nas: Kartiny literaturnoi zhizni (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’,
1977), 82.
36. Viktor Shklovskii, Gamburgskii schet: Stat’i, vospominaniia, esse (1914–1933), ed. A.
Galushkin and A. Chudakov (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 145 (the text quoted here was
written in January 1922).
37. “U Serapionovykh brat’ev,’’ Krasnaia gazeta, 22 December 1922; this version is close
to the text of the article “Na Zapad!” (Westward!), published in 1923 in the third issue of the
Berlin newspaper Beseda.
38. Russkii sovremennik 2 (1924): 273–78.
39. See N. Aseev, “Kliuch siuzheta,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 7 (1925): 34; G. Lelevich, “K
opredeleniiu siuzheta,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 5 (1926): 34–38; see also Lelevich, O proletarskom
literaturnom molodniake (Moscow: Novaia Moskva, 1926).
40. A. Belyi, “Dnevnik pisatel’ia,” Rossiia 2 (1924): 133–46; Belyi, “Literatura i nedra byta,”
Novaia Rossiia 3 (1926): 80–82; and Ia. Braun, “Bez pafosa—bez formy,” Rossiia 1 (1926): 88–89.
41. “‘The Serapion Brothers’ are no brothers, really: they have different fathers, and they
are neither a school nor a current: what kind of current is that where some are aiming for
the East and others for the West,” in E. Zamiatin, Ia boius’: Literaturnaia kritika. Publitsistika.
Vospominaniia, ed. A. Galushkin (Moscow: Nasledie, 1999), 84.
42. Russkii sovremennik 3 (1924): 229.
43. See Galina Belaia, Don-Kikhoty 20-kh godov. “Pereval” i sud’ba ego idei (Moscow:
Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989).
44. Eikhenbaum, “V ozhidanii literatury,” 289.
45. M. Osorgin, “Rossiiskie zhurnaly,” Sovremennye zapiski 22 (1924): 426.
46. Voronskii, Izbrannye stat’i o literature, 337. Other references to this edition appear in
parentheses in the main text.
47. V. Polonskii, O literature: Ibrannye raboty (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988), 11.
48. See Literaturnye manifesty ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei, ed. S. B. Dzhimbinov (Moscow:
XXI vek-Soglasie, 2000), 408–9.
49. A. Lezhnev, “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 7 (1927): 81.
50. Ibid., 84.
51. Lezhnev, “Zametki o zhurnalakh. 1. Na pravom flange (O zhurnalakh ‘Rossiia’ and
‘Russkii sovremennik’),” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 6 (1924): 124. See Trotsky’s Literatura i revoliutsiia:
“The Formalists are marked by the stamp of premature priesthood” (145).
52. Lezhnev, “Zametki o zhurnalakh,” 123–30.
53. Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 8 (1926): 83.
54. The topic “Belinsky and Hegel” was widely discussed in many scholarly works of
this decade; in 1923 Plekhanov’s book Belinskii: Sbornik statei included the article “Belinskii
i ratsional’naia deistvitel’nost’” (Belinsky and Rational Reality), devoted to Belinsky’s

Hegelianism.
55. A. Zalkind, “Freidizm i Marksizm,” Krasnaia nov’ 4 (1924): 163.
56. See Voronskii’s article “Marsel’ Prust (K voprosu o psikhlogii tvorchestva)” Iskusstvo
videt’ mir. Portrety. Stat’i (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), 348-54.
57. O. Brik, “Za novatorstvo!” Novyi Lef 1 (1927): 28.
58. N. Chuzhak, “Pod znakom zhiznestroeniia (Opyt osoznaniia iskusstva dnia),” Lef 1
(1923): 12.
59. Chuzhak, “K zadacham dnia (Stat’ia diskussionnaia),” Lef 2 (1923): 152.
60. B. Arvatov, “Utilitarizm v literature,” Oktiabr’ 12 (1925): 105.
61. Arvatov, “Na putiakh k proletarskomu iskusstvu,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 1 (1922): 68.
62. Arvatov, “Marks o khudozhestvennoi restavratsii,” Lef 3 (1923): 88, 93.
63. Arvatov, “Kontr-revoliutsiia formy (O Valerii Briusove),” Lef 1 (1923): 230.
64. A. Lunacharskii, “Ob Aleksandre Nikolaeviche Ostrovskom i po povodu ego,” Izvestiia
(12 April 1923): 2; (13 April 1923): 2.
65. V. Maiakovskii, “Rasshirenie slovesnoi bazy,” Novyi Lef 10 (1927): 15.
66. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia, 109, 192.
67. “Lef i MAPP,” Lef 4 (1923): 3; and O. Brik, “Za politiku!,” Novyi Lef 1 (1927): 23.
68. K. Zelinskii, “Kniga, rynok i chitatel’,” Lef 3 (1925): 121 (an allusion to Lunacharsky’s
formula; see Lunacharskii, “Revoliutsionnyi teatr [Otvet tov. Bukharinu],” Vestnik teatra 47
(1919): 3: “We must remember that the proletarian, having seized power in his country, also
wants a bit of enjoyment, he wants to enjoy a beautiful show.”
69. N. Chuzhak quoted in Literatura fakta: Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEF-a, ed. N.
F. Chuzhak (Moscow: Zakharov, 2000), 28; S. Tretyakov quoted in Literatura fakta, 32.
70. V. Shklovskii, Ikh nastoiashchee (Moscow: Kinopechat’, 1926), 57.
71. Chuzhak, “Pyl’,” Novyi Lef 2 (1927): 37.
72. Molodaia gvardiia 1–2 (1922): 3.
73. P. Kogan, Nashi literaturnye spory (Moscow: GAKhN, 1927), 67.
74. S. Rodov, V literaturnykh boiakh: Stat’i, zametki, dokumenty, 1922–1925 (Moscow: Zhizn’ i
znanie, 1926), 134.
75. G. Lelevich, “1923 god: Literarturnye itogi,” Na postu 1 (1924): 79.
76. Semyon Rodov quoted in Molodaia gvardiia 6–7 (1922): 308–9.
77. Kuznitsa 7 (1921): 33.
78. G. Iakubovskii, “Iskusstvo i revoliutsiia,” Rabochii zhurnal 3–4 (1924): 88.
79. Iakubovskii, “Trud i krasota,” Rabochii zhurnal 1 (1924): 100; Iakubovskii, “Iskusstvo i
revoliutsiia,” 107.
80. See Iu. Libedinskii’s article “Temy, kotorye zhdut svoikh avtorov,” Na postu 2–3 (1923);
the article is found in the book Literaturnye manifesty: Ot simvolizma k Oktiabriu, ed. N. L.
Brodskii, V. L’vov-Rogachevskii, N.P. Sidorov (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929).
81. See P. Kogan, “Bezymenskii,” Oktiabr’ 8 (1925): 114–20.
82. From G. Lelevich’s address at the plenary session of the VAPP executive, 28 November
1926, Manuscript Section of the Gorky Institute of World Literature (OR IMLI), f. 155, op. 1,
ed. khr. 135, l. 164–65.
83. L. Averbakh, “O politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi literatury” (Paper for the
RKP faction in the executive of MAPP and VAPP and the komkollektiv of MAPP on 11 July
1925), Oktiabr’ 9 (1925): 123.
84. “Slovo partii skazano,” Oktiabr’ 7 (1925): 7.
85. Iu. Libedinskii, “Ucheba, tvorchestvo i samokritika,” Oktiabr’ 1 (1926): 98. All follow-
ing references to this source are in parentheses in the main text.
86. A. Zonin, “Kakaia nam nuzhna shkola?,” Na literaturnom postu 11–12 (1927): 15.
87. A. Fadeev, “Tvorcheskie puti proletarskoi literatury,” Na literaturnom postu 11–12 (1927):
4–6.
88. Quoted in V. Ermilov, Za zhivogo cheloveka v literature (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1928), 16
(emphasis in original).
89. Libedinskii, “Ucheba, tvorchestvo i samokritika,” 104.
90. O. Poimanova, “Religioznaia maska Pushkina,” Na literaturnom postu 5–6 (1927): 39–41.
91. Data from VAPP Bulletin, Manuscript Section of the Gorky Institute of World
Literature (OR IMLI), f. 155, op. 1, ed. khr. 181, l. 121.
92. Ibid., f. 155, op. 1, ed. khr. 135, l. 256.
93. Ibid., f. 155, op. 1, ed. khr. 181, l. 10.
94. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia, 61; further page references in parentheses in the main
text.
95. V. Briusov, “Vchera, segodnia i zavtra russkoi poezii,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 7 (1922): 67.
96. N. Aseev, “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 7 (1922): 69.
97. On Gorky’s attitude to the peasant writers, see N. Primochkina, Pisatel’ i vlast’, 2nd ed.
(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), 15–79.
98. A. Lezhnev, “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 7 (1927): 83, 108–9.
99. P. Iarovoi, “Skvoz’ stroi,” Rabochii zhurnal 3 (1925): 101.
100. Address of Bliakhin, representative of the Central Committee’s press section, at the
Extraordinary All-Union Conference of VAPP, November 1926, Manuscript Section of the
Gorky Institute of World Literature (OR IMLI), f. 155, ed. khr. 181, l. 5.
101. M. Bekker, “O derevne po-rabochemu,” Na literaturnom postu 2 (1926): 53.
3. Literary Criticism and the Transformations of the Literary Field during
the Cultural Revolution, 1928–1932
This chapter was translated from Russian by Josephine von Zitzewitz.
1. See V. Papernyi, Kul’tura Dva (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1996); and
Nicholas Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1946).
2. A. I. Mazaev, “20-e gody: Novaia kul’turnaia politika v deistvii,” in Mezhdu obshchestvom
i vlast’iu: Massovye zhanry ot 20-kh k 80-m godam XX veka, ed. E. V. Dukov (Moscow: Indrik,
2002), 65.
3. V. Shklovskii, “Pamiatnik nauchnoi oshibke,” Literaturnaia gazeta (28 January 1930).
4. “Klassovaia bor’ba obostriaetsia” (editorial), Na literaturnom postu 1 (1929): 6.
5. V. Kaverin, “Neskol’ko let,” Novyi mir 11 (1966): 141–42.
6. See B. Kor, “Ne poputchik, no soiuznik ili vrag,” Na literaturnom postu 2 (1931): 30–40.
7. I. Nusinov, “[Review of] D. Gorbov, U nas i za rubezhom (M.: Krug, 1928),” Novyi mir 8
(1928): 215.
8. Molodaiia gvardiia 5 (1929): 66, 67.
9. Na literaturnom postu 7 (1927): 2.
10. See K. Eimermacher, Politika i kul’tura pri Lenine i Staline: 1917–1932 (Moscow: Airo-XX,
1998), 65–91; E. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 1928–1932 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1953), 48–50.
11. L. Averbakh, “Ot liberalizma k porazhenchestvu,” S kem i pochemu my boremsia, ed.
Leopold Averbakh (Moscow: Zemlia i fabrika, 1930), 32–33; 37.
12. G. Lebedev and K. Stepanov, “[Review of] ‘RAPP’ No. 1, 2, 3 i: ‘Proletarskaia
literatura’ No. 4, 1931 g.,” Pod znamenem marksizma 1–2 (1932): 205.
13. See V. Polonskii, “Kontsy i nachala: Zametki o rekonstruktivnom periode sovetskoi
literatury,” Novyi mir 1 (1931): 119–34.
14. V. Ermilov, “Za plekhanovskuiu ortodoksiiu,” in S kem i pochemu my boremsia, 240.

15. A. Rybasov, “Zametki o kritike,” Na literaturnom postu 16 (1931): 38 (emphasis in
original).
16. G. Korabel’nikov “Za partiinost’ literatury,” Na literaturnom postu 6 (1931): 16.
17. A. Fadeev, “Doloi Shillera!” in Za tridtsat’ let: Izbrannye stat’i, rechi i pis’ma o literature i
iskusstve (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1957), 63–71.
18. Averbakh, “Eshche o tvorcheskikh putiakh,” Na literaturnom postu 11–12 (1927): 19.
19. On the RAPP critics’ demands on literature, see Brown, Proletarian Episode, 58–86,
132–49; Herman Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories, 1917–1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 55–72, 89–118.
20. G. Gorbachev, “O samozvanykh dusheprikazchikakh ‘kul’turnogo nasledstva’:
Nalitpostovtsy i ‘ucheba u klassikov,’” Polemika (Leningrad and Moscow: GIKhL, 1931), 142,
149.
21. B. Reikh, “O klassike,” Na literaturnom postu 8 (1928): 41.
22. Averbakh, Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia i voprosy sovremennoi literatury (Moscow: Gosudarstven-
noe izdatel’stvo, 1928), 75
23. A. Mikhailov, “O literaturnom nasledii i uchebe u ‘klassikov,’” Na literaturnom postu 17
(1929): 19.
24. Averbakh, Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia, 84.
25. V. Ermilov, Za zhivogo cheloveka v literature (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1928), 23.
26. A. Kurella, “Protiv psikhologizma,” Na literaturnom postu 6 (1928): 17.
27. A. Bek and L. Toom, “O psikhologizme i ‘stolbovoi doroge,’” Novyi mir 7 (1929): 209;
V. Friche, “V zashchitu ‘ratsionalisticheskogo’ izobrazheniia cheloveka,” Krasnaia nov’ 1 (1929):
237–44.
28. Bek and Toom, “O psikhologizme,” 215, 218.
29. “Na uroven’ novykh zadach” (editorial), Pravda (9 May 1932).
30. See G. Gorbachev, “Kriticheskii oboz,” Krasnaia nov’ 12 (1930): 136–57; B. Olkhovoi,
“Eshche raz o I. Grossmane-Roshchine,” Pravda (13 June 1930).
31. See M. Gel’fand in Protiv burzhuaznogo liberalizma v khudozhestvennoi literature: Diskussia o
“Perevale” (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Kommunisticheskoi akademii, 1931); and Galina Belaia, Don
Kikhoty 20-kh godov: “Pereval” i sud’ba ego idei (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1989).
32. Protiv burzhuaznogo liberalizma, 14, 21.
33. Ibid., 16, 47.
34. Ibid., 60.
35. A. Lezhnev, O literature: Stat’i (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), 140.
36. Protiv burzhuaznogo liberalizma, 45.
37. D. Gorbov, Poiski Galatei: Stat’i o literature (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1928), 262, 48.
38. Gorbov, U nas i za rubezhom (Moscow: Krug, 1928), 218 (capitals in the original).
39. Belaia, Don Kikhoty, 320.
40. Ibid., 322.
41. A. Rodchenko, “Protiv summirovannogo portreta za momental’nyi snimok,” Novyi
Lef 4 (1928): 14.
42. M. Zalambani, Literatura fakta: Ot avangarda k sotsrealizmu (St. Petersburg: Akademiches-
kii proekt, 2006), 11.
43. V. Pertsov, “Grafik sovremennogo LEFa,” Novyi Lef 1 (1927): 15.
44. S. Tretiakov, “S Novym godom! S ‘Novym lefom’!” Novyi Lef 1 (1928): 2.
45. N. Chuzhak, “Pisatel’skaia pamiatka,” in Literatura fakta: Pervyi sbornik materialov
rabotnikov LEFa, ed. N. F. Chuzhak (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), 21.
46. O. Brik, “Protiv ‘tvorcheskoi lichnosti,’” in Literatura fakta, 75–78.
47. Tretiakov, “Prodolzhenie sleduet,” in Literatura fakta, 263
48. Pertsov, “Kul’t predkov i literaturnaia sovremennost’,” in Literatura fakta, 157, 165; S.
Tretyakov, “Prodolzhenie sleduet,” 263.
49. Tretiakov, “Biografiia veshchi,” in Literatura fakta, 70.
50. Ibid., 65.
51. Chuzhak, “Pisatel’skaia pamiatka,” 28; V. Pertsov, “Kul’t predkov,” 164.
52. Tretiakov, “Biografiia veshchi,” 67.
53. V. Ermilov, “Tvorcheskoe litso MAPPa,” in Tvorcheskie puti proletarskoi literatury, 2 vols.
(Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928-29), 1: 137.
54. V. Asmus, “V zashchitu vymsyla. Literatura fakta i fakty literatury,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia
11 (1929): 11–31. A similar debate took place in cinema criticism with regard to Dziga Vertov’s
theory of “cinematic truth” (kinopravda).
55. Brik, “Protiv ‘tvorcheskoi lichnosti’,” 78.
56. Brik, “Tak nazyvaemyi ‘formal’nyi metod’,” Lef 1 (1923): 213–14.
57. V. Maiakovskii and O. Brik, “Nasha slovesnaia rabota,” Lef 1 (1923): 41.
58. Z. Shteinman, “K sporu o sotsial’nom zakaze,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 1 (1929): 45.
59. I. Nusinov, “Sotsial’nyi zakaz,” Literatura i marksizm 2 (1928): 13; Nusinov, “Postoiannye
i peremennye velichiny v literature: K voprosu o sotsial’nom zakaze,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 1
(1929): 57.
60. Nusinov, “Sotsial’nyi zakaz,” 22.
61. V. F. Pereversev, “O teorii sotsial’nogo zakaza,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 1 (1929): 60–62.
62. V. Polonskii, “Khudozhnik i klassy (O teorii ‘sotsial’nogo zakaza’),” Novyi mir 9 (1927):
169–73.
63. On the renaming of VOPKP, see “Postanovlenie TsS VOPKP,” Zemlia Sovetskaia 2–3
(1931): 214.
64. F. Dokukin, “Na krutom perelome: Itogi rasshirennogo plenuma Severo-Kavkazskogo
otdeleniia VOKP,” Na pod’’eme (Rostov-on-Don) 2–3 (1931): 222.
65. Averbakh, Spornye voprosy kul’turnoi revoliutsii (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1929), 172.
66. G. Deev-Khomiakovskii, “Protiv upadnichestva,” Zhernov 8 (1927): 13.
67. I. Astakhov, “Protiv kulatskoi kritiki i gnilogo liberalizma,” Literatura i iskusstvo 9–10
(1931): 123.
68. V. Karpinskii, “Kogo zhe schitat’ krest’ianskim pisatelem?” Zemlia Sovetskaia 4 (1929):
47–55; see also P. Zamoiskii, “Knutom napravo,” Zemlia Sovetskaia 1 (1929): 47–50; I. Batrak,
“Protiv polonshchiny,” in Nashi pozitsii: Kriticheskii sbornik, ed. I. Batrak (Moscow: Federatsiia,
1931), 41–52.
69. Polonskii, “Kogo zhe, nakonets, schitat’ krest’ianskim pisatelem?” Novyi mir 10 (1929):
174–86.
70. Polonskii, “Kogo zhe, nakonets, schitat’ krest’ianskim pisatelem?” 181 (emphasis in
original).
71. Ibid., 183.
72. A. Selivanovskii, “Na styke s krest’ianskoi literaturoi,” Oktiabr’ 10 (1929): 176.
73. Averbakh, Spornye voprosy kul’turnoi revoliutsii, 175.
74. B. Bialik, “Popytki restavratsii Esenina,” Shturm (Samara) 2 (1932): 78.
75. Osip Beskin, Kulatskaia khudozhestvennaia literatura i opportunisticheskaia kritika: Stat’i
(Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Kommunisticheskoi akademii, 1930); all subsequent page references to
Beskin’s book are in parentheses in the main text.
76. Vasilii Kniazev, Rzhanye apostoly: Kliuev i kliuevshchina (Moscow: Priboi, 1924). See also
A. Dorogoichenko, “Puti krest’ianskoi khudozhestvennoi literatury,” in Puti krest’ianskoi
literatury: Sbornik, ed. P. Zamoiskii, A. Dorogoichenko, I. Laz’ian, A. Subbotin (Moscow and
Leningrad: Moskovskii rabochii, 1929), 32–63.
77. V. Pertsov, “Istoriia i belletristika,” Novyi Lef 8 (1928): 20.
78. Nevertheless Gorky’s attitude toward the peasant poets was more nuanced. On Gorky’s
support for novice peasant writers, see Deev-Khomiakovskii, “Rost derevni i ee pisateli,”
Revoliutsiia i kul’tura 7 (1928): 35–40.
79. M. Gor’kii, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: GIKhL, 1953), 26: 91. On
Gorky’s attitude to the peasant poets, see E. Naumov, M. Gor’kii v bor’be za ideinost’ i masterstvo
sovetskikh pisatelei (Moscow: GIKhL, 1958), 147–63.
4. Literary Theory in the 1920s: Four Options and a Practicum
1. “1920-e gody kak intellektual’nyi resurs: v pole formalizma,” NLO 50 (2001): 194–321.
All subsequent references to this forum appear in the main text in parentheses.
2. Aleksandr Dmitriev and Yan Levchenko, “Nauka kak priem: Eshche raz o
metodologicheskom nasledii russkogo formalizma,” NLO 50 (2001): 195–245. All subsequent
references to this article appear in the main text in parentheses.
3. Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1981), 55. As a survey of the genesis and basic achievements of the movement, this study
is still unsurpassed.
4. The term dominant is borrowed from Roman Jakobson, “The Dominant” [1935,
unpublished ms. in Czech], trans. in Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1987), 41–46. The dominant is that which “guarantees the integrity
of the structure” (41) and subordinates to itself other variables in the artistic work (movement,
period, worldview).
5. These shifts are explicated as three sequential metaphors in Peter Steiner, Russian
Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 44–137.
6. For a concise discussion of this crucial shift, see Ken Hirschkop, “Bakhtin’s Linguistic
Turn,” Dialogism 5–6 (2001): 21–34.
7. For this debate in a mainstream proletarian Marxist journal, see Robert A. Maguire,
Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000),
237–44.
8. Bakhtin himself, late in life, referred to his study group (perhaps as an echo of the
dignified German philosophical Kreis) as a krug and not a kruzhok; see David Shepherd,
“Re-introducing the Bakhtin Circle,” in The Bakhtin Circle: In the Master’s Absence, ed. Craig
Brandist, David Shepherd, and Galin Tihanov (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 2004), 1–2.
9. The best account of this “journaled” aspect of literary-critical culture during the
first postrevolutionary decade remains Robert A. Maguire’s above-mentioned Red Virgin
Soil, especially chapters 2 and 3 on the relationship between literature and the journals that
serialized it or critiqued it.
10. On the parallels between the Jena and Berlin romantics, Hegel, and formalist method-
ology, see Boris Paramonov, “Formalizm: Metod ili mirovozzrenie?,” NLO 14 (1995): 35–52,
esp. 42–45.
11. See P. N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans. Albert J. Wehrle
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), esp. ch. 5, “Poetic Language as the Object of
Poetics.” Medvedev accuses the formalists (his overt target is Shklovsky) of fetishizing the
artistic word and consigning “practical language” to a subsidiary, uncreative, nonhistorical,
and arbitrary role in human life (96–97).
12. See Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood
Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 5.
13. Alexander Potebnya (1835–1891), an important linguist and philosopher of language at
Kharkov University, became famous for professing visual imagery as the defining factor of
poetic language. Shklovsky’s “Art as Device” (1916–1917) begins abruptly and in medias res on
a polemical quote, which is then satirically dismissed: “‘Art is thinking in images.’ This phrase
may even be heard from the mouth of a lycée student. It serves as the point of departure for
the academic philologist who is making his first stab at formulating a theory of literature.”
Shklovsky later defines the image as an obfuscating “sack around objects” (Shklovsky, “Art as
Device,” 1).
14. See “Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry,” originally delivered as a lecture
in 1960, trans. in Roman Jakobson, Language and Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1987), 121–44, esp. 121–22.
15. Boris Eikhenbaum, The Young Tolstoy, collective trans., ed. Gary Kern (Ann
Arbor: Ardis, 1972), esp. part one on the early diaries (“Devices of Self-Observation and
Self-Experimentation”).
16. In Russian, see the indispensable stenographer’s transcripts of this 6 March 1927 meet-
ing, a threshold evening for the fate of literary criticism in the 1920s, in D. Ustinov, ed., “Ma-
terialy disputa ‘Marksizm i formal’nyi metod,” NLO 50 (2001): 247–78. On the significance of
the dispute, see Galin Tihanov, “Zametki o dispute formalistov i marksistov 1927-ogo goda,”
NLO 50 (2001): 279–86 (trans. M. Poliakova); and the English version of Tihanov’s article,
“Marxism and Formalism Revisited: Notes on the 1927 Leningrad Dispute,” Literary Research/
Recherche Littéraire 19.37–38 (2002): 69–77.
17. The essay is an expansion of Tomashevsky’s comments delivered orally at the
Leningrad debate of 6 March 1927, and published as “La nouvelle école d’histoire littéraire en
Russie,” Revue des études slaves 8 (1928): 226–40. Here I quote from the English translation by
Gina Fisch, “The New School of Literary History in Russia,” PMLA 119.1 (January 2004):
120–32, 126 (for both quoted passages).
18. Petre Petrov, “Laying Bare: The Fate of Authorship in Early Soviet Culture,” (PhD
dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2006), part I, ch. 1, 23–24. He continues: “So that
form can implement its new operative principle, it must employ a human agent. And thus
the individual, in realizing his ‘artistic calling,’ becomes just that: an employee of form” (24).
Petrov’s discussion of authorial agency in the formalist and the sociological-Marxist schools
provides a valuable comparative focus.
19. Viktor Shklovsky, “Neskol’ko slov o knigakh OPOYAZa,” Voprosy literatury 6
(November–December 2006): 326. The article was first published in Hungarian in the journal
Kritika 11 (1967); republished in Russian and prefaced by a lengthy memoir on Shklovsky by
the commissioning journalist Pal Flekher in Voprosy literatury 6 (November–December 2006):
315–27.
20. Bakhtin was arrested and exiled in connection with his activity in underground Chris-
tian church groups. A thorough and provocative discussion of Bakhtin Circle members (plus
a detailed chronology of their life and publishing activity) is found in the above-mentioned
edited volume by Brandist, Shepherd, and Tihanov, The Bakhtin Circle.
21. For Pumpianskii’s variegated career, see Nikolai Nikolaev, “Lev Pumpianskii and the
Nevel School of Philosophy,” in The Bakhtin Circle, 125–49.
22. For speculation on this Schelling (and later Scheler) connection as it might have
contributed to the dynamics of Bakhtin’s polyphony, see Caryl Emerson, “Mikhail Bakhtin
and the Dialogic Word in Literary Art: What Sort of Fiction Is This?,” in “Philosophy of
Dialogue,” special issue, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 26.1 (2005): 107–43, esp. 128–29.
23. M. M. Bakhtin and P. M. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical
Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1978); all subsequent references to this work appear in the main text in parentheses. The
“Bakhtin” in the shared authorial credits, a commercial decision to increase sales, is disputed
(actually, discredited) by recent scholarship. Bakhtin’s ideas glint through (the circle was a
close-knit group with no special piety about idea ownership), but Bakhtin would not have
expressed them within a Marxist framework, which he did not share.
24. For these defenses of orthodox formalism against Medvedev’s critique I am indebted
to Adrian Barr, Rutgers University, unpublished paper for my Princeton graduate seminar
COM 583 “Bakhtin, the Russian Formalists, and the Lotman School,” 10 October 2005.
25. Translated by Kenneth Brostrom in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by
M. M. Bakhtin, ed. and annotated by Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1990), 257–325; all subsequent references to this work appear in the main text in parentheses.
Ivan Kanaev, a zoologist member of the Bakhtin Circle, told Sergei Bocharov that he had
shown Bakhtin a surviving typescript of the 1924 “Problem of Content” essay in the late 1930s
and asked him what should be done with it. “Bakhtin waved his hand and said: ‘Burn it’” (as
recorded by S. G. Bocharov, “Ob odnom razgovore i vokrug nego,” NLO 2 (1993): 70–89, esp.
85–86).
26. In the 1929 edition, this chart is included in ch. 1 of part II, “Types of Prose Word: The
Word in Dostoevsky” (Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo [Leningrad: Priboi, 1929], 127); in the
English translation of the 1963 expanded and revised edition, it appears in ch. 5, “Discourse
[Slovo] in Dostoevsky” (Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl
Emerson [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984],199).
27. For a brief survey in English of the reception of the 1929 Dostoevsky volume on the
threshold of Stalinism, see Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 75–82.
28. For this survey I am indebted to Khans Lenert (Hans Lehnert), “Sud’ba sotsio-
logicheskogo napravleniia v sovetskoi nauke o literature i stanovlenie sotsrealisticheskogo
kanona: Pereverzevshchina / Vul’garnyi sotsiologizm,” in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, ed. Hans
Günther and Evgeny Dobrenko (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2000), 320–38, esp.
321–27.
29. See especially chapter 5, “The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism,” in Leon
Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1971), 162–83; all subsequent references to this work appear in the main text in
parentheses.
30. For a lucid discussion of Lenin’s “copy theory of reality” and its contribution to the
dismantling of Russian spiritual philosophy in the name of objectivism, see ch. 10, “Lenin and
the View from No One,” in Lesley Chamberlain, Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia
(London: Atlantic, 2004), 185–99. Lenin is not admired for this crusade—but he is valued,
since Chamberlain, a disciple of Isaiah Berlin, wholeheartedly equates the secularization of
Russian thought with its maturation and progress.
31. Pereverzev repeatedly defended his sociologism against charges of impure materialism.
He took pains to insist that “there were as many ‘sociological methods’ as there were sociolo-
gies,” and thus the label attached to his school was hopelessly imprecise unless yoked firmly
to materialism (strictly required of every Marxist, “without any reservations whatsoever”);
see V. F. Pereverzev, “Neobkhodimye predposylki marksistskogo literaturovedeniia,” in
Literaturovedenie: Sbornik statei, ed. V. F. Pereverzev (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia Akademiia
khudozhestvennykh nauk, 1928), 9–10.
32. For an excellent integration of Vygotsky’s lab science and humanistic views, gracefully
rendered into English and wholly nondoctrinaire, see Mikhail Yaroshevsky, Lev Vygotsky,
trans. Sergei Syrovatkin (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989).
33. This remarkable book awaits a reliable translation. For the time being, see Lev
Vygotsky, The Psychology of Art (completed ms. in 1925; published in Russian only in 1965),
trans. Scripta Technica (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971).
34. First published in Aleksandr Voronskii, Literaturnye tipy (Moscow: Krug, 1925), trans.
by James Karambelas as “Isaac Babel,” in Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, ed.
Victor Erlich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 182–97, here 186.
35. Cited in Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of
Soviet Literary Culture, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 167.
36. See Herman Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories 1917–1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism
(New York: Octagon, 1977), 3–4 and ch. 1 and 2 (on literary theories and groupings up to
1925).
37. Petre Petrov, “Laying Bare,” 43–44.
38. Valentin Voloshinov, Freidizm: Kriticheskii ocherk (1927), translated by I. R. Titunik
as V. N. Vološinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (New York: Academic Press, 1976); all
subsequent references to this translation appear in the main text in parentheses.
39. Aleksandr Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii (St. Petersburg:
Meduza, 1993), ch. 6, “Psikhoanaliz v strane bol’shevikov,” esp. 213–31; all subsequent
references follow this edition and are the author’s translation. (There is also a full English
translation, The Eros of the Impossible, 1997). Etkind’s history is learned, capricious, and dark, in
the style of Russia’s first generation of post-Communist cultural historians. Its final definition
of “the Eros of the impossible” harkens explicitly back to Nietzsche: a “cult of power in the
service of death” (424).
40. See the balanced survey by Martin A. Miller, “Freudian Theory under Bolshevik
Rule: The Theoretical Controversy during the 1920s,” Slavic Review 44.4 (Winter 1985):
625–46, to which this discussion is indebted, esp. 635–36 on Lenin and Trotsky.
41. The exchange is in Mikhail Zoshchenko, Before Sunrise, trans. Gary Kern (Ann Arbor:
Ardis, 1974), 6.
42. Boris Eichenbaum, “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made,” in Gogol from the Twentieth
Century: Eleven Essays, ed. and trans. Robert A. Maguire (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1974), 267–91; all subsequent references to this translated work appear in the main text
in parentheses.
43. For a lucid and sympathetic discussion, see Carol Any, Boris Eikhenbaum: Voices of a
Russian Formalist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), esp. ch. 3, “Guarding the Work-
Centered Poetics.”
44. See Jurij Striedter, Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value: Russian Formalism and Czech
Structuralism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 58–82, esp. 63.
45. This study, completed between 1921 and 1929 and included in Arkhaisty i novatory
(Leningrad: Priboi, 1929) has been translated in two parts: part I as “Stylization and Parody,”
in Dostoevsky and Gogol: Texts and Criticism, ed. and trans. Priscilla Meyer and Stephen Rudy
(Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 101–17, and part II as “Dostoevsky and Gogol,” in Twentieth-Century
Russian Literary Criticism, ed. and trans. Victor Erlich, 102–16. All subsequent references to
these translated works appear in the main text in parentheses.
46. L. V. Pumpianskii, “Gogol,” Klassicheskaia traditsiia: Sobranie trudov po istorii russkoi
literatury, ed. A. P. Chudakov (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), 256–342, plus detailed
annotations (706–21); all subsequent references to this work appears in the main text in
parentheses.
47. The best discussion and application in English of Pumpianskii’s theses on Gogol is Alina
Wyman, “Gogol’s Urban Labyrinth: The Treatment of Space in Nevsky Prospekt,” in Poetics.
Self. Place: Essays in Honor of Anna Lisa Crone, ed. Nicole Boudreau, Sarah Krive, and Catherine
O’Neil (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2007), 737–62, esp. 738.
48. V. F. Pereverzev, Tvorchestvo Gogolia, 2nd ed. (Ivanovo-Voznesensk: Osnova, 1926); all
subsequent references appear in the main text in parentheses and refer to the second edition.
49. Valerian Pereverzev, “The Evolution of Gogol’s Art,” a conflation of three chapters
from Tvorchestvo Gogolia as edited and translated by Robert Maguire in Gogol from the Twentieth
Century, 134–54, here 151.
50. As regards the larger question of Bakhtin’s ideological orientation, see the valuable but
unvalidatable testimony by Sergei Bocharov in “Ob odnom razgovore i vokrug nego,” NLO 2
(1993): 70–89, esp. 76–77, as translated by Vadim Liapunov in “Conversations with Bakhtin,”
PMLA 109.5 (October 1994), 1009–24, based on a conversation with Bakhtin on 21 November
1974: “I asked, ‘M. M., were you ever fascinated with Marxism?’ ‘No, never. I took an interest
in it, as in much else—Freudianism, even spiritualism. But I was never a Marxist to any
degree whatsoever’” (1016).
51. M. M. Bakhtin, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929), 101–2; this
later omitted portion has been translated as Appendix I in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 278.
52. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Appendix II, “Toward a Reworking of the
Dostoevsky Book” (1961), 288.
53. For an excellent commentary and translation (closer to a heavily edited rearrangement)
of Ermakov’s chapter on “The Nose” from the 1923 monograph, see Robert Maguire, ed.,
Gogol from the Twentieth Century, 155–98; all subsequent references to this work appear in the
main text in parentheses.
54. Galin Tihanov, “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern
Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?),” Common Knowledge 10.1 (Winter 2004): 61–81, esp. 62;
all subsequent references to this work appear in the main text in parentheses.
5. Soviet Literary Criticism and the Formulation of the Aesthetics of
Socialist Realism, 1932–1940
This chapter was translated from Russian by Corinne Ducey.
1. For the text of the resolution, see D. L. Babichenko, ed., “Schast’e literatury.” Gosudarstvo i
pisateli, 1925–1938: Dokumenty (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997), 130–31.
2. Hans Günther, “Socialist Realism and Utopianism,” in Socialist Realism Revisited, ed.
N. Kolesnikoff and W. Smyrniw (Hamilton: McMaster University, 1994), 29–41.
3. See David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of
Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
4. N. Pogodin, “Siuzhet, zhanr, stil’,” Literaturnaia gazeta (5 February 1933): 3.
5. See I. Gronskii, “Iz pisem 1972 goda,” in Izbavlenie ot mirazhei: Sotsrealizm segodnia, ed.
E. Dobrenko (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 119–23. It is useful to note that the discussion
about socialist realism was so widespread that two years after the proclamation of socialist
realism there were over four hundred articles on the topic; see S. Aresh’ian, E. Gromberg,
and G. Ostrovskaia, Sotsialisticheskii realizm: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’, ed. N. K. Piksanov
(Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1934).
6. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1990), 712.
7. I. M. Bespalov, “Sostoianie i zadachi sovetskoi kritiki,” in Vtoroi plenum pravleniia Soiuza
sovetskikh pisatelei SSSR, mart 1935: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo “Khudozhest-
vennaia literatura,” 1935), 26.
8. See G. Lukach, “Khudozhnik i kritik (O normal’nykh i nenormal’nykh otnosheniiakh
mezhdu nimi),” Literaturnyi kritik 7 (1939): 3–31.
9. On censorship in the 1930s, see D. L. Babichenko, ed., “Literaturnyi front”: Istoriia
politicheskoi tsenzury, 1932–1946. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: Entsiklopediia russkikh dereven’,
1994); T. M. Goriaeva, ed., Iskliuchit’ vsiakie upominaniia: Ocherk istorii sovetskoi tsenzury
(Moscow: Vremia i mesto, 1995); L. V. Maksimenkov, ed., Bol’shaia tsenzura: pisateli i zhurnalisty
v Strane Sovetov, 1917–1956 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia”; Materik, 2005).
10. E. Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo pisatelia (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt,

1999), 12.
11. M. Iampolski, “Censorship as the Triumph of Life,” in Socialist Realism without Shores,
ed. Th. Lahusen and E. Dobrenko (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 165.
12. Babichenko, “Schast’e literatury,” 165.
13. See H. Günther, Die Verstaatlichung der Literatur: Entstehung und Funktionsweise des
sozialistisch-realistischen Kanons in der sowjetischen Literatur der 30er Jahre (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984),
18–54.
14. A. V. Lunacharskii, Stat’i o sovetskoi literature, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1971),
199.
15. V. Asmus, “O normativnoi estetike,” Literaturnyi kritik 1 (1934): 190.
16. Ibid., 200 (emphasis in original).
17. I. Al’tman, “Pravda o nashei literature,” Literaturnyi kritik 7–8 (1934): 12.
18. A. Serafimovich, “O pisateliakh ‘oblizannykh’ i ‘neoblizannykh,’” Literaturnaia gazeta
(6 February 1934): 2.
19. “O koriavoi muzhitskoi sile” (editorial), Literaturnaia gazeta (12 February 1934): 1.
20. M. Gor’kii, “Otkrytoe pis´mo A.S. Serafimovichu,” Literaturnaia gazeta (14 February
1934): 1.
21. Literaturnaia gazeta (28 February 1934): 1.
22. “S nekotorym opozdaniem” (editorial), Literaturnaia gazeta (26 March 1934): 2.
23. O. Forsh, “O kaprize i novatorstve,” Literaturnyi Leningrad (8 April 1934): 3.
24. “Novatory i puristy,” Literaturnyi Leningrad (21 March 1934): 12.
25. M. Shaginian, “Diskussiia o iazyke,” Literaturnaia gazeta (18 April 1934): 2.
26. “Otvet opponentam” (editorial), Literaturnaia gazeta (18 April 1934): 1.
27. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd, 273–74.
28. Nikolai Stepanov, “Slovesnaia butaforiia,” Literaturnaia ucheba 6 (1934): 115; all
subsequent references to this article appear in parentheses in the main text.
29. See G. A. Belaia, Zakonomernosti stilevogo razvitiia sovetskoi prozy dvadtsatykh godov
(Moscow: Nauka, 1977).
30. Vs. Vishnevskii, “Znat’ Zapad!“ Literaturnyi kritik 7 (1933): 79–85.
31. In 1927–1928, Eisenstein came up with the idea of filming Marx’s Capital with the
help of Joyce’s artistic devices, see Eisenstein’s article “Iz neosushchestvlennykh zamyslov
(Kapital),” Iskusstvo kino 1 (1973): 56–57. In another article, “Odolzhaites’!” (Proletarskoe kino
17–18 [1931]: 19–20), Eisenstein returns once again to the problem of the internal monologue
in Joyce.
32. Vs. Vishnevskii, “Chto khorosho u Dos-Passosa?,” Znamia 5 (1933): 165; all subsequent
references to this issue are given in parentheses in the main text.
33. V. Kirpotin, “Tendentsiia rozhdeniia novogo stilia,” Znamia 5 (1933): 175.
34. A. Leites, “Put’ Dos-Passosa,” Znamia 5 (1933): 150.
35. V. Pertsov, “O lupe vremeni i pravdivom izobrazhenii deistvitel’nosti,” Znamia 3 (1933):
185.
36. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd, 317.
37. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd, 359–61.
38. Leites, “Put’ Dos-Passosa,” 153.
39. A. Fadeev, “Pomen’she literaturshchiny,” Znamia 5 (1933): 178.
40. V. Stenich, “Kak rabotaet Dos-Passos,” Znamia 5 (1933): 152.
41. Pertsov, “Litsom k deistvitel´nosti,“ Znamia 6 (1933): 158.
42. D. Mirskii, “Dos-Passos, sovetskaia literatura i Zapad,” Literaturnyi kritik 1 (1933): 124.
43. See Mirskii, “Dzheims Dzhois,” Al’manakh God shestnadtsatyi 1 (1933): 449.
44. L. Timofeev, Teoriia literatury (Moscow, 1934), 93–94.
45. Timofeev, Stikh i proza: Teoriia literatury dlia nachinaiushchego pisatelia (Moscow: Khu-
dozhestvennaia literatura, 1935), 95.
46. V. Novinskii, “V poiskakh soderzhatel’noi kompozitsii,” Oktiabr’ 11 (1934): 196.
47. Timofeev, “O kompozitsii khudozhestvennogo proizvedeniia,” Oktiabr’ 11 (1934): 152.
48. See M. Mikhailov and B. Mikhailovskii, “Siuzhet,” in Literaturnaia entsiklopediia
(Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Kommunisticheskoi akademii, 1939), 11: 145.
49. A. Lunacharskii, “Sotsialisticheskii realizm” in Stat’i o sovetskoi literature, 2nd ed.
(Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1971), 181, 182, 195; first published as “Vmesto zakliuchitel’nogo
slova,” Literaturnyi kritik 1 (1933): 47–56.
50. P. Iudin, “Lenin i nekotorye voprosy literaturnoi kritiki,” Literaturnyi kritik 1 (1933):
11–31.
51. M. Rozental’, “Mirovozzrenie i metod v khudozhestvennom tvorchestve,” Literaturnyi
kritik 6 (1933): 24.
52. Rozental’, “Mirovozzrenie i metod,” 28.
53. I. Nusinov, “Sotsialisticheskii realizm i problema mirovozzreniia i metoda,” Literaturnyi
kritik 2 (1934): 146, 148, 150.
54. Rozental’, “Eshche raz o mirovozzrenii v khudozhestvennom tvorchestve,” Literaturnyi
kritik 5 (1934): 31.
55. L. Spokoinyi, “Protivorechie mezhdu khudozhestvennym metodom i mirovoz
zreniem,” in V sporakh o metode: Sbornik statei o sotsialisticheskom realizme, ed. N. Zhdanov
(Leningrad: Lenoblizdat, 1934), 134, 135.
56. The critic Nusinov, an opponent of Rozental’s in the discussion on method, was also
accused of vulgar sociologism.
57. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd, 4. On the history of the expression “engineers of human souls,”
see O. Ronen, “Inzhenery chelovecheskikh dush: k istorii izrecheniia,” in Lotmanovskii sbornik
(Moscow: O. G. I; RGGU, 1997), 2: 393–400.
58. See H. Günther, “Stalinskie sokoly (analiz mifa 30-ykh godov),” Voprosy literatury 11–12
(1991): 122–41; H. Günther, Der sozialistische Übermensch: Maksim Gor´kij und der sowjetische
Heldenmythos (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 104–17.
59. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd, 4.
60. Ibid., 10.
61. A. Artizov, Oleg Naumov, ed., Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia (Moscow:
Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 1999), 239.
62. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd, 13, 17.
63. Ibid., 384.
64. Ibid., 382, 381.
65. V. Malik, ed., Protiv formalizma i naturalizma v iskusstve: Sbornik statei i materialov
(Tashkent: Uzprofizdat, 1936), 33; all subsequent references to this work appear in parentheses
in the main text.
66. V. Ermilov, “Za narodnost’ iskusstva,” Krasnaia nov’ 4 (1936): 231.
67. See more in Günther, Der sozialistische Übermensch, 53-58, 144–54.
68. See the introduction in H. Günther and S. Hänsgen, ed., Sovetskaia vlast’ i media: Sbornik
statei (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2006), 9–10.
69. See F. J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era
(Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1990); D. Howell, The Development of Soviet Folkloristics
(New York and London: Garland, 1992).
70. Malik, ed., Protiv formalizma i naturalizma, 39.
71. See Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt,
1997).
72. Malik, ed., Protiv formalizma i naturalizma, 113.
73. “O khoroshikh rasskazakh i redaktorskoi rutine” (editorial), Literaturnyi kritik 8 (1936):

106-113.
74. Gurvich’s attack is reproduced in N. V. Kornienko and E. D. Shubina, ed., Andrei
Platonov: Vospominaniia sovremennikov; materialy k biografii (Moscow: Sovremennyi pisatel’, 1994),
268–78; all subsequent references to this work appear in parentheses in the main text.
75. See the commentary by Nataliia Kornienko in Andrei Platonov, 425. In 1939, Ermilov,
who in Platonov’s words was an “administrative critic,” stood in the way of the publication of
Platonov’s book Razmyshleniia chitatelia.
76. Andrei Platonov, “Bessmertie,” Literaturnyi kritik 8 (1936): 118.
77. “O vrednykh vzgliadakh Literaturnogo kritika” (editorial), Krasnaia nov’ 4 (1940): 168–69,
173.
78. On the masochistic features of the socialist-realist hero, see I. Smirnov, Psikho-
diakhronologika: Psikhoistoriia russkoi literatury ot romantizma do nashikh dnei (Moscow: Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie, 1994), 233–57.
6. Soviet Literary Theory in the 1930s: Battles over Genre and the
Boundaries of Modernity
Katerina Clark wrote the sections “The Formation of the Canon of Marxist-Leninist
Aesthetics”; “Literaturnyi kritik, Lukács and Lifshits, and IFLI”; “The Moscow Discussion on
the Novel”; and “Narration vs. Description, the Assault on Expressionism, Disputes about the
Lyric.” Galin Tihanov wrote all sections on Mikhail Bakhtin and on semantic paleontology;
he also wrote the brief introduction and the conclusion.
1. See P. Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets, trans. J. L. Sammons (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1967).
2. Literaturnoe nasledstvo 1 (1931) contained the hitherto unpublished correspondence of
Engels with Paul Ernst; Literaturnoe nasledstvo 2 (1932) carried the previously unpublished
correspondence between Engels and Margaret Harkness; Literaturnoe nasledstvo 3 (1932) featured
the correspondence of Marx and Engels with Lassalle about his play Franz von Sickingen (the
most complete version of the correspondence published to that date); and Literaturnoe nasledstvo
7–8 (1933) contained Engels’s letters to Minna Kautsky about her novel The Old and the New.
3. For sections of Hegel’s Aesthetics in translation, see Literaturnyi kritik 10 and 11 (1934);
Literaturnyi kritik 1, 2, 6, and 8 (1935); Literaturnyi kritik 3, 5, and 7 (1936); Literaturnyi kritik 4 and
5 (1937); and Literaturnyi kritik 1, 7, and 8 (1938). A fuller version of the same translation came
out in 1938 in an impressive print run of 20,000 copies; see Gegel’, Sochineniia. XII. Lektsii po
estetike. Kniga pervaia, trans. B. S. Stolpner (Moscow: Insitut filosofii Akademii nauk, 1938). For
the account of Kant’s aesthetics, see L. Spokoinyi, “Estetika Kanta,” Literaturnyi kritik 3 (1935):
17–37.
4. Lifshits originally had worked in art history but shifted to literary theory. The passion
for the Renaissance was so strong in Lifshits’s case that he gave his daughter an Italian name
from the Renaissance, Vittoria (Katerina Clark’s interview with Vittoria Lifshits of June
1998).
5. A revised version appeared as G. Lukach, “Roman kak burzhuaznaia epopeia,” Literatur-
naia entsiklopediia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Kommunisticheskoi akademii, 1935), 9: 795–832.
6. “Doklad A. M. Gor’kogo o sovetskoi literature,” Pervyi s”ezd pisatelei: Stenograficheskii
otchet (Moscow: Ogiz, 1934), 6.
7. “Problemy teorii romana: Materialy diskussii,” Literaturnyi kritik 2 (1935): 214–49;
Literaturnyi kritik 3 (1935): 231–54. This version omits some material (in particular the
contributions of Viktor Shklovsky and Igor Sats). A fuller version of these texts appeared in
German in Disput über den Roman: Beiträge aus der Sowjetunion 1917–1941, ed. M. Wegner,
B. Hiller, P. Kessler, and G. Schaumann (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1988). For a more
extended analysis of the discussion, based also on archival records, see G. Tihanov, The Master
and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 113–28. All references to Lukács’s paper and to the discussion
are given in parentheses in the main text, pointing to the issue of Literaturnyi kritik (2 or 3) and
the relevant page numbers. The authors’ names appear in parentheses only where the quote is
not already attributed in the main text.
8. See G. Lukach, “Zolia i realizm,” Literaturnaia gazeta (22 November 1934).
9. See Aristova’s contribution, Literaturnyi kritik 3 (1935): 232; Lifshits calls the classical epic
“folklore.”
10. G. Lukacs, “Rasskaz ili opisanie,” trans. from the German manuscript by N.
Vol’kenau, Literaturnyi kritik 8 (1936): 44–67; German version: “Erzählen oder beschreiben?,”
Internationale Literatur 11 (1936): 100–18; Internationale Literatur 12 (1936): 108–23. All subsequent
references are to the Russian version and appear in parentheses in the main text.
11. R. Müller, ed., Die Säuberung: Moskau 1936: Stenogramm einer geschlossenen Parteiversamm-
lung. Georg Lukács, Johannes Becher, Friedrich Wolf u. a. (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991).
On the precarious position of the leftist exiles from Central and Eastern Europe in Stalin’s
Moscow and the complicated situation of Lukács, see G. Tihanov, “Cosmopolitans without
a Polis: Towards a Hermeneutics of the East-East Exilic Experience (1929–1945),” in The Exile
and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe, ed. J. Neubauer and Z. Török (Berlin and New
York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 123–43.
12. K. Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1995), 290–97.
13. The debate proper began with responses to two essays published in the September 1937
issue of Das Wort by Klaus Mann and Alfred Kurella (under the pseudonym Bernhard Ziegler),
but their attacks on expressionism represented a continuation of the position taken by Lukács
in his essay “Greatness and Decline of Expressionism,” the German version of which was first
published in Internationale Literatur in 1934. In this essay, Lukács tried to establish a direct link
between expressionism and National Socialism.
14. G. Pomerants, “Zapiski gadkogo utenka,” Znamia 7 (1993): 134–73, here 143.
15. E. Usievich, “V zashchitu politicheskoi poezii,” Literaturnyi kritik 5 (1937): 70, 87, 90, 89,
90, and 102, respectively. The response by D. Al’tauzen, “V zashchitu politicheskoi poezii,”
Literaturnaia gazeta 63 (1 November 1937), accused Usievich among other things of peddling
the Bukharin line; she was also attacked in “O politicheskoi poezii,” Pravda 58 (1937).
16. See E. Usievich, Review of “Molodaia Moskva. Sbornik stikhov,” Literaturnoe obozrenie
10 (1937): 9; Usievich, “Lirika,” Literaturnaia gazeta 36 (1939).
17. On “sincerity,” see, for example, A. Evgen’ev, “Proshchanie s liubimym: O chetyrekh
sonetakh S. Kirsanova,” Literaturnaia gazeta 57 (1938).
18. For example, M. Gusin, “A gde zhe liubov’?” Literaturnaia gazeta (13 October 1940),
argued that love relations in literature are too tied to politics, pointing out that Engels
believed that true socialism will come from genuine marriage and choice in love.
19. See, for example, M. Aliger, “Vo ves’ golos,” Literaturnaia gazeta 31 (1940).
20. “Doklad N. I. Bukharina o poezii, poetike i zadachakh poeticheskogo tvorchestva v
SSSR,” Pervyi s”ezd pisatelei, 479–503.
21. See A. Fadeev, “O poeme Very Inber,” Literaturnaia gazeta (5 December 1938); “Poemy
Very Inber i ee kritiki,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 3 (1939): 59–62.
22. G. Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. H. and S. Mitchell (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 33–34.
23. “Istoriia i literatura,” Literaturnaia gazeta (26 August 1939).
24. K. Clark and E. Dobrenko, eds., Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents,
1917–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 210–15, here 211.
25. The early version of the Rabelais book, submitted as a dissertation in 1940, and a
plethora of related materials have been published, accompanied by extensive apparatus, in
M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, vol. 4(1), “Fransua Rable v istorii realizma” (1940 g.);
Materialy k knige o Rable (1930–1950-e gg.); Kommentarii i prilozheniia (Moscow: Iazyki slavian-
skikh kul’tur, 2008).
26. On the changes introduced when “Discourse in the Novel” (conceived and written by
Bakhtin as a book) was published in the 1970s, see N. Pan’kov, “‘Roman kak naibolee podlin-
nyi epicheskii zhanr . . . ’ Dva doklada M. M. Bakhtina po teorii romana (IMLI 1940, 1941),”
Dialog. Karnaval. Khoronotop 1 (2009): 64–169, esp. 87–88. Pan’kov reveals that initially Bakhtin
gave the essay currently known as “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” the same
title as the 1934–1936 book manuscript, “Discourse in the Novel” (90); the essay now known as
“Epic and Novel” was titled “Roman kak literaturnyi zhanr” (The Novel as a Literary Genre
[88]). More on the genesis and the textology of the preserved fragments on the Bildungsro-
man, see in N. Pan’kov, “M. M. Bakhtin v materialakh lichnogo arkhiva B. V. Zalesskogo,”
Dialog. Karnaval. Khorotop 1–2 (2003), 129–41; see in the same issue Pan’kov’s publication of
additional fragments of the book on the Bildungsroman (142–61).
27. Quoted here from the English translation in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical
Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. M. Holquist and V. Liapunov, trans. K. Brostrom (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1990), 257–325; all subsequent references to this work appear in
parentheses in the main text. In the new Russian edition of Bakhtin’s works, the title of this
treatise is “K voprosam metodologii estetiki slovesnogo tvorchestva. I. Problema formy,
soderzhaniia i materiala v slovesnom khudozhestvennom tvorchestve,” which reflects the
fact that the text was intended as the first part of a larger work (the other parts of which have
not survived); see M. M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Vol. 1: Filosofskaia estetika
1920-kh godov (Moscow: Russkie slovari; Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2003), 264–66; 710–11.
28. On Lukács’s texts from Literaturnyi kritik known to Bakhtin (including the materials
from the discussion on the novel), see Tihanov, Master and the Slave, 11–13.
29. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), 335.
30. Three texts from the end of the Cold War shaped this ongoing debate: Boris Groys,
“Grausamer Karneval: Michail Bachtins ‘ästhetische Rechtfertigung’ des Stalinismus,”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 140 (21 June 1989): N3, and the response by Renate Lachmann,
“Versöhnung von Leben und Tod im Lachen: Der russische Theoretiker Michail Bachtin
(1895–1975) läßt die Stimmen der Texte laut werden,” Frankfurter Rundschau 85 (10 April 1990):
13; Mikhail Ryklin, “Tela terrora,” Bakhtinskii sbornik (Moscow: Prometei, 1990), 1: 60–76.
31. On Bakhtin’s social utopianism, see Michael Gardiner, “Bakhtin’s Carnival: Utopia as
Critique,” Utopian Studies 3.2 (1992): 21–49. The rapprochement of the epic and the novelistic,
the case for which one finds subterraneously yet vigorously made in Bakhtin’s book on
Rabelais, is of course a trend to be explained with reference not just to Soviet culture but
within the wider European context. Joyce’s Ulysses was a particularly significant embodiment
of this trend (for more on this, see G. Tihanov, “Bakhtin, Joyce, and Carnival: Towards the
Synthesis of Epic and Novel in Rabelais,” Paragraph 24.1 [2001]: 66–83).
32. See T. Shchedrina’s comments on “O granitsakh nauchnogo literaturovedeniia (kons-
pekt doklada),” in Gustav Shpet, Iskusstvo kak vid znaniia: Izbrannye trudy po filosofii kul’tury, ed.
T. G. Shchedrina (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007), 507. All subsequent references to Shpet’s notes
on the novel will be to this volume, with the relevant page numbers appearing in parentheses
in the main text. For more on Shpet’s literary theory, see G. Tihanov, “Innovation and
Regression: Gustav Shpet’s Theoretical Concerns in the 1920s,” in Critical Theory in Russia and
the West, ed. A. Renfrew and G. Tihanov (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 44–62.
33. In Russian, “empiricheskaia obshchnost’ motiva (ona ne obshcha, a obshchna).”
34. See Bakhtin’s critique of Shpet in “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination:
Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), 268.
35. In Russian: “Pri nastoiashchem rastsvete iskusstva roman budushchego ne imeet.”
36. Mikhail Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Vol. 2: “Problemy tvorchestva
Dostoevskogo,” 1929; Stat’i o L. Tolstom, 1929; Zapisi kursa lektsii po istorii russkoi literatury,
1922–1927 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 2000), 26; all subsequent references to this work are in
parentheses in the main text. There has so far been no full English translation of the 1929
version of Bakhtin’s book.
37. J. Mukařovský, “Dialogue and Monologue,” The Word and Verbal Art: Selected Essays,
trans. J. Burbank and P. Steiner (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977),
81–112.
38. For a recent very good study of the origins of the term gothic realism in Bakhtin, see N.
Pan’kov, “Smysl i proiskhozhdenie termina ‘goticheskii realizm’,” Voprosy literatury 1 (2008):
227–48 (237–39 on Max Dvořak’s impact, and 241–48 on classicist aesthetics in Literaturnyi
kritik and Bakhtin’s implicit polemic with it in the Rabelais book).
39. The first publication of a text by Bakhtin in the West (still in Russian) dates to 1962; see
L. Matejka, ed., Readings in Russian Poetics (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Materials, 1962). As
late as 1988, in a widely used reader compiled by David Lodge, Bakhtin’s “From the Prehis-
tory of Novelistic Discourse” was assigned a place in the rubric “Formalist, structuralist and
poststructuralist poetics, linguistics, and narratology”; see D. Lodge, ed., Modern Criticism and
Theory: A Reader (London and New York: Longman, 1988).
40. On the French (mis)appropriation, see K. Zbinden, Bakhtin between East and West: Cross-
Cultural Transmission (Oxford: Legenda, 2006), esp. ch. 1: “The Structuralist in the Closet.”
41. Although Bakhtin did follow the work of the Moscow-Tartu School more closely
than even his contemporaries might have assumed (see the inventory of his personal library,
recently published in I. V. Kliueva and L. M. Lisunova, M. M. Bakhtin—myslitel’, pedagog,
chelovek [Saransk: S.p., 2010], 49–168).
42. See V. Kozhinov, “Bakhtin i ego chitateli: Razmyshleniia i otchasti vospominaniia,”
Dialog. Karnaval. Khoronotop 2–3 (1993): 120–34, here 124–25.
43. See Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to
Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978), 50–52 (with a quote from Eikhenbaum’s earlier endorsement of Wölfflin on p.
52). On the idea of “history without names” in the Bakhtin Circle, see also F. Pereda, “Mijail
Bajtín y la historia del arte sin nombres,” in Mijail Bajtín en la encrucijada de la hermenéutica y las
ciencias humanas, ed. B. Vauthier and P. M. Cátedra (Salamanca: SEMYR, 2003), 93–118.
44. M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee, ed. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 167.
45. See V. Tolz, Russian Academicians and the Revolution: Combining Professionalism and Politics
(Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1997), 107.
46. M. K. Azadovskii, “Pamiati N. Ia. Marra,” Sovetskii fol’klor: Sbornik statei i materialov 2–3
(1935): 5–20, here 13.
47. N. Marr, “K semanticheskoi paleontologii v iazykakh neiafeticheskikh system,”
Izvestiia GAIMK 7.7–8 (1931): 1–57, cited here from N. Marr, Izbrannye raboty (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1936), 2: 246–88.
48. Marr, “K semanticheskoi paleontologii,” 251 (“Semantika dala dobrat’sia shag za
shagom paleontologieiu rechi do protsessa organizatsii iazykovogo materiala, proniknut’ v
nego”).
49. I. G. Frank-Kamenetskii, “Itogi kollektivnoi raboty nad siuzhetom Tristana i Isol’dy,”
in Tristan i Isol’da: Ot geroini liubvi feodal’noi Evropy do bogini matriarkhal’noi Afrevrazii. Kollektivnyi
350  NOTES TO PAGE 133
trud Sektora semantiki mifa i fol’klora pod redaktsiei N. Ia. Marra (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii
nauk SSSR, 1932), 261–76, here 270.
50. Marr, “K semanticheskoi paleontologii,” 250.
51. Marr, K bakinskoi diskussii o iafetidologii i marksizme (Baku: AzGNII, 1932), 44; asked by
a student why the elements were exactly four, Marr is reported to have replied with indigna-
tion: “Because they are not five!”; see I. M. D’iakonov, Kniga vospominanii (St. Petersburg:
Fond regional’nogo razvitiia Sankt-Peterburga, 1995), 315: “Pa-ta-mu-chto ne piat!” (It was
this sense of Marr’s “new teaching” being linguistically unfounded and yet aggressively
self-assured that led Roman Jakobson to claim, retrospectively, that Marrism’s “pernicious
pressure” was one of the factors contributing to the “self-liquidation” of the Prague Linguistic
Circle in the late 1940s; see R. Jakobson, “An Example of Migratory Terms and Institutional
Models (On the fiftieth anniversary of the Moscow Linguistic Circle),” in Selected Writ-
ings, Vol. 2 [The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971], 527–38, here 535; see also D. Laferrière,
“Semiotica sub Specie Sovietica: Anti-Freudianism, Pro-Marrism, and Other Disturbing
Matters,” PTL 3 [1978]: 437–54, esp. 452–53.)
52. I. I. Meshchaninov, “Problemy klassifikatsii iazykov i narodov v osveshchenii
iafeticheskogo iazykoznaniia,” Sovetskaia etnografiia 2 (1933): 74–83, here 83.
53. On Marr’s knowledge of contemporary Russian literature, especially the avant-garde,
see T. Nikol’skaia, “N. Ia. Marr i futuristy,” Kredo 3–4 (1993): 7 (where she maintains that
Marr, through his son Iurii, knew the poetry of A. Kruchenykh, I. Zdanevich, and I.
Terent’ev) and Ia. Vasil’kov, “Tragediia akademika Marra,” Khristianskii Vostok 8.2 (2001):
390–421 (where attention is drawn to Marr’s quotes from the poetry of Mariengof [416]). Iurii
Marr reminisced that his childhood belief in the similarity between Basque and Georgian
was later taken up and developed by his father (see T. Nikol’skaia, Avangard i okrestnosti [St.
Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh, 2002], 84; there Nikol’skaia also highlights vestiges of Marr’s “new
teaching” in the work of the futurist Aleksandr Tufanov, 239–45).
54. See “Vstupitel’noe slovo, proiznesennoe vitse-prezidentom Vsesoiuznoi Akademii
Nauk akad. N. Ia. Marrom v torzhestvennom sobranii, sostoiavshemsia 27 sentiabria,”
Vestnik Akademii Nauk SSSR 10 (1932): 5–18, here 14 (“kogda tekhnika myshleniia v obrazakh
smeniaetsia , sobstvenno povyshaetsia v utochnenii tekhnikoi myshleniia poniatiami”).
55. The full list of participants can be found in N. Braginskaia’s notes to O. Freidenberg,
“Recollections of N. Ia. Marr,” Soviet Studies in Literature 27.3 (1991): 61–83, here 82n23. Some
of the work of the “Homer Circle” was published as a separate volume in the series Iazyk i
literatura (1929, vol. 4); see there especially Freidenberg’s article “Siuzhetnaia semantika
‘Odissei’,” 59–74, and Ivan Meshchaninov’s “Gomer i uchenie o stadial’nosti,” 21–28.
Methodologically, this volume is inferior to the introductory and concluding articles (by
Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii, respectively), included in the 1932 collective volume on
Tristan and Isolde; mainstream classicists abroad disapproved of the methodology of the 1929
Homer volume: “here Homer serves Japhetidology, rather than Japhetidology Homer”
(F. Novotný, “Homer ve svĕtle jafetidologie,” Listy filologické 58 [1931]: 101–14, here 114).
56. B. Bogaevskii, “Gomer i iafeticheskaia teoriia,” Iazyk i literatura 4 (1929): 1–20, here
20 (emphasis in the original); N. Marr, ed., Tristan i Isol’da: Ot geroini liubvi feodal’noi Evropy do
bogini matriarkhal’noi Afrevrazii. Kollektivnyi trud Sektora semantiki mifa i fol’klora pod redaktsiei
N. Ia. Marra (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1932).
57. Marr’s article “Ishtar’: ot bogini matriarkhal’noi Afrevrazii do geroini liubvi feodal’noi
Evropy” was published in Iafeticheskii sbornik 5 (1927): 109–78. Olga Freidenberg drew attention
to this intentional reversal in her opening article, “Tselevaia ustanovka kollektivnoi raboty
nad siuzhetom Tristana i Isol’dy,” in Tristan i Isol’da, 1–16, here 3. Freidenberg’s text is available
in English translation in Soviet Studies in Literature 27.1 (1990–1991), 54–66. A contemporary
reviewer also noted the inversion (see A. Lozanova, “Rabota po fol’kloru v Institute iazyka i
myshleniia [IIAM] Akademii Nauk SSSR,” Sovetskaia etnografiia 1–2 [1934]: 209).
58. See M. Schlauch, “A Russian Study of the Tristan Legend,” Romanic Review 24
(1933): 37–45; Schlauch praised Frank-Kamenetskii in particular for providing a “brilliant
concluding essay” (37). For information about Stalin’s ownership of the volume, see B. S.
Ilizarov, “Pochetnyi akademik I. V. Stalin protiv akademika N. Ia. Marra: K istorii diskussii
po voprosam iazykoznaniia v 1950 g.,” Novaia i noveishaia istroiia 3, 4, and 5 (2003), 4: 125.
Stalin also possessed a copy of Marr’s posthumously published collection of articles O iazyke i
istorii abkhazov (1938); see Ilizarov, “Pochetnyi akademik I. V. Stalin protiv akademika N. Ia.
Marra,” 4: 126. Marr’s surviving letters to Stalin appear to be marked by a somewhat didactic
tone; see B. S. Ilizarov, Tainaia zhizn’ Stalina (Moscow: Veche, 2002), 258.
59. For book-length accounts of Freidenberg’s career, see K. Moss, “Olga Mikhailovna
Freidenberg: Soviet Mythologist in a Soviet Context” (PhD dissertation, Cornell University,
1984); N. Perlina, Ol’ga Freidenberg’s Works and Days (Bloomington: Slavica, 2002); A. Kabanov,
Ol’ga Michajlovna Frejdenberg, 1890–1955: Eine sowjetische Wissenschaftlerin zwischen Kanon und
Freiheit (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2002); see also my review of Kabanov’s and Perlina’s
monographs in Slavonica 10.2 (2004): 189–90. For an account of Frank-Kamenetskii’s life, see
the short note written by his nephew V. A. Frank-Kamenetskii, “I. G. Frank-Kamenetskii
(1880–1937),” Russkii tekst 2 (1994): 178–79. For analyses of his methodology, see K. A.
Barsht, “Russkaia mifologicheskaia shkola i literaturovedcheskaia paleontologiia I. G.
Frank-Kaenetskogo (‘K genezisu legendy o Romeo i Iulii’),” Russkii tekst 5 (1997): 164–92; L.
Debaker and Iu. M. Shilkov, “Iazyk, mif i metafora (O paleosemanticheskoi kontseptsii I. G.
Frank-Kamenetskogo),” Veche 13 (2002): 164–76; and C. Brandist, “Semantic Palaeontology
and the Passage from Myth to Science and Poetry: The Work of Izrail’ Frank-Kamenetskii
(1880-1937),” Studies in East European Thought 63.1 (2011): 43–61.
60. Freidenberg’s reaction is reported, based on her memoirs, in N. Braginskaia, “O rabote
O. M. Freidenberg ‘Sistema literaturnogo siuzheta’,” in Tynianovskii sbornik: Vtorye Tynianovskie
chteniia, ed. M. O. Chudakova (Riga: Zinatne, 1986), 272–83, here 274.
61. See O. Freidenberg, Poetika siuzheta i zhanra (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1936), 7–8.
62. See Freidenberg, “O nepodvizhnykh siuzhetakh i brodiachikh teoretikakh (iz sluzheb-
nogo dnevnika),” in Odissei: Chelovek v istorii, ed. N. V. Braginskaia (Moscow: Nauka, 1995),
272–97, here 275–77; the polemic with Eikhenbaum is glossed by N. Braginskaia in her article
“Siste, Viator! (Predislovie k dokladu O. M. Freidenberg ‘O nepodvizhnykh siuzhetakh i
brodiachikh teoretikakh’),” in Odissei: Chelovek v istorii, 244–71, here 259. For the polemic that
openly names Eikhenbaum, see I. Frank-Kamenetskii, “K voprosu o razvitii poeticheskoi
metafory,” Sovetskoe iazykoznanie 1 (1935): 93–145, here 93–94.
63. The point is made very clearly in Freidenberg, “Ttselevaia ustanovka,” 5.
64. Freidenberg, “Tselevaia ustanovka,” 6 (“Na gotovoe literaturnoe iavlenie sledovalo
reagirovat’ voprosom o proiskhozhdenii samoi literatury”).
65. If an anecdote is to be trusted, Stalin associated “culture” with “pre-class,” “primitive”
society; a history of culture, he told the philosopher Pavel Iudin, is a book about that “which
was in primitive society before the emergence of classes and the state” (“istoriia kul’tury—eto
to, chto bylo v pervobytnom obshchestve do vozniknoveniia klassov i gosudarstva”); Greek
antiquity was no longer associated with the “history of culture” but rather with the “history
of civil society” (see Iu. Borev, Staliniada [Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990], 182).
66. Freidenberg, “Ttselevaia ustanovka,” 5.
67. See Frank-Kamenetskii, “Itogi kollektivnoi raboty,” 266.
68. Freidenberg, Poetika siuzheta i zhanra, 12.
69. Ibid., 335–61. This appendix to the book, titled “Tri siuzheta, ili semantika odnogo,”
was written in 1925; for an English translation, see “Three Plots, or the Semantics of One,”
in Formalism: History, Comparison, Genre (Russian Poetics in Translation, vol. 5), ed. L. M.
O’Toole and A. Shukman (Colchester: University of Essex, 1978), 30–51.
70. Freidenberg, Poetika siuzheta i zhanra, 11; see also Freidenberg’s 1925 text “Sistema
literaturnogo siuzheta,” in Montazh: Literatura, iskusstvo, teatr, kino, ed. B. V. Raushenbakh
(Moscow: Nauka, 1988), 214–37, here 236–37.
71. Freidenberg, Poetika siuzheta i zhanra, 361.
72. Frank-Kamenetskii, “Itogi kollektivnoi raboty,” 275 (“na grani semanticheskogo
tozhestva i siuzhetnogo postroeniia”; “cheredovanie zhizni i smerti v mife ob umiraiushchem i
voskresaiushchem bozhestve”).
73. Ibid., 274. The assertion that the grammatically undifferentiated third person pointed
to the totem was borrowed from Marr; see N. Marr, Iazyk i myshlenie (Moscow: Gosudarst-
vennoe sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1931), 19–20.
74. For Frank-Kamenetskii’s engagement with the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, see
Frank-Kamenetskii, “Pervobytnoe myshlenie v svete iafeticheskoi teorii i filosofii,” Iazyk i
literatura 3 (1929): 70–155; Freidenberg’s most sustained engagement with Cassirer can be found
in her Poetika siuzheta i zhanra, 30–31. The quotes are from I. G. Frank-Kamenetskii, “Razluka,
kak metafora smerti v mife i v poezii,” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR (Seriia 7, Otdelenie
obshchestvennykh nauk) 2 (1935): 153–76, here 173 (“poznavatel’noi kategorii, predvariaiush-
chei logicheskie poniatiia v obraznom myshlenii”; “nauchnogo poznaniia”).
75. Frank-Kamenetskii, “K voprosu o razvitii poeticheskoi metafory,” Sovetskoe iazykoz-
nanie 1 (1935), 93–145, here 141 (“poznanie konkretnogo cherez konkretnoe”; “iskusstvenno
razryvaiushchei sviaz’ mezhdu obshchim i edinichnym”).
76. Frank-Kamenetskii, “K voprosu o razvitii poeticheskoi metafory,” 145 (“geneticheskaia
sviaz’ s mifom stol’ko zhe malo diskreditiruet poeticheskuiu metaforu, kak nikem ne
osparivaemaia sviaz’ astronomii s astrologiei ili khimii s alskhimiei sposobna nabrosit’ ten’ na
nazvannye oblasti znaniia”).
77. See, for example, Frank-Kamenetskii’s articles “K voprosu o razvitii poeticheskoi
metafory,” 142; “Razluka, kak metafora smerti,” 172; and “Itogi,” 268–69.
78. Frank-Kamenetskii, “K genezisu legendy o Romeo i Iulii,” Russkii tekst 4 (1996):
178–203, here 186 (“V mife my nakhodim obraznoe vospriiatie prirody v terminakh, zaimst-
vovannykh iz sotsial’nykh otnoshenii. I esli v mife razluka vliublennykh [bogov] iavliaetsia
metaforoi zimy, kak smerti prirody, a brak—metaforoi rastitel’nosti i plodorodiia, to v poezii
nakhodim obratnoe sootnoshenie: zdes’ zima sluzhit metaforoi razluki i smerti, a rastitel’nost’
. . . emblemoi braka, liubvi ili zhenshchiny kak voploshcheniia liubovnykh char”). This quota-
tion comes from the third part of the article; the other two parts were published in Russkii tekst
2 (1994): 158–77 and Russkii tekst 3 (1995): 167–205.
79. Frank-Kamenetskii, “K genezisu,” Russkii tekst 3 (1995), 197; Frank-Kamenetskii,
“K voprosu o razvitii poeticheskoi metafory,” 144; this is also one of the central arguments
of Freidenberg’s lectures of the late 1930s and early 1940s, published posthumously by N.
Braginskaia as part of a one-volume selection of Freidenberg’s works, Mif i literatura drevnosti
(1976; 1998 [first full edition of the text]; 2008).
80. On the “rationalization” of myth in the transition to realist plot, see Frank-
Kamenetskii, “K genezisu,” Russkii tekst 2 (1994): 184; and Russkii tekst 3 (1995): 186, 189.
81. “Therefore we shouldn’t passively await the fading of folklore; instead, we should
employ all methods, fighting for its radical extermination,” Freidenberg told her colleagues at
the discussion on 11 June 1931 (“Poetomu my ne dolzhny passivno zhdat’ izzhitiia fol’klora,
a prilozhit’ vse metody bor’by k ego korennomu unichtozheniiu,” quoted from O. M.
Freidenberg, “Tezisy k kontr-dokladu O. M. Freidenberg,” in O. Freidenberg’s typewritten
memoirs, Probeg zhizni, folder 5, p. 9; the Pasternak Family Archive, Oxford). Freidenberg’s
“counter-paper” was in response to Zhirmunsky’s paper “Chto takoe fol’klor?” (What Is

Folklore?), which was to appear in 1934, in a modified version, as “Problema fol’klora” (The
Problem of Folklore). Zhirmunsky’s paper, as we shall see later, paid unambiguous tribute to
semantic paleontology. Both papers, although at the time perceived as polemically charged,
agreed in essence on folklore being a relic that would fade away in the future classless society.
For a witness report, see A. Astakhova, “Diskussiia o sushchnosti i zadachakh fol’klora,”
Sovetskaia etnografiia 3–4 (1931): 239–42. A good overview of the discussion in English is offered
in D. Howell, The Development of Soviet Folkloristics (New York and London: Garland, 1992),
260–67 (Howell inaccurately gives the date of the discussion as May 1931).
82. I. I. Ioffe, Sinteticheskoe izuchenie iskusstva i zvukovoe kino (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennyi
Muzykal’nyi Nauchno-issledovatel’skii Institut, 1937), 16 (in the original Russian, Ioffe’s
statement is rendered through a nominative construction: “Zamykaiushchaiasia krivaia
kapitalisticheskogo myshleniia”). All subsequent references to Ioffe’s book are to this edition
and appear in parentheses in the main text.
83. In Russian, “ot irratsional’nykh kosmogonicheskikh okov, ot rodovoi i tsekhovoi
zamknutosti.”
84. In Russian, “nepodvizhnye formy,” “kul’turnoe podpol’e,” “v epokhu razlozheniia
kapitalizma.”
85. In Russian, “razdvoenie i bor’bu elementov odnogo puchka, raznesenie ikh v
nesoizmerimye riady.”
86. In Russian, “Uporstvo semanticheskikh riadov, uporstvo irratsional’nykh smyslovykh
puchkov, ustoichivost’ vytekaiut iz konservativnosti form soznaniia klassovogo obshchestva.”
87. S. N. Bykovskii, N. Ia. Marr i ego teoriia: K 45-letiiu nauchnoi deiatel’nosti (Leningrad:
Ogiz; Lensotsekgiz, 1933), 70–84 (“Znachenie nauchnoi teorii N. Ia. Marra dlia smezhnykh s
lingvistikoi otdelov nauki”).
88. This process is analyzed in F. J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin (Armonk, NE: Sharpe,
1990), 3–24; see also A. S. Arkhipova and S. Iu. Nekliudov, “Fol’klor i vlast’ v zakrytom
obshchestve,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 101 (2010): 84–108, esp. 96–100. For an early critique of
the encouragement of “artificial folklore” in the Soviet Union, see N. Leont’ev, “Volkhovanie
i shamanstvo,” Novyi mir 8 (1953): 227–44.
89. A recent well-researched history of Russian folkloristics groups together under a
broadly conceived “paleontological method” scholars as different as Freidenberg, S. Ia. Lur’e,
V. Propp, I. M. Kolesnitskaia, and I. I. Tolstoi (see T. G. Ivanova, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki XX
veka: 1900–pervaia polovina 1941 g. [St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2009], 601–8); as a matter of
fact only a couple of these scholars (Freidenberg; to some extent also Tolstoi) took Marr and
semantic paleontology seriously enough, relying on the new methodology to inform their
studies of folklore and demonstrating a commitment going beyond the occasional expedient
quotation from Marr.
90. Freidenberg, Poetika siuzheta i zhanra, 32 (“Poistine revoliutsionnyi okazalsia paleon-
tologicheskii analiz Marra—naibolee spetsificheskaia osobennost’ vsego novogo ucheniia
o iazyke, imeiushchaia naimen’shee kolichestvo podlinnykh posledovatelei i naibolee chislo
protivnikov”).
91. Ts. Leiteizen, “Vrednaia galimatiia,” Izvestiia (31 September 1936) (on Poetika siuzheta i
zhanra); T. N. “Etot slepets Gomer!” Krasnaia nov’ 7 (1936): 271 (on Poetika siuzheta i zhanra);
T. N. “Teofrast i drugie,” Krasnaia nov’ 5 (1936): 238 (on Antichnye teorii iazyka i stilia).
92. Beskina was arrested and shot in 1936; in the same year, Tsyrlin acted as the editor
of Freidenberg’s Poetika siuzheta i zhanra at the Leningrad “Khudozhestvennaia Literatura”
publishing house (see N. Braginskaia, “Siste, Viator!” 268n30). As early as 1930 Tsyrlin had
praised the “genetic study of literature” (geneticheskoe izuchenie literatury), without referring by
name to Freidenberg; see his article “K voprosu o ‘zhizhi’ i ‘smerti’ literaturnogo fakta,” in
V bor’be za marksizm v literaturnoi nauke, ed. V. Desnitskii, N. Iakovlev, and L. Tsyrlin

(Leningrad: Priboi, 1930), 81–116.
93. A. Beskina and L. Tsyrlin, “Marksistskaia poetika i novoe uchenie N. Ia. Marra o
iazyke,” Literaturnyi Leningrad 64 (26 December 1934): 2–3, here 3 (“[No] literaturovedenie
dolzhno nakonets zametit’ sushchestvovanie iafetidologii. Luchshe sdelat’ eto pozdno, chem
nikogda”).
94. In Russian, “uzkoi ploshchadkoi evropeiskoi literatury XIX veka.”
95. In Russian, “forma vyrazheniia poniatiinogo myshleniia.”
96. See D. Tamarchenko, “Literaturovedenie i ‘iafetidologiia’,” Literaturnyi Leningrad 2
(1935): 2.
97. O. Freidenberg, “Nuzhna li iafetidologiia literaturovedeniiu?” (1931), Olga
Freidenberg’s Archive, cited with the kind permission of Nina Braginskaia (“v nem kak-
budto skryvaetsia pretenziia na metodologicheskuiu nezavisimost’”; “Eta ubiistvennaia
terminologiia sushchestvuet, kazhetsia, tol’ko dlia togo, chtob vozmushchat’ marksistov i bit’
iafetidologov”). Other portions of this paper have already appeared in print (see Braginskaia,
“Siste, Viator!” 263–64).
98. S. V. Poliakova, “Oleinikov i ob Oleinikove” i drugie raboty po russkoi literature (Moscow:
INAPRESS, 1997), 370 (“Takim obrazom, my v tsarstve tozhdestv, oblechennykh v otlichi-
iakh”); the quote is from Poliakova’s article “Iz izstorii geneticheskogo metoda: marrovskaia
shkola,” first published in Literaturnoe obozrenie 7–8 (1994): 13–20. Poliakova contrasts in her
article Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii; the latter is declared a true scholar and thinker,
Freidenberg is apportioned the dubious honor of a helpless and methodologically perplexed
follower of Marr and Frank-Kamneteskii. This assessment is historically inaccurate and
unfounded. Suffice it to point to Frank-Kamenetskii’s unequivocal praise of Freidenberg’s
pioneering role in the mythological interpretation of the Greek novel, which overturned
Erwin Rohde’s false assumption of the importance of invention and foreshadowed “by three
years” Karl Kerényi’s 1927 study, Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschich-
tlicher Beleuchtung (which, according to Frank-Kamenetskii, was, compared to Freidenberg’s,
rather narrow in scope, limiting itself to an examination of the Egyptian myth of Osiris and
its impact on the Greek novel); see Frank-Kamenetskii, “K genezisu,” Russkii tekst 3 (1995): 187.
99. See Juri Lotman, Culture and Explosion, ed. M. Grishakova, trans. Wilma Clark (Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), 140 (first published in Russian as Kul’tura i vzryv, 1992); see also
Lotman’s article “O. M. Freidenberg as a Student of Culture,” Soviet Studies in Literature
12.2 (1976): 3–11 (first published in Russian in 1973 as “O. M. Freidenberg kak issledovatel’
kul’tury”). At the same time, one has to keep in mind that Lotman’s understanding of “explo-
sion” was sometimes marked by a very non-Freidenbergian romantic belief in the genius of
individual writers and artists as the agents of change (see S. Frank, C. Ruhe, and A. Schmitz,
“Explosion und Ereignis: Kontexte des Lotmanschen Geschichtskonzepts,” in J. M. Lotman,
Kultur und Explosion, trans. D. Trottenberg [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010], 227–59,
esp. 254, 259).
100. Some of the materials, including articles critical of Freidenberg, by S. A.
Takhtadzhian and A. K. Gavrilov, are republished in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 15 (1995).
For a fascinating retrospective by one of the participants, see L. Zhmud’, “Studenty-istoriki
mezhdu ofitsiozom i ‘liberal’noi’ naukoi,” Zvezda 8 (1998): 204–9; see also the retort by one
of Lotman’s defenders: G. Levinton, “Zametki o kritike i polemike, ili Opyt otrazheniia
nekotorykh neliteraturnykh obvinenii (Iu. M. Lotman i ego kritiki),” Novaia russkaia kniga 1
(2002): 14–17.
101. V. Zhirmunskii, “Sravnitel’noe literaturovedenie i problema literaturnykh vliianii,”
Izvestiia Akademii Nauk (Otdelenie obshchestvennykh nauk) 3 (1936): 383–403, here 384 (the article
was first presented as a paper in December 1935). This passage is specifically quoted by M. K.
Azadovskii in his survey “Sovetskaia fol’kloristika za 20 let” (Sovetskii fol’klor: Sbornik statei
i materialov 6 (1939): 3–53, here 46; the survey is dated 15 December 1937 [53]), in which
Azadovskii treats Zhirmunsky’s comparatism as an unambiguous manifestation of Marr’s
methodology. At the beginning of his article, Zhirmunsky explicitly mentions Marr and
quotes from Marr’s “Iazyk i sovremennost’” (383).
102. V. Zhirmunskii, “Problema fol’klora,” Fol’klor Zapada i Vostoka: Sravnitel’no-
istoricheskie ocherki, ed. B. S. Dolgin and S. Iu. Nekliudov (Moscow: O.G.I., 2004), 40–57,
here 53 (first published in Sergeiu Fedorovichu Ol’denburgu: K 50-letiiu nauchno-obshchestvennoi
deiatel’nosti, 1882–1932 [Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1934], 195–213).
103. Zhirmunskii, “Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo Gerdera,” Ocherki po istorii klassicheskii nemetskoi
literatury (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1972), 209–76, here 241 (“Takim
obrazom, za natsional’nym svoeobraziem narodnoi poezii dlia Gerdera otkryvaiutsia ee
obshchechelovecheskie svoistva kak opredelennoi stupeni razvitiia poeticheskoi mysli,
odinakovo istoricheski obiazatel’noi i dlia ‘klassicheskikh’ i novoevropeiskikh narodov i dlia
narodov pervobytnykh, ne zatronutykh vliianiem evropeiskoi tsivilizatsii”). It is not clear
when exactly Zhirmunsky wrote this text. Desnitskaia dates it to the late 1930s (see
A. V. Desnitskaia, “Na putiakh k sozdaniiu istoriko-tipologicheskoi teoriia eposa. Stranitsy
nauchnoi biografii V. M. Zhirmunskogo,” in Iazyk, literatura, epos [K 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia
akademika V. M. Zhirmunskogo], ed. D. Likhachev [St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2001], 377–401,
here 385), but a reference to Franz Mehring’s work on Lessing and Herder, right at the start
of Zhirmunsky’s text (209), suggests that it may have been written a couple of years earlier, as
Mehring’s text on Herder appeared in Russian translation in 1934 (as part of the first volume,
Legenda o Lessinge: Literturno-kriticheskie stat’i, of a representative two-volume selection of
Mehring’s literary criticism published by Academia; see E. P. Zhukova, Gerder v Rossii:
Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’ [Moscow: KDU, 2007], 45, entry no. 40).
104. Although Bakhtin referred to Freidenberg only once in his book on Rabelais, he
had read Poetika siuzheta i zhanra soon after its publication, leaving behind revealing marginal
notes; see O. Osovskii, “Bakhtin chitaet Ol’gu Freidenberg: o kharaktere i smysle bakhtin-
skikh marginalii na stranitsakh ‘Poetiki siuzheta i zhanra’,” in M. M. Bakhtin v Saranske:
Dokumnety, materialy, issledovaniia (Saransk: Mordovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 2002), 1:
24–35.
105. For an overview of Bakhtin’s debt to Marr and Freidenberg, see G. Tihanov, Master
and the Slave, 159–60. For Bakhtin’s extensive quotations from Marr and Meshchaninov in the
essay “From the Prehistoy of Novelistic Discourse” (removed at the time of its subsequent
publication), see Pan’kov, “‘Roman kak naibolee podlinnyi epicheskii zhanr’. . . ,” 151n111;
there were also references to Marr in the text currently known as “Discourse in the Novel,”
similarly taken out at the time of publication (see K. Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic
for Democracy [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 123n32). For Bakhtin’s
respectful mention of Marr in the 1950s, see M. Bakhtin, Lektsii po istorii zarubezhnoi literatury:
Antichnost’, srednie veka, ed. I. V. Kliueva and L. M. Lisunova (Saransk: Izdatel’stvo Mordovsk-
ogo universiteta, 1999), 89. For a more general account of Marr’s importance for the Bakhtin
Circle, see A. Mihailovic, “Bakhtin’s Dialogue with Russian Orthodoxy and Critique of
Linguistic Universalism,” in Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith, ed. S. Felch and P. Contino
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 121–49, esp. 127–34.
7. Russian Émigré Literary Criticism and Theory between the World Wars
1. M. Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 115.
2. L. Livak’s How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), while not focusing specifically on émigré
criticism, is a very good step toward breaking the inertia of looking at Russian exilic literary
culture as self-enclosed and autistic, refusing to cultivate any productive ties with the new
home cultures. See also Jean-Philippe Jaccard, A. Morard, and Gervaise Tassis, ed., Russkie
pisateli v Parizhe: Vzgliad na frantsuzskuiu literaturu, 1920–1940 (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2007),
esp. L. Livak, “K izucheniiu uchastiia russkoi emigratsii v intellektual’noi i kul’turnoi zhizni
mezhvoennoi Frantsii,” 200–14 (Livak mentions the names of Sazonova, Struve, and Veidle
as regular reviewers and critics contributing to French periodicals [208]); for an exhaustive
bibliography, see L. Livak, Russian Émigrés in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Inter-War France:
A Bibliographical Essay (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), where Livak extends
this list to include other Russian émigré critics writing—sometimes anonymously—for the
French press (4, 26).
3. V. S. Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie (St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii fond, 1993), 254–55. (There
is an English translation: V. S. Yanovsky, Elysian Fields: A Book of Memory [DeKalb: Northern
Illinois University Press, 1987].) Nabokov’s novel, translated into French from his own English
translation, was published by Gallimard in 1939 (see S. Davydov, “Despair,” in The Garland
Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. V. Alexandrov [New York and London: Garland, 1995],
88–101, here 99n1); for statistical information on translations of Russian literature in France
from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-1940s, see Vladimir Boutchik, La littérature russe
en France (Paris: Libraire Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1947), 10–11.
4. This dialogue is partly documented in L. Livak and G. Tassis, ed., Le Studio franco-russe,
1929–1932 (Toronto: Toronto Slavic Quarterly, 2005).
5. On the porous boundaries between home and émigré literature at that juncture, see
G. Slobin, “The ‘Homecoming’ of the First Wave Diaspora and Its Cultural Legacy,” Slavic
Review 60.3 (2001): 513–29. Livak seems to believe that authors who had returned to the Soviet
Union before the outbreak of World War II should be excluded from the list of émigré literati,
but then makes exceptions for Kuprin and Tsvetaeva (Livak, Russian Émigrés, 8); in the absence
of a clear criterion, later in this chapter I consider Jakobson (who never returned), Shklovsky
(who returned but had fled the country for political reasons), and Bogatyrev (who spent more
than fifteen years in Czechoslovakia) an integral part of émigré intellectual life at various
points during the 1920s and 1930s.
6. For VTsIK’s decree, see M. Agurskii, Ideologiia natsional-bol’shevizma (Moscow:
Algoritm, 2003), 163; on the Soviet interest in Volya Rossii, see M. Aucouturier, “Marc Slonim
et la revue Volja Rossii,” in Prague enre l’Est et l’Ouest, ed. M. Burda (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001),
21–31, here 25; and M. Slonim, “‘Volia Rossii,’” in Russkaia literatura v emigratsii, ed. N. P.
Poltoratskii (Pittsburgh: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, 1972), 291–300, here
299.
7. See A. Blium, “Pechat’ russkogo zarubezh’ia glazami Glavlita i GPU,” Novyi zhurnal 183
(1991): 264–82.
8. See R. A. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1968), 21. On the history of Sovremennye zapiski, see M. V. Vishniak,
“Sovremennye zapiski”: Vospominaniia redaktora (St. Petersburg: Logos; Düsseldorf: Goluboi
vsadnik, 1993; first published 1957) and the materials (including thorough studies and
bibliographies of the contemporary reception of the journal) in Vokrug redaktsionnogo arkhiva
“Sovremennykh zapisok” (Parizh, 1920-1940), ed. O. Korostelev and M. Schruba (Moscow:
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010).
9. See, for example, N. Smirnov, “Na tom beregu. Zametki ob emigrantskoi literature,”
Novyi mir 6 (1926): 141–50 (I am grateful to Oleg Korostelev for drawing this article to my
attention); D. Gorbov, “10 let literatury za rubezhom,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 8 (1927): 9–35. See
also Gorbov’s collection of articles, U nas i za rubezhom. Literaturnye ocherki (Moscow: Artel’
pisatelei “Krug,” 1928), which included a reworked version of his 1927 article, as well as an
earlier article on émigré literature, “Novaia krasota i zhivuchee bezobrazie” (first published
in Krasnaia nov’ in 1926); in the book publication, the titles of the two articles were changed to
“Desiat’ let literaturnoi raboty” (28–76) and “Mertvaia krasota i zhivuchee bezobrazie” (7–27),
respectively.
10. See D. Gorbov, U nas i za rubezhom, 32 (for the accusation in bytovizm) and 76 (for the
dangers of “symbolist abstraction” [simvolistskoi abstraktsii]).
11. See E. Nil’sen, “P. Miliukov i I. Stalin: O politicheskoi evoliutsii Miliukova v
emigratsii,” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 2 (1991): 124–52, esp. 131.
12. See S. S. Boiko, “Russkoe zarbezh’e i ‘Pereval’: K voprosu o formirovanii ‘zhanra’
sovetskoi prorabotochnoi stat’i,” in “V rasseianii sushchie . . .” Kul’turologicheskie chteniia
“Russkaia emigratsiia XX veka” (Moskva, 15–16 fevralia 2005), ed. I. Iu. Beliakova (Moscow:
Dom-muzei Mariny Tsvetaevoi, 2006), 232–39, here 236–37.
13. All references are to Bem’s series of articles, “O kritike i kritikakh,” republished in
A. L. Bem, Pis’ma o literature (Prague: Slovanský ústav; Euroslavica, 1996), esp. 36–37, 43.
14. In chronological order: P. Pil’skii, Zatumanivshiisia mir (Riga: Gramatu Draugs, 1929);
M. Slonim, Portrety sovetskikh pisatelei (Paris: Parabola, 1933; there is an earlier Belgrade edition:
Portreti savremenih ruskih pisaca [Belgrade: Ruski Archiv, 1931]); and I. Mandel’shtam, Iskateli
(Shankhai: Slovo, 1938).
15. See K. I. Zaitsev, ed., Shedevry russkoi literaturnoi kritiki (Harbin: s.p., 1941); Zaitsev’s
“Predislovie” (5–9) makes the points about the importance of including work by nonprofes-
sional critics (5) and the need to limit the selection to the nineteenth century (9).
16. See G. Tihanov, “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern
Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?),” Common Knowledge 10.1 (2004): 61–81.
17. On the complex semantics of nostalgia and estrangement in Shklovsky’s exilic texts,
see S. Boym, “Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky,” Poetics Today 17.4 (1996):
511–30. On Russian émigré literary criticism in Berlin, see V. Sorokina, Literaturnaia kritika
russkogo Berlina 20-kh godov XX veka (Moscow: MGU, 2010).
18. On Bogatyrev’s close contacts with Soviet folkloristics and ethnography, see A. M.
Reshetov, “Pis’ma P. G. Bogatyreva D. K. Zeleninu,” in P. G. Bogatyrev, Narodnaia kul’tura
slavian, ed. E. S. Novik and B. S. Dolgin (Moscow: OGI, 2007), 324–40. In 1936, for example,
having learned that the Soviet delegation was not travelling to Sofia after all, and on talking
to the Soviet embassy in Sofia, Boagatyrev cancelled his participation at the Fourth Congress
of Slavic Geography and Ethnography (Reshetov, “Pis’ma P. G. Bogatyreva D. K. Zeleninu,”
334).
19. See R. Jakobson, “Yuri Tynianov in Prague” [1974], in Iu. Tynianov, The Problem of
Verse Language, ed. and trans. M. Sosa and B. Harvey (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981), 135–40.
20. Quoted here from the English translation in Russian Poetics in Translation (Vol. 4:
Formalist Theory), ed. L. M. O’Toole and Ann Shukman (Colchester: University of Essex,
1977), 49–51, here 49; written in December 1928 and first published in Russian in Novyi Lef 12
(1928)—actually in early 1929.
21. In a different context and with different tasks in mind, Stephen Greenblatt forcefully
asserts that in order to write cultural history we must “understand colonization, exile,
emigration, wandering, contamination . . . , for it is these disruptive forces that principally
shape the history and diffusion of languages, and not a rooted sense of cultural legitimacy”
(S. Greenblatt, “Racial Memory and Literary History,” in Rethinking Literary History: A
Dialogue on Theory, ed. L. Hutcheon and M. Valdes [New York and Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2002], 61).
22. E. Said, “Travelling Theory Reconsidered,” in Critical Reconstructions. The Relationship
of Fiction and Life, ed. R. Polhemus and R. Henkle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994),
264.
23. On Bogatyrev’s functionalist structuralism and his Prague period, see T. G. Ivanova,
Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki XX veka: 1900–pervaia polovina 1941 g. (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii
Bulanin, 2009), 748–72; S. P. Sorokina, “Funktional’no-strutural’nyi metod P. G. Bogaty-
reva,” in P. G. Bogatyrev, Funktsional’no-struktrual’noe izuchenie fol’klora (Maloizvestnye i
neopublikovannye raboty) (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2006), 5–72.
24. The most important papers read at the Dostoevsky Seminar were published in three
volumes, O Dostoevskom (Prague, 1929; 1933; 1936), with a fourth volume, conceived but left in
manuscript form, to appear only in 1972. The third and fourth volumes were made up entirely
of Bem’s own studies on Dostoevsky, while the second volume contained, among other
contributions, a valuable dictionary of personal names in Dostoevsky’s works compiled by
Bem, S. V. Zavadskii, R. V. Pletnev, and D. Tschižjewskij. For more on the Prague scene
of Dostoevsky studies and Bem’s contributions, see Vadim Markovich, “Obshchestvo
Dostoevksogo v Prage,” Československá rusistika 16.4 (1971): 165–71, esp. 166–67; R. Pletnev,
“Vospominaniia o pervom Mezhdunarodnom osbshchestve imeni F. Dostoevskogo,”
Zapiski russkoi akademicheskoi gruppy v S.Sh. A. 14 (1981): 7–25, esp. 14–19 (Pletnev reveals
that the dictionary of personal names in Dostoevsky’s prose remained incomplete and
lists Dostoevsky’s works that were left out, 18); M. Bubenikova and A. N. Goriainov, “O
nevospolnimykh poteriakh: Al’fred Liudvigovich Bem i Vsevolod Izmailovich Sreznevskii,”
in Bem and Sreznevskii, Perepiska, 1911–1936, ed. M. Bubenikova and A. Goriainov (Brno:
Slavisticheskoe obshchestvo Franka Vol’mana, 2005), 7–40, esp. 27–29; and S. G. Bocharov
and I. Z. Surat, “Al’fred Liudvigovich Bem,” in Bem, Issledovaniia: Pis’ma o literature, ed. S. G.
Bocharov (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2001), 7–31, esp. 15–22.
25. The correspondence between Freud and Osipov is documented in: S. Freud and
N. Ossipow, Briefwechsel, 1921–1929, ed. E. Fischer et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel,
2009).
26. Savitsky’s admission can be found in Stepan Lubenskii (i.e., Petr Savitsky), “Evra-
ziiskaia bibliografiia, 1921–1931: Putevoditel’ po evraziiskoi literature,” in Tridtsatye gody.
Utverzhdenie evraziitsev. Kniga VII (Paris: Izdanie Evraziitsev, 1931), 285–317, here 288.
Savitsky’s writings on literature, including a brief but very telling article on Pushkin, are
listed in Martin Beisswenger’s most helpful Petr Nikloaevich Savitskii: Bibliografiia (Prague: Na-
tional Library of the Czech Republic; Slavonic Library, 2008). On Chkheidze, see in English
A. G. Gacheva, “Unknown Pages from Late 1920s and 1930s Eurasianism: K. A. Chkheidze
and His Conception of ‘Perfect Ideocracy,’” Russian Studies in Philosophy 47, no. 1 (2008): 9–39;
see also Chkheidze’s 1932 paper “O sovremennoi russkoi literature,” in Filosofskii kontekst
russkoi literatury 1920-1930-kh godov, ed. A. G. Gacheva, O. A. Kaznina, and S. G. Semenova,
(Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2003), 375–88. On Kopetskii (1894–1976), see G. A. Lilich, “L. V.
Kopetskii i cheshskaia rusistika,” in IX Slavisticheskie chteniia pamiati professora P. A. Dmitrieva i
professora G. I. Safronova (St. Petersburg: Fakul’tet filologii i iskusstv SPbGU, 2008), 38–42. G.
I. Rubanov’s brief surveys of recent Soviet literature were published in Evraziiskaia khronika
8 (1927): 52–53; Evraziiskaia khronika 9 (1927): 82–83. For an overview, see A. A. Reviakina,
“Russkaia litratura v kontekste idei evraziistva 1920-kh godov,” in Klassika i sovremennost’ v
literaturnoi kritike russkogo zarubezh’ia, 1920-1930-kh godov, ed. T. G. Petrova, 2 vols. (Moscow:
INION RAN, 2005–2006), 2: 52–78.
27. See R. Jakobson, K kharakteristike evraziiskogo iazykovogo soiuza (Paris: Izdanie
Evraziitsev, 1931; the last section bears the telling subtitle “Ocherednye zadachi evraziiskogo
iazykoznaniia” [The next tasks of Eurasian linguistics]) and Savitsky’s letter of 9 August
1930 discussing a draft of that work, in Letters and Other Materials from the Moscow and Prague
Linguistic Circles, 1912–1945, ed. J. Toman (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1994),
124–38; see also Savitsky and Jakobson’s joint brochure (each contributing a short article),
Evraziia v svete iazykoznaniia (Prague: Izdanie Evraziitsev, 1931). Jakobson generously praised
Savitsky as a “talented forebear of structuralist geography,” in R. Jakobson and K. Pomorska,

Dialogues (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 68. Bogatyrev’s account of a distinctively Eurasian
Russian folkloristics was published under pseudonym: Ivan Savel’ev, “Svoeobychnoe v
russkoi fol’kloristike: Chto dala i mozhet dat’ novogo v metodologii russkaia fol’kloristika?,”
in Tridtsatye gody, 65–81.
28. Both articles are reprinted in R. Jakobson, Selected Writings, 8 vols. (The Hague:
Mouton, 1962–88), 5: 355–81 and 5: 416–32, respectively.
29. See Khodasevich’s article “O Maiakovskom” (1930), republished in Khodasevich,
Literaturnye stat’i i vospominaniia (New York: Chekhov, 1954), 219–31. On Khodasevich and
formalism, see J. Malmstad, “Khodasevich and Formalism: A Poet’s Dissent,” in Russian For-
malism: A Retrospective Glance. A Festschrift in Honor of Victor Erlich, ed. R. Jackson and S. Rudy
(New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1985), 68–81; for Khodasevich’s
skepticism toward psychoanalytic literary studies, see his “Kur’ezy psikhoanaliza,” Vozro
zhdenie (15 July 1938).
30. Adamovich’s reviews and short essays on the formalists are collected in Adamovich,
Kriticheskaia proza, ed. O. A. Korostelev (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Literaturnogo instituta im.
A. M. Gor’kogo, 1996); see also Adamovich’s “Stat’i Iu. Tynianova,” in Adamovich,
Literaturnye zametki. Kniga I, ed. O. A. Korostelev (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2002), 244–48, in
which Adamovich, while recognizing the formalists’ role in challenging the impressionistic
criticism of “the late Aikhenval’d and his fellow travellers,” finds formalism—exemplified
here by Tynianov’s Arkhaisty i novatory—to be deeply flawed as a method of literary studies
(the article was first published in Poslednye novosti [3 October 1929]).
31. Smert´ Vladimira Maiakovskogo (Berlin: Petropolis, 1931), 47–66; the volume also
contained Jakobson’s “O pokolenii, rastrativshem svoikh poetov” (On the Generation that
Squandered Its Poets).
32. The review is republished in D. S. Mirsky, Stikhotvoreniia. Stat’i o russkoi poezii, ed. G. K.
Perkins and G. S. Smith (Oakland: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1997), 112–17.
33. See E. Litauer, “Formalizm i istoriia literatury,” Evraziia 18 (23 March 1929), 7–8.
Litauer’s article, an extended review of Pavel Medvedev’s 1928 book The Formal Method, is
analyzed at more length in the context of Eurasian émigré aesthetics in G. Tihanov, “When
Eurasianism Met Formalism: An Episode from the History of Russian Intellectual Life in the
1920s,” Die Welt der Slaven 48.2 (2003): 359–82.
34. The polemical nature of émigré literary life as a whole has been noted before; see
chapter 3 in O. Demidova, Metamorfozy v izgnanii: Literaturnyi byt russkogo zarubezh’ia (St.
Petersburg: Giperion, 2003).
35. Inconsequential literary polemics were often the result of hurt personal pride dressed
up as disagreement on matters of principle; see, for example, the 1927 polemic between the
Warsaw-based Za svobodu! and the Paris-based Zveno, reflecting the strained relationship
of Dmitrii Filosofov and Zinaida Gippius (for details, see N. A. Bogomolov, “Ob odnoi
litraturno-politicheskoi polemike 1927 goda,” Rossiiskii literaturovedcheskii zhurnal 4 [1994]:
19–24).
36. See, for example, the discussion on the Russian literary language in Zveno and Rossiia
i slavianstvo (1927–1929), in which Sergei Volkonsky (1860–1937) and Pyotr Bitsilli (1870–1953)
were the main protagonists (Bitsilli’s contributions are reprinted in P. Bitsilli, Izbrannye trudy
po filologii, ed. V. N. Iartseva [Moscow: Nasledie, 1996], 598–612). Georgii Adamovich also
took part, summarizing Volkonsky’s views as conservative preservationist, and Bitsilli’s as
in favor of complete relaxation of established language rules; Adamovich believed that the
process of Europeanization of the Russian language had not been completed and had to be
further stimulated, even at the cost of changes to syntax (“posiagnut’ na russkii sintaksis”); see
Adamovich, “Dni Turbinykh M. Bulgakova—O russkom iazyke i spore kn. Volkonskogo s
P. Bitsilli,” in Adamovich, Literaturnye besedy, ed. O. A. Korostelev (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia,

1998), 2: 293–300, here 300 (first published in Zveno 6 [1927]: 309–13). Other more significant
polemics included the debate on the historical novel, which peaked in 1927 (the main protago-
nists were Vladimir Veidle, who believed that the genre had been in decline since its acme in
the first half of the nineteenth century, and Mikhail Kantor, who defended the autonomy of
the genre and its potential in the new historical circumstances), and the ongoing discussion on
émigré literature of the “capital” versus that of the “provinces,” which occupied most of the
first half of the 1930s, involving Bitsilli, Khodasevich, Bem, and, during its concluding phase,
Filosofov and Merezhkovsky (I briefly dwell on some aspects of this polemic at the end of the
present chapter).
37. See, for example, R. Hagglund, “The Adamovič-Xodasevič Polemics,” Slavic and East
European Journal 20, no. 3 (1976): 239–52; O. Korostelev and S. Fediakin, “Polemika G. V.
Adamovicha i V. F. Khodasevicha,” Rossiiskii literaturovedcheskii zhurnal 4 (1994): 204–8.
38. For a treatment of Russian émigré literary criticism organized around portraits of
individual prominent critics (Slonim, Mirsky, Stepun, Khodasevich, and Adamovich), see A.
P. Kazarkin, Russkaia literaturnaia kritika XX veka (Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo Tomskogo universiteta,
2004), 247–93. For a different approach, see chapter 5, “Literaturovedenie i literturnaia
kritika,” in A. G. Sokolov, Sud’by russkoi literaturnoi emigratsii 1920-kh godov (Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1991), 157–68, and T. G. Petrova, Literaturnaia kritika
russkoi emigratsii pervoi volny (Moscow: INION RAN, 2010). For a brief discussion of “first
wave” criticism in the wider context of émigré literature, see G. Struve, Russkaia literatura
v izgnanii, 2nd corrected and expanded ed. (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1984); see also R. Pletnev,
“Russkoe literaturovedenie v emigratsii,” in Poltoratskii, ed., Russkaia litertura v emigratsii,
255–70. In English, see A. Gibson, Russian Poetry and Criticism in Paris from 1920 to 1940 (The
Hague: Luxenhoff, 1990).
39. On the attribution, see O. Korostelev, “Pafos svobody,” in Kritika russkogo zarubezh’ia,
ed. O. A. Korostelev and N. G. Mel’nikov, 2 vols. (Moscow: Olimp, 2002), 1: 3–35, here 8.
40. These earlier (1926-1927), and largely isolated, interventions included essays by Dmitry
Sviatopolk-Mirsky, Marina Tsvetaeva (a diatribe against Adamovich), and Mikhail Tsetlin;
for the relevant bibliographical details, see R. Hagglund, “The Russian Émigré Debate of
1928 on Criticism,” Slavic Review 32, no. 3 (1973): 515–26, 526n3.
41. See M. Osorgin, “Literaturnaia nedelia,” Dni (29 April 1928); Osorgin confirmed this
view, adding the lack of dialogue between the generations as another reason for the decline
of émigré literary life, in the next edition of his column, “Literaturnaia nedelia,” Dni (13 May
1928).
42. See Anton Krainii, “Polozhenie literaturnoi kritiki,” Vozrozhdenie (24 May 1928).
43. G. Adamovich, “O kritike i ‘druzhbe,’” Dni (27 May 1928).
44. M. Osorgin, “Literaturnaia nedelia,” Dni (3 June 1928).
45. See G. Ivanov’s eponymous article, “Bez chitatelia,” Chisla 5 (1931): 148–52.
46. M. O. Tsetlin, “Kriticheskiia zametki: Emigrantskoe,” Sovremennye zapiski 32 (1927):
435–41. Tsetlin offered a balanced view, trying to weigh the opportunities and the risks facing
the two generations; he nonetheless emphasized the danger of self-isolation to which the entire
émigré literature was prone (440–41).
47. See V. S. Varshavskii, Nezamechennoe pokolenie (New York: Chekhov, 1956). Recent
research has questioned Varshavskii’s image of his own generation, deconstructing it as a
strategy of self-identification and self-presentation; see Livak, How It Was Done, 10–11, and
I. Kaspe, Iskusstvo otsustvuvat’: Nezamechennoe pokolenie russkoi literatury (Moscow: Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie, 2005). For objections to this skepticism, insisting on Varshavskii’s
text being “a retrospective rather than a manifesto,” and thus interpreting it as a more reliable
evaluation of the place of his generation in literary history, see M. A. Vasil’eva, “K probleme
nezamechennogo pokoleniia vo frantsuzskoi literature,” in Russkie pisateli v Parizhe, 43–62,
esp. 44.
48. On these two articles in Chisla, see more in T. L. Voronina, “Spor o molodoi emi-
grantskoi literature,” Rossiiskii literaturovedcheskii zhurnal 2 (1993): 152–59, here 153–54; see also
A. V. Martynov, “Literatura na podoshvakh sapog (spor o ‘molodoi’ emigrantskoi literature
v kontekste samopoznaniia russkoi emigratsii),” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’ 2 (2001):
181–90.
49. See F. Stepun, “Porevoliutsionnoe soznanie i zadacha emigrantskoi literatury,” Novyi
grad 10 (1935): 12–28; all subsequent references to this work appear in parentheses in the main
text. On Novyi grad’s platform more generally, see V. Varshavskii, “Perechityvaia Novyi Grad,”
Mosty 11 (1965): 267–85; R. Iu. Safronov, “‘Novyi grad’ i idei preobrazovaniia Rossii,” in
Kul’tura Rossiiskogo Zarubezh’ia, ed. A. V. Kvakin and E. A. Shulepova (Moscow: Rossiiskii
institut kul’turologii, 1995), 79–90.
50. Emphasis in the original: “Tol’ko v takom—ne poboimsia skazat’—geroicheskom
nastroenii vozmozhno molodomu emigrantskomu chitateliu naiti sebia i svoi tvorcheskii
put’.”
51. In Russian, “nuzhnuiu dlia dela emigratsii russkost’ molodogo pisatel’stva.”
52. V. Varshavskii, “Neskol’ko razsuzhdenii ob Andre Zhide i emigrantskom molodom
cheloveke,” Chisla 4 (1930-31), 216–22, here 221.
53. In Russian, “derzhitsia ne veroi, a vkusom.”
54. The full list of the 1936 responses and counterresponses, by Gazdanov, Adamovich,
Osorgin, Bem, Aldanov, Varshavskii, and Khodasevich can be found in Kritika russkogo
zarubezh’ia, 2: 445; the following émigré periodicals were involved in the 1936 exchanges:
Sovremmenye zapiski, Poslednie novosti, Mech, and Vozrozhdenie.
55. G. Gazdanov, “O molodoi emigrantskoi literature,” Sovremennye zapiski 60 (1936):
404–8; all subsequent references appear in parentheses in the main text.
56. In Russian: “Eto ne znachit, chto pisateli perestaiut pisat’. No glavnoe, chto my
trebuem ot litertury, v ee ne evropeiskom, a russkom ponimanii, iz nee vynuto i delaet ee
neinteresnoi i bledoi.”
57. In Russian, “ne buduchi sposobno ni poverit’ v kakuiu-to novuiu istinu, ni otritsat’ so
vsei siloi tot mir, v kotorom ono sushchestvuet.”
58. M. Aldanov, “O polozhenii emigrantskoi literatury,” Sovremmenye zapiski 61 (1936):
400–409, here 409; all subsequent references appear in parentheses in the main text.
59. Varshavskii, “O proze ‘mladshikh’ emigrantskikh pisatelei,” Sovremmenye zapiski 61
(1936): 409–14; all subsequent references appear in parentheses in the main text.
60. In Russian, “nastoiashchego sushchestva, neopredelimogo nikakimi ‘pasportnymi’
oboznacheniiami.”
61. In Russian, “tol’ko v sotsializirovannoi chasti ikh ‘ia’.”
62. In Russian, “lichnosti drugogo cheloveka, kazhdogo cheloveka, vsekh liudei.”
63. See Adamovich’s reviews of Sovremennye zapiski (nos. 60 and 61) in Poslednie novosti 5467
(12 March 1936): 3; Poslednie novosti 5606 (30 July 1936): 3; and Osorgin’s article “O ‘molodykh
pisateliakh’,” Poslednie novosti 5474 (19 March 1936): 3; it is here that Osorgin speaks of
Gazdanov’s “legitimate” but nonetheless unhelpful pessimism.
64. M. Osorgin, “O ‘dushevnoi opustoshennosti’,” Poslednie novosti 5617 (10 August 1936): 3.
65. In Russian: “imeia v svoem rasporiazhenii ves’ mir”; “dushevnoi pustoty i utverzhde-
niia svoego ‘odinochestva’.”
66. In Russian, “perestan’te varit’sia v sobstvennom soku.”
67. V. Khodasevich, “Pered kontsom,” Vozrozhdenie (22 August 1936), quoted from the
republication in Rossiiskii literaturovedcheskii zhurnal 2 (1993): 179–83, here 181; all subsequent
references are in parentheses in the main text. In Russian, “v ideinom i khudozhestvennom
smysle byli neslozhny i ustarely.”
68. In Russian, “dazhe samoiu noviznoiu svoikh imen.”
69. In Russian, “odinochek, rasseianykh po neobozrimomu prostranstvu nashego
rasseianiia.”
70. In Russian, “svobodu vopit’ v pustyne.”
71. On the history of the designation “Paris note” see O. Korostelev, “Parizhskaia nota,” in
Literaturnaia entsiklopediia russkogo zarubezh’ia, 1918–1940, vol. 2, Periodika i literaturnye tsentry, ed.
A. N. Nikoliukin (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), 300–303; see also Korostelev’s “‘Parizhskaia
nota’: Materialy k bibliografii,” Literaturovedcheskii zhurnal 22 (2008): 276–318.
72. Mikhail Filin has estimated that the “first-wave” émigrés produced about 100 books
and 1,500 articles on Pushkin (without including the articles in daily newspapers); he also
reports that the centenary of Pushkin’s death in 1937 was celebrated in 231 cities in 42 countries
on all five continents; see T. G. Petrova, “Literaturnaia kritika emigratsii o pisateliakh XIX
veka (Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov),” in Klassika i sovremennost’, 1: 34–59, here 38–39, 39n2
and 39n8.
73. V. S. Solovev, “Lermontov,” Vestnik Evropy 2 (1901): 441–59. All subsequent translations
are my own; the references (in parentheses in the main text) are to the republication in Ler-
montov: Pro et contra, ed. V. M. Markovich and G. E. Potapova (St. Petersburg: RkhGI, 2002),
330–47. For an English translation of Solovyov’s essay, see “Lermontov,” in V. S. Soloviev,
The Heart of Reality: Essays on Beauty, Love, and Ethics, ed. and trans. V. Wozniuk (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 179–97.
74. In Russian, “Pushkin kogda i o sebe govorit, to kak budto o drugom.”
75. In Russian, “kak pravo, a ne kak obiazannost’, kak privilegiiu, a ne kak sluzhbu.”
76. On how this opposition was born out in émigré criticism, see Raeff, Russia Abroad,
97–98; for a good panorama of “first-wave” Dostoevsky criticism, see J.-P. Jaccard and U.
Schmid, “Dosteovskii i russkaia zarubezhnaia kul’tura: K postanovke voprosa,” in Dostoevskii
i russkoe zarubezh’e XX veka, ed. J.-P. Jaccard and U. Schmid (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin,
2008), 7–26.
77. In Russian: “Pushkin—dnevnoe, Lermontov—nochnoe svetilo russkoi poezii. Vsia
ona mezhdu nimi kolebletsia, kak mezhdu dvumia poliusami—sozertsaniem i deistviem”
(D. S. Merezhkovskii, “M. Iu. Lermontov: Poet sverkhchelovechestva,” V tikhom omute.
Stat’i i issledovaniia raznykh let [Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1991], 378–415, here 379). On
Merezhkovsky’s role in the turn-of-the-century Lermontov myth, see V. M. Markovich,
“Mif o Lermontove na rubezhe XIX-XX vekov,” Pushkin i Lermontov v istorii russkoi literatury
(St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo S.-Peteburgskogo universiteta, 1997), 157–84.
78. In Russian: “Pochemu priblizilsia k nam Lermontov? Pochemu vdrug zakhotelos’ o
nem govorit’?” (Merezhkovskii, “M. Iu. Lermontov: Poet sverkhchelovechestva,” 378).
79. See “Ot redaktsii,” Novyi korabl’ 1 (1927): 4.
80. G. Adamovich, Literaturnye besedy. Kniga I: “Zveno” 1923–1926, ed. O. Korostelev
(St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 1998), 125 (“Pushkinskii kanon iasnogo, tverdogo, muzhskogo,
‘solnechnogo’ otnosheniia k zhizni kazalsia edinstvennym. Lermontov riadom s nim byl
provintsialen, staromoden i chut’-chut’ smeshon so svoei melankholiei”; first published in
Zveno [1 December 1924]).
81. In Russian: “Po strukture svoego dukha on obrashchen k proshlomu, a ne k budu-
shchemu”; “on dal nam ‘otzvuki’ vsemirnoi krasoty v ikh zamiraiushchikh akkordakh”;
“osennee chuvstvo”; “struia ‘vesennego’ prorochestva.” See V. Rozanov, “‘Vechno pechal’naia
duel’,’” in O Pushkine: Esse i fragmenty, ed. V. G. Sukach (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo gumanitarnoi
literatury, 2000), 185–210, here 191; 202; 208; 209, respectively (first published in Novoe vremia
[24 March 1898]); the title of the article is an inaccurate quote from an article by the son of
Lermontov’s killer (S. N. Martynov, “Istoriia dueli M. Iu. Lermontova s N. S. Martynovym,”
Russkoe obozrenie 1 [1898]: 313–26). On Rozanov’s importance for Adamovich’s intellectual
formation, see Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie, 105.
82. All quotes are from V. Rozanov, “Pushkin i Lermontov,” in Rozanov, O Pushkine,
117–21, here 117; 119 (first published in Novoe vremia [9 October 1914]).
83. V. Rozanov, “O Lermontove,” in Rozanov, O Pushkine, 247–51, here 249: “Pushkin
byl vseob”emliushch, no star—‘prezhnii’ . . . Lermontov byl sovershenno nov, neozhidan, ‘ne
predskazan’” (first published in Novoe vremia [26 April 1916]).
84. See Adamovich’s review of Petr Bitsilli’s book Etiudy o russkoi poezii (1926, actually
published at the end of 1925), in Literaturnye besedy. Kniga I, 381–85, here 384 (first published in
Zveno [3 January 1926]): “v nashei poezii Pushkin obrashchen litsom v proshloe, a Lermontov
smotrit vpered.”
85. G. Adamovich, Literaturnye besedy. Kniga II: “Zveno” 1926–1928, ed. O. Korostelev (St.
Petersburg: Aleteiia, 1998), 198 (“Kazhetsia, mir, deistvitel’no, slozhnee i bogache, chem
predstavlialos’ Pushkinu”; “ne est’ liniia nai-bol’shego soprotivleniia”). Adamovich’s review
was first published in Zveno (3 April 1927).
86. V. Khodasevich, “Besy,” Vozrozhdenie (11 April 1927), reprinted in Rossiiskii litera-
turovedcheskii zhurnal 4 (1994): 210–13. Khodasevich wrote of Adamovich’s comments: “Here,
finally, our literary (and not only literary) patriotism is offended, for Pushkin is our homeland,
‘our all’”; “Pushkin’s is in fact the path of greatest resistance, for in the depiction of greatest
complexity he takes the way of greatest simplicity” (Tut, nakonets, nash literaturnyi [nu, i ne
tol’ko literaturnyi] patriotizm zadet: ibo Pushkin est’ nasha rodina, “nashe vse” [211]; Imenno
potomu-to pushkinskaia liniia i est’ voistinu liniia naibol’shego soprotivleniia, chto Pushkin
dlia izobrazheniia velichaishei slozhnosti idet putem velichaishei prostoty [212]).
87. Adamovich, “O Pushkine,” Zveno (17 April 1927); reprinted in Literaturnye besedy.
Kniga II, 205–11 (on the futility of the call “Back to Pushkin,” see 209). On the exchanges
between Khodasevich and Adamovich over Pushkin in the context of their other aesthetic
disagreements, see D. Bethea, Khodasevich: His Life and Art (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983), 322–31.
88. “Lermontov” was first published in Poslednie novosti (1 August 1931); “Pushkin and
Lermontov” also there, in the issue of 1 October.
89. Adamovich, “Pushkin i Lermontov,” in Adamovich, Literaturnye zametki. Kniga I,
571–81, here 576 (“razdrazhenie i nedoumenie opekunov literatury”); all subsequent references
to this text are in parentheses in the main text.
90. In Russian: “predstavlenie o cheloveke i mire ne zakoncheno, ne zaversheno, ne pri-
vedeno v ravnovesie i poriadok”; “sputnikom, sotrudnikom, a ne ukoriaiushchim idealom.”
Adamovich could be credited with having anticipated the use of “polyphonic” in describing
the narrative features of the Russian novel. In a review of Leonov’s Barsuki he mentions
Leonov’s “‘polyphonic’ narrative [‘polifonicheskoe’ povestvovanie] modeled on Dostoevsky or
Tolstoy” (G. Adamovich, Literaturnye besedy, Kniga I, 296–97; the review was first published
in Zveno, 7 September 1925; in the same year, Adamovich also called Belyi’s Moscow a
“polyphonic narrative,” Adamovich, Literaturnye besedy, Kniga I, 249; first published in Zveno
[29 June 1925]). However, later Adamovich objected to the terminological use of “polyphonic”
by Bakhtin, comparing it with the “barren” formalist (Eikhenbaum’s) statements about how
a text “is made” (“‘Romany Dostoevskogo polifonichny,’ ‘Takaia-to povest’ sdelana tak-to.’
Prekrasno, a chto dal’she?,” quoted in Adamovich, Kommentarii, ed. O. A. Korostelev [St.
Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2000], 588; Adamovich’s text was written in 1971). This should serve as
another example of the rather dissimilar discursive dynamics of émigré criticism and theory.
91. In Russian: “vneshnei zakonchennosti nad vnutrennym bogatstvom”; “veshchi nad

dukhom.”
92. On Merezhkovsky’s influence, see A. B. Mokrousov, “Lermontov, a ne Pushkin: Spory
o ‘natsional’nom poete’ i zhurnal ‘Chisla,’” in Pushkin i kul’tura russkogo zarubezh’ia, ed. M. A.
Vasil’eva (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2000), 153–66, esp. 158.
93. Adamovich, “Kommentarii,” Chisla 1 (1930): 136–43, here 142.
94. Adamovich, “Kommentarii,” Chisla 2–3 (1930): 167–76, here 167 (“Krakh idei
khudozhestvennogo sovershenstva otrazilsia otchetlivee vsego na nashem otnoshenii k
Pushkinu”).
95. Adamovich, “Soiuz molodykh poetov v Parizhe. Sb. III, 1930; Perekrestok. Sb. stikhov,
Parizh, 1930,” Chisla 2–3 (1930): 239–40, here 240 (“Pozhertvuite, gospoda, vashim klassitsiz-
mom i strogost’iu, vashei chistotoi, vashim pushkinizmom, napishite khotia by dva slova tak,
kak budto vy nichego do nikh ne znali”).
96. See Khodasevich’s article “O pushkinizme,” Vozrozhdenie (29 December 1932).
97. A. Bem, “Kul’t Pushkina i kolebliushchie trenozhnik,” in Bem, Pis’ma o literature,
53–58, here 54 (first pubished in Rul’ [Berlin], 18 June 1931); all subsequent references to this
collection are in parentheses in the main text. According to Zinaida Shakhovskaia’s memoirs,
Adamovich vowed never to respond to Bem’s article; see Z. Shakhovskaia, Otrazheniia (Paris:
YMCA-Press, 1975), 92. Privately, Adamovich would go as far as calling Bem a “bastard,”
“without a single thought of his own” [see “‘My s Vami ochen’ raznye liudi.’ Pis’ma G. V.
Adamovicha A. P. Burovu (1933–1938),” ed. O. Korostelev, Diaspora: Novye materialy 9 (2007):
325–54, here 338 (“merzavets,” “bez odnoi svoei mysli”). Adamovich’s letter is dated 23 June
1934].
98. In Russian, Pushkin’s line reads, “I v detskoi rezvosti koleblet tvoi trenozhnik.”
99. In Russian, “bez kul’ta proshlogo net i dostizhenii budushchego.”
100. On the resonance of the debate on Pushkin and Lermontov and the prototypes of
Khristofor Mortus, see A. Dolinin, “Dve zametki o romane ‘Dar,’” Zvezda 11 (1996): 168–80,
and his article “The Gift,” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. V. Alexandrov
(New York and London: Garland, 1995), 135–69, esp. 142–49, where Dolinin also reveals the
significance of the 1930s discussions on émigré literature as a background to Nabokov’s novel.
On the prototypes behind Mortus, see also J. Malmstad, “Iz perepiski V. F. Khodasevicha
(1925–1938),” Minuvshee 3 (1987): 262–91, esp. 281 and 286. On Nabokov’s conflict with the
younger literati around Chisla, including Adamovich, see L. Livak, “Kriticheskoe khoziaistvo
Vladislava Khodasevicha,” Diaspora: Novye materialy 4 (2002): 391–456, here 418–21; see also
S. Davydov, “Teksty-matreshki” Vladimira Nabokova (Munich: Sagner, 1982), 37–51.
101. In Russian, “russkoi kul’tury, russkoi gosudarstvennosti, protiv vsei noveishei istorii
Rossii” (quoted in K., “Po retsenziiam,” Chisla 4 [1930–1931]: 210–11, here 211).
102. See L. Livak, “Iurii Fel’zen,” in Twentieth-Century Russian Émigré Writers (Dictionary of
Literary Biography, vol. 317), ed. Maria Rubins (Detroit: Thomson and Gale, 2005), 102–9, here
103.
103. Bem, “Stolichnyi provintsializm,” in Pis’ma o literature, 242–46, here 242 (“V romane
Iu. Fel’zena vy priamo naidete otryvki iz ‘Kommentariev’ G. Adamovicha, no menee ostro
podnesennye i bolee vialye po stiliu”; the review was first published in Mech [Warsaw], 19
January 1936). This claim was not unfounded: Fel’zen does indeed paraphrase (without
explicit reference, but with the help of the pointer “it has become a common place”) Adamov-
ich’s view of Lermontov as “the start of the new” (contrasted to Pushkin’s role as finalizer
of the old); see Iu. Fel’zen, Pis’ma o Lermontove (Berlin: Izdatel’skaia kollegiia parizhskogo
ob”edineniia pisatelei [n.d.; actually published in 1935]), 84; all subsequent references to the
novel are in parentheses in the main text.
104. In Russian, “esli bylo kakoe-nibud’ chudo, nam izvestnoe, eto konechno Prust,
chem-to uzhe zatmivshii Tolstogo i Dostoevskogo.”
105. In Russian, “Lermontov byl prosto chelovek i, pogruzhennyi v sebia, on nastoichivo
razsuzhdal o sebe i o svoei zhizni.”
106. In Russian: “gladkaia, tusklo-seraia i legkovesnaia”; “iskrennii lichnyi ton.” See
Konstantin Mochul’skii’s later claim: “Of course, Lermontov did learn from Pushkin; but
how wonderfully did he transform Pushkin’s manner, softening its stern dryness and lending
it new, inexplicable charm” (K. V. Mochul’skii, Velikie russkie pisateli XIX v. [St. Petersburg:
Aleteiia, 2000], 77; first published in Paris in 1939; “Konechno, Lermontov uchilsia u Push-
kina; no kak chudesno preobrazil on pushkinskuiu maneru, smiagchiv ee stroguiu sukhost’ i
pridav ei novoe, neobiasnimoe ocharovan’e”).
107. B. Poplavskii, “O misticheskoi atmosfere molodoi literatury v emigratsii,” Chisla
2–3 (1930): 308–11, here 309 (“chastnoe pis’mo, otpravlennoe po neizvestnomu adresu”); all
subsequent references are in parentheses in the main text.
108. In Russian, “Kak voobshche mozhno govorit’ o Pushkinskoi epokhe. Sushchestvuet
tol’ko Lermontovskoe vremia.” See Poplavsky’s later juxtaposition—indicatively, in a section
of literary criticism discussing Joyce—between Pushkin, “the greatest worm,” and Lermon-
tov, “huge and . . . endlessly gothic” (“samyi bol’shoi cherv’”; “Lermontov ogromen . . . on
bezkonechno gotichen”), in “Po povodu . . . ,” Chisla 4 (1930–1931): 161–75, here 171.
109. Bem, “Stolichnyi provintsializm,” 246.
110. The polemic was triggered by Adamovich’s “Provintsiia i stolitsa” (Province and
Capital) in Poslednie novosti (31 December 1931), a rather condescending review of the Harbin
collective volume Bagul’nik. Bem’s above-mentioned article “Stolichnyi provintsializm,” as
well as his later “Provintsiia i stolitsa,” are echoes of this discussion, which, as Oleg Korostelev
notes, had reached its peak in 1934 in the pages of the Warsaw-based Mech; see Korostelev’s
notes in Adamovich, Literaturnye zametki. Kniga I, 745.
111. Adamovich, “Lermontov,” Poslednie novosti (19 December 1939), quoted here from
the republication in M. Iu. Lermontov: Pro et contra, 840–45, with all subsequent references in
112. In Russian: “I esli ne sversheniia, to stremleniia lermontovskoi poezii tianutsia dal’she
pushkinskoi”; “Pushkin ostalsia bogom, Lermontov sdelalsia drugom, naedine s kotorym
kazhdyi stanovilsia chishche i svobodnee.”
113. In Russian: “Pushkin slishkom iasnyi i zemnoi, slishkom utverzhdaet zhizn’ i
slishkom zakonchen v svoei forme. Parizhane oshchushchaiut zemliu skoree kak ad i khotiat
razbivat’ vsiakie naidennye formy, stanoviashchiesia okovami. Lermontov im blizhe”; see
G. P. Fedotov, “O parizhskoi poezii,” in Kovcheg: Sbornik russkoi zarubezhnoi literatury (New
York: Association of Russian Writers in New York, 1942), 197.
114. V. Ermilov, “Za rabotu po-novomu,” Krasnaia nov’ 5 (1932): 161–74, here 162.
8. Literary Criticism and the Institution of Literature in the Era of War and
Late Stalinism, 1941–1953
This chapter was translated from Russian by Jeffrey Karlsen.
1. A. Shcherbakov, “O nekotorykh zadachakh propagandistskoi raboty,” Propagandist 1
(1942): 11.
2. See E. Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti: Literatura stalinksoi epokhi v istoricheskom osveshchenii
(Munich: Otto Sagner, 1993), 209–317. On the other hand, a traditionally Soviet approach
to the history of literary criticism existed up to 2005; see, for example, V. A. Chalmaev,
“Literaturnaia kritika: Perekrestok mnenii, sporov, tendentsii,” in “Idet voina narodnaia . . . ”
Literatura Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (1941–1945), ed. V. Ia. Savateev (Moscow: IMLI RAN,
2005), 398–428.
3. I. Erenburg, “Slovo-oruzhie,” Novyi mir 1–2 (1944): 212.

4. See, for example, the Pravda editorials “Litso vraga” (28 June 1942) and “Stoikost’ i
zheleznoe uporstvo—nepremennoe uslovie pobedy” (17 July 1942).
5. “Iskusstvo—na sluzhbu Krasnoi Armii,” Pravda (February 1942).
6. Erenburg, “Dolg pisatelia,” Novyi mir 9 (1943): 112.
7. Erenburg, “Slovo-oruzhie,” Novyi mir 1–2 (1944): 211.
8. Erenburg, “Slovo-oruzhie,” 212.
9. A. Anikst, “Nasha literatura,” Znamia 4 (1945): 124.
10. V. Pertsov, “Pisatel’ i ego geroi v dni voiny. Stat’ia pervaia,” Oktiabr’ 6–7 (1943): 196.
11. Pertsov, “Pisatel’ i ego geroi v dni voiny. Stat’ia tret’ia,” Oktiabr’ 3 (1945): 120.
12. O. Reznik, “Rozhdenie sovremennogo eposa,” Novyi mir 1–2 (1942): 222.
13. For more about the “conspicuous absence of criticism,” see A. Surkov, “Tovarishcham
kritikam,” Literatura i iskusstvo (8 March 1942): 2.
14. P. Skosyrev, “Otveta ne posledovalo (O kritike v nashi dni),” Novyi mir 4 (1943):
119–23.
15. “Vyshe uroven’ khudozhestvennogo masterstva,” Literatura i iskusstvo (27 February
1943): 1.
16. A. Egolin, “Za vysokuiu ideinost’ sovetskoi literatury,” Bol’shevik 10–11 (1944): 46.
17. Egolin, “Sovetskaia literatura v dni Otechestvennoi voiny,” Propagandist 6 (1944): 28.
18. Lidiia Poliak, “O ‘liricheskom epose’ Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” Znamia 9–10
(1943): 292–99.
19. E. Knipovich, “‘Krasivaia’ nepravda o voine,” Znamia 9–10 (1944): 212.
20. The quotations from Gromov’s and Prokof’ev’s speeches come from the official report
covering the meeting, see Leningrad 7–8 (1945): 26–27.
21. See D. Babichenko, “Stalin: ‘Doberemsia do vsekh’ (Kak gotovili poslevoennuiu
ideologicheskuiu kampaniiu (1943–1946),” in Iskliuchit’ vsiakie upominaniia . . . Ocherki sovetskoi
tsenzury, ed. T. M. Goriaeva (Moscow: Vremia i mesto; Minsk: Staryi Svet-Print, 1995).
22. See Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti, 318–404.
23. See A. Moryganov, “Esteticheskaia demonologiia sotsrealizma,” in Sotsrealisticheskii
kanon, ed. Hans Günther and Evgeny Dobrenko (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt,
2000), 449–58.
24. K. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia (Moscow: APN, 1989), 124–29.
25. Literaturnaia gazeta (8 July 1947).
26. The campaign against Nusinov and his book was started even before Fadeev’s speech,
in N. Tikhonov, “V zashchitu Pushkina,” Kul’tura i zhizn’ (9 May 1947).
27. See the report in Literaturnaia gazeta (8 July 1947).
28. Oktiabr’ 9 (1947).
29. For the “unmasking” of Alekseev, see A. Kamenskii, “Iskazhennye proportsii i
lozhnye vyvody,” Literaturnaia gazeta (14 June 1947); for the “unmasking” of Eikhenbaum, see
Kamenskii, “Lozhnye paralleli i porochnye vyvody,” Literaturnaia gazeta (21 June 1947); for
the “unmasking” of Azadovsky, see V. Sidel’nikov, “Protiv izvrashchenii i nizkopoklonstva
v sovetskoi fol’kloristike,” Literaturnaia gazeta 26 (29 June 1947); and for the “unmasking” of
Propp, see S. Lazutin, “Restavratsiia otzhivshikh teorii,” Literaturnaia gazeta 29 (12 July 1947).
30. L. Plotkin, “Aleksandr Veselovskii i ego epigony,” Literaturnaia gazeta 39 (20 September
1947).
31. M. Kuznetsov, “A. N. Veselovskii podlinnyi i priukrashennyi,” Literaturnaia gazeta 4 (14
January 1948).
32. On the situation in Leningrad regarding the fate of well-known literary scholars, see
K. Azadovskii and B. Egorov, “O nizkopoklonstve i kosmopolitizme: 1948–1949,” Zvezda 6
(1989); and Azadovskii and Egorov, “Kosmopolity,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 36 (1999): 83-135.
33. A. Nikol’skaia, “Bez liubvi i vdokhnoven’ia,” Literaturnaia gazeta 75 (18 September

1948).
34. Literaturnaia gazeta 63 (7 August 1948). Incidentally, Oktiabr’ quickly “righted this
abnormal situation,” becoming one of the leading participants in the struggle against the
cosmopolitan critics in 1949.
35. A. Tarasenkov, “Kosmopolity ot literaturovedeniia,” Novyi mir 2 (1948): 127.
36. I. Al’tman, “Protiv idealizma v teatrovedenii,” Literaturnaia gazeta 18 (25 February
1948); B. Solov’ev, “Malaia entsiklopediia formalizma,” Literaturnaia gazeta 42 (26 May 1948);
and A. Arnol’dov and P. Trofimov, “Vo vlasti burzhuaznogo ob”ektivizma,” Literaturnaia
gazeta 70 (1 September 1948).
37. See Literaturnaia gazeta 55 (27 November 1948).
38. See Literaturnaia gazeta 4 (15 January 1949).
39. See A. Borshchagovskii’s memoirs Zapiski balovnia sud’by (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’,
1991).
40. See the report on the conference in Literaturnaia gazeta 13 (12 February 1949).
41. F. Abramov and N. Lebedev, “V bor’be za chistotu marksistsko-leninskogo literaturo-
vedeniia,” Zvezda 7 (1949).
42. A. Surov, “Estetstvuiushchie klevetniki,” Literaturnaia gazeta 12 (9 February 1949).
43. L. Shaumian, “Otshchepenets-kosmopolit,” Literaturnaia gazeta 16 (23 February 1949).
44. Z. Papernyi, “Sushchestvo bezdushnoe,” Literaturnaia gazeta 14 (16 February 1949).
45. N. Pogodin, “Ikh metody . . . ” Literaturnaia gazeta 18 (2 March 1949).
46. B. Romashov, “O korniakh kosmopolitizma i estetstva,” Literaturnaia gazeta 18 (2
March 1949).
47. To cite just a few telling titles of articles from the first issue of Teatr for 1949: “Do
kontsa razgromim i razoblachim gruppu antipatrioticheskikh teatral’nykh kritikov” (Let Us
Rout to the End and Unmask the Group of Antipatriotic Theater Critics), “Zlopykhatel’stva
bezrodnogo kosmopolita” (The Malevolence of the Rootless Cosmopolite), “Kleveta
ideologicheskogo diversanta Iuzovskogo” (The Slander of the Ideological Saboteur Iuzovskii),
“Propaganda burzhuaznogo estetstva i formalizma” (The Propaganda of Bourgeois Aestheti-
cism and Formalism), “‘Vyverty’ formalistsko-estetskoi kritiki” (The “Quirks” of Formalist-
Aestheticist Criticism).
48. B. Solov’ev, “Estetstvuiushchii zlopykhatel’,” Literaturnaia gazeta 19 (5 March 1949);
V. Ozerov, “Kosmopolit-‘teoretik’,” Literaturnaia gazeta 24 (23 March 1949).
49. A. Makarov, “Tikhoi sapoi,” Literaturnaia gazeta 15 (19 February 1949).
50. E. Kholodov, “Pochemu molchit professor Losev,” Literaturnaia gazeta 57 (17 July 1948).
51. K. Rudnitskii, “Na zemle i na stsene,” Literaturnaia gazeta 60 (28 July 1948).
52. See, for example, Iu. Zhukov, “Iad kosmopolitizma,” Novyi mir 3 (1950); A. Tarasenkov,
“O natsional’nykh traditisiiakh i burzhuaznom kosmopolitizme,” Znamia 1 (1950): 152–64; V.
Vazhdaev, “Propovednik kosmopolitizma,” Novyi mir 1 (1950): 257–72; E. Brandis, “Rastvore-
nie v obozhestvlennom kosmose,” Zvezda 3 (1950), among many others.
53. See Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR ot nachala do kul’minatsii: 1938–1953, ed. G. V.
Kostyrchenko (Moscow: Materik, 2005); Stalin i kosmopolitizm: Dokumenty Agitpropa TSK
KPSS, 1945–1953, ed. D. G. Nadzhafov and Z. S. Belousova (Moscow: Materik, 2005); G.
V. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast’ i antisemitizm (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye
otnosheniia, 2005); Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National
Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
54. Boris Groys, Utopiia i obmen (Moscow: Znak, 1993), 13–14.
55. B. Meilakh, “Filosofskaia diskussiia i nekotorye voprosy izucheniia estetiki,” Zvezda 1
(1948): 157.
56. I. Al’tman, “Problemy dramaturgii i teatra,” Znamia 11–12 (1946): 183–84.
57. A. Borshchagovskii, “Kriticheskie normativy i traditsii,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo (24 May

1946).
58. A. Tarasenkov, “Sovetskaia literatura na putiakh sotsialisticheskogo realizma,”
Bol’shevik 9 (1948): 47.
59. A. Zhdanov, Sovetskaia literatura—samaia ideinaia, samaia peredovaia literatura v mire
60. B. Bialik, “Nado mechtat’!” Oktiabr’ 11 (1947): 181–89; Bialik, “Geroicheskoe delo
trebuet geroicheskogo slova,” Oktiabr’ 2 (1948): 166–82.
61. V. Ermilov, “Za boevuiu teoriiu literatury!” Literaturnaia gazeta 91 (13 November 1948).
62. Ermilov, “Za boevuiu teoriiu literatury!”
63. Ermilov, “Za boevuiu teoriiu literatury! Protiv ‘romanticheskoi’ putanitsy!” Literatur-
naia gazeta 74 (15 September 1948).
64. See Pod znamenem marksizma 8 (1940).
65. G. M. Malenkov, Otchetnyi doklad XIX s’’ezdu partii o rabote Tsentral’nogo Komiteta VKP(b)
(Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1952), 115.
66. A. Zhdanov, Doklad o zhurnalakh “Zvezda” i “Leningrad” (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1952),
28.
67. L. Plotkin, “O pravde zhizni,” Zvezda 8 (1952): 139.
68. B. Riurikov, “Otritsatel’nye obrazy i neprimirimost’ pisatelia,” Literaturnaia gazeta 89
(24 July 1952).
69. “Uchebnik zhizni,” Literaturnaia gazeta 110 (11 September 1952): 1.
70. B. Riurikov, “V zhizni tak ne byvaet,” Literaturnaia gazeta 110 (11 September 1952).
71. Ed., “Bditel’nost’!” Literaturnaia gazeta 8 (17 January 1953): 1.
72. T. Trifonova, “O nekotorykh voprosakh sotsialisticheskogo realizma,” Zvezda 4 (1953):
162.
73. This problem generated an extensive literature. In 1953 alone, dozens of articles
were published, and the “problem of the typical” became the main theme of Soviet literary
scholarship. Among the most representative titles are V. Asmus, “Obraz kak otrazhenie
deistvitel’nosti i problema tipicheskogo,” Novyi mir 8 (1953): 214–26; G. Lomidze, “Za
pravdivoe otrazhenie zhiznennykh konfliktov v literature,” Voprosy filosofii 5 (1952): 149–60; A.
Miasnikov, “Problema tipicheskogo obraza v literature,” Oktiabr’ 6 (1953): 156–69; V. Ozerov,
“Zhivaia literatura i mertvaia skholastika,” Literaturnaia gazeta (19 September 1953); B. Reizov,
“O poniatii formy khudozhestvennogo proizvedeniia,” Zvezda 7 (1953): 128–42; N. Shamota,
“Tipicheskoe—vsegda iarkoe,” Dnipro 8 (1953); Ia. El’sberg, “Za boevuiu sovetskuiu satiru,”
Voprosy filosofii 2 (1953); and so on and so on.
74. Cited in Literaturnaia gazeta 151 (12 December 1952).
75. M. Kagan, “Problema prekrasnogo v esteticheskom uchenii N. G. Chernyshevskogo,”
Zvezda 8 (1953): 161.
76. B. Meilakh, “Spetsifika literatury i problema tipicheskogo,” Literaturnaia gazeta 151 (12
December 1952).
77. T. Trifonova, “Delo chesti i slavy,” Zvezda 7 (1952): 156.
78. B. Solov’ev, “Poeziia i pravda,” Zvezda 3 (1954): 163.
79. A. El’iashevich, “Budni ili prazdniki?” Zvezda 10 (1954): 184.
80. See L. Geller and A. Boden, “Institutsional’nyi kompleks sotsrealizma,” in Sotsrealisti-
cheskii kanon, 289–319.
9. Literary Criticism during the Thaw
The first and third sections of this chapter were written by Evgeny Dobrenko, while the
second and fourth sections are by Ilya Kalinin. This chapter was translated from Russian by
Josephine von Zitzewitz.
1. See “A za mnoiu shum pogoni . . . ”: Boris Pasternak i vlast’. Dokumenty: 1956–1972 (Moscow:
ROSSPEN, 2001).
2. S. Bocharov, V. Kozhinov, and P. Palievskii, “Chelovek za bortom,” Voprosy literatury
4 (1962): 61; 77; see also B. N. Agapov, D. S. Danin and B. M. Runin, Khudozhnik i nauka
(Moscow: Znanie, 1966).
3. L. Lavlinskii, “Bilet, no kuda?” Komsomol’skaia Pravda 219 (15 September 1961): 4.
4. A. Makarov, Pokoleniia i sud’by (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1967), 77.
5. The materials of these discussions were collected in the volume Razgovor pered s’’ezdom:
Sbornik statei, opublikovannykh pered Vtorym Vsesoiuznym s’’ezdom pisatelei, ed. K. Ozerova
(Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1954).
6. A. Dremov, “Deistvitel’nost’—ideal—idealizatsiia,” Oktiabr’ 1–2 (1964).
7. O. Berggol’ts, “Razgovor o lirike,” Literaturnaia gazeta 46 (16 April 1953): 3.
8. M. Aliger, “Razgovor s drugom,” Znamia 6 (1954): 153–74; I. Sel’vinskii, “Nabolevshii
vopros,” Literaturnaia gazeta 125 (19 October 1954): 3.
9. Berggol’ts, “Protiv likvidatsii liriki,” Literaturnaia gazeta 129 (28 October 1954): 3.
10. See Oktiabr’ 11 and 12 (1958); Oktiabr’ 1, 2, and 5 (1959). The materials of the discussion
were published in the collection Chto takoe sovremennost’?, ed. V. Belokon’ (Moscow: Pravda,
1960).
11. B. Reizov, “O literaturnykh napravleniiakh,” Voprosy literatury 1 (1957): 87–117.
12. I. El’sberg, “Problemy realizma i zadachi literaturnoi nauki,” Voprosy literatury 4 (1958):
149.
13. See Sovremennye problemy realizma i modernizm, ed. A. S. Miasnikov (Moscow: Nauka,
1965).
14. See “Tvorcheskaia praktika i teoreticheskaia mysl’: So Vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia po
voprosam sotsialisticheskogo realizma,” Voprosy literatury 6 (1959): 61–92.
15. D. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1995), 348, 361.
16. V. Pomerantsev, “Ob iskrennosti v literature,” Novyi mir 12 (1953), 218–45, here 220.
For the accusation against Pomerantsev, see “Ob oshibkakh zhurnala Novyi mir: Rezoliutsiia
Prezidiuma Pravleniia Soiuza Pisatelei SSSR,” Literaturnaia gazeta 98 (17 August 1954): 3.
17. See “Uluchshit’ ideino-vospitatel’nuiu rabotu sredi pisatelei,” Literaturnaia gazeta 71 (15
June 1954): 1; “Vyshe uroven’ ideino-vospitatel’noi raboty sredi pisatelei,” Literaturnaia gazeta
85 (17 July 1954): 3.
18. See I. Brainin, “Ediat menia serye volki,” Moskovskie novosti 42 (21 June 1995): 19.
19. On this first period of Novyi mir after Stalin, see E. Rogovin, “Novy mir”: A Case Study
in the Politics of Literature, 1952–1958 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
1981).
20. See D. Spechler, Permitted Dissent in the USSR: ‘Novy Mir’ and the Soviet Regime (New
York: Praeger, 1982).
21. Chuprinin, in his highly important article on the literary critical policies of Novyi
mir, even stated that criticism assumed “confessional and evangelical . . . responsibilities.” See
Chuprinin, “Pozitsiia (literaturnaia kritika v zhurnale Novyi mir vremen A. T. Tvardovskogo:
1958-1970 gg.),” Voprosy literatury 4 (1988): 3–47, here 18.
22. N. Dobroliubov, “Temnoe tsarstvo” [1859], cited after V. I. Kuleshov, Istoriia russkoi
kritiki XVIII–nachala XX vekov, 3rd ed. (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1984), 529.
23. Chuprinin, “Pozitsiia,” 11.
24. Even in those cases where the object of analysis was apparently a particular genre of
folklore; see Iurii Burtin’s famous article “O chastushkakh,” Novyi mir 1 (1968): 211–38.
25. Burtin, “O chastushkakh,” 231; I. Vinogradov, “Po stranitsam ‘Derevenskogo
dnevnika’ Efima Dorosha,” Novyi mir 7 (1965): 234–53, here 251.
26. I. Vinogradov, “Derevenskie ocherki Valentina Ovechkina,” Novyi mir 6 (1964): 212.
27. V. Lakshin, “Tri mery vremeni (vydvizehnie na Leninskuiu premiiu ‘Derevenskogo

dnevnika’ Efima Dorosha),” Novyi mir 3 (1966): 223.
28. Igor’ Vinogradov had already pointed out the isolationist tendencies in literature about
the village; see Vinogradov, “Po stranitsam,” 240.
29. I. Dedkov, “Stranitsy derevenskoi zhizni (Proza, poeziia i literaturnaia kritika v zhur-
nale Molodaia gvardiia),” Novyi mir 3 (1969): 231–46; A. Dement’ev, “O traditsiiakh i narodnosti
(Rassmotrenie nekotorykh idei i nastroenii, vyrazhennykh v publikatsiiakh zhurnala Molodaia
gvardiia v 1968 godu),” Novyi mir 4 (1969): 215–35.
30. Dedkov, “Stranitsy,” 242.
31. Ibid., 232.
32. Dement’ev, “O traditsiiakh,” 221.
33. Chuprinin, “Pozitsiia,” 37.
34. “Protiv chego vystupaet ‘Novyi mir’?” Ogonek 30 (1969): 26–27.
35. Cited after A. Kondratovich, Novomirskii dnevnik, 1967–1970 (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’,
1991), 425.
36. See, for example, A. Burov, Esteticheskaia sushchnost’ iskusstva (Moscow: Iskusstvo,
1956); V. Vanslov, Problema prekrasnogo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi
literatury, 1957); and, most importantly, L. Stolovich, Esteticheskoe v deistvitel’nosti i v iskusstve
(Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1959).
37. A. Dymshits, “O knige A. Voronskogo i predislovii A. Dement’eva,” Oktiabr’ 7 (1963):
210–13; P. Strokov, “Paradoksy bytovykh gipotez,” Oktiabr’ 3 (1965): 198–204.
38. A. Grebenshchikov, “Zabveniiu ne podlezhit!” Oktiabr’ 6 (1968): 212.
39. M. Gus, “Za kommunisticheskuiu nov’!” Oktiabr’ 5 (1962): 193.
40. A. Vlasenko, “Ideinost’—masterstvo—talant,” Oktiabr’ 8 (1961): 214.
41. L. Kriachko, “Puti, zabluzhdeniia i nakhodki: O ‘nravstvennom’ poiske molodykh,”
Oktiabr’ 3 (1963): 205.
42. Ia. Rivkis and I. Stebun, “Gor’kovskaia kontseptsiia cheloveka i sovremennyi geroi,”
Oktiabr’ 10 (1963): 181–95.
43. See A. Vlasenko, “Trud—poeziia!” Oktiabr’ 12 (1964): 193–203; L. Kriachko, “Sut’ i
vidimost’,” Oktiabr’ 2 (1966): 180–201.
44. See, above all, M. Lifshits, “Pochemu ia ne modernist,” Literaturnaia gazeta 119 (8
October 1966): 2–3; M. Lifshits and L. Reingardt, Krizis bezobraziia: Ot kubizma k pop-artu
(Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968).
45. See the discussion on Slavophilism in the journal Voprosy literatury (1968–1969) that drew
a wide response.
46. A. Siniavskii, “Russkii natsionalizm,” Sintaksis 26 (1989): 106.
47. The journal Nash sovremennik (whose editor in chief, Sergei Vikulov, was the deputy
editor of Molodaia gvardiia until 1969) and a number of provincial journals—Don, Sever,
Sibirskie ogni, the newspapers Literaturnaia Rossiia, Sovetskaia Rossiia, as well as the publishing
houses Voenizdat and Moskovskii rabochii became close to Molodaia gvardiia in questions of
ideology and politics.
48. V. Chalmaev, “Neizbezhnost’,” Molodaia gvardiia 9 (1968): 259–89, here 266.
49. G. Konovalov, “Dumy o Volge,” Molodaia gvardiia 4 (1969): 277–308, here 295.
50. See Kozhinov’s entry in “Trizhdy velikaia. Romanu “Voina i mir” 100 let. Podborka
statei V. Petelina, O. Mikhailova, V. Kozhinova, A. Lanshchikova, M. Lobanova, I. Ivanova,
V. Drobysheva,” Molodaia gvardiia 12 (1969): 279.
51. See S. Semanov, “O tsennostiakh otnositel’nykh i vechnykh,” Molodaiia gvardiia 8 (1970):
311.
52. Chalmaev, “Neizbezhnost’,” 277.
53. Ibid., 272.
54. See A. Solzhenitsyn, “Obrazovanshchina” [1974], Novyi mir 5 (1991): 28–46.

55. M. Lobanov, “Prosveshchennoe meshchanstvo,” Molodaia gvardiia 4 (1968): 294–306,
here 299.
56. Lobanov, “Prosveshchennoe,” 303.
57. Lobanov, “Bol’ tvorchestva i slovesnoe samodovol’stvo,” Molodaia gvardiia 11 (1969):
381–82.
58. Lobanov, “Prosveshchennoe,” 304.
59. O. Mikhailov, “Klassika rubezha dvukh stoletii,” Molodaia gvardiia 10 (1970): 263–78,
here 263.
60. Mikhailov, “Klassika,” 278.
61. V. Petelin, “Tolstoi i sovremennost’,” Molodaia gvardiia 12 (1969): 272 (in Russian, “kol’
rech’ zakhodila o nakoplennykh narodom dukhovnykh bogatstvakh”).
62. Semanov, “[Review of] Iu. I. Ovtsin. Bol’sheviki i kul’tura proshlogo (M, 1969),” Molodaia
gvardiia 4 (1970): 295.
10. Literary Criticism of the Long 1970s and the Fate of Soviet Liberalism
The sections “The Role of Literary Criticism in the Long 1970s,” “Nationalist Criticism,”
and “Liberal Criticism” were written by Mark Lipovetsky; “Unofficial Literary Criticism,“
“The Journals of the Moscow Underground, “ and “Samizdat in Leningrad” were written by
Mikhail Berg. This chapter was translated from Russian by Josephine von Zitzewitz.
1. V. Baranov, A. Bocharov, and Iu. Surovtsev, Literatuno-kudozhestvennaia kritika (Moscow:
Vysshaia shkola), 1982.
2. A detailed analysis of the concept of socialist realism as an “open system” and the reac-
tions of Soviet critics can be found in T. Lahusen, “Socialist Realism in Search of Its Shores:
Some Historical Remarks on the ‘Historically Open System of the Truthful Representation
of Life,’” in Socialist Realism Without Shores, ed. T. Lahusen and E. Dobrenko (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1997), 5–26.
3. D. F. Markov, Problemy teorii sotsialisticheskogo realizma (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia
literatura, 1975), 303.
4. A. Iakovlev “Protiv antiistorizma,” Literaturnaia gazeta (15 November 1972): 7–8.
5. See Literaturnaia gazeta 7 (1976): 4.
6. See V. Kozhinov, Stat’i o sovremennoi literature (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1982), 25–36.
Despite Chuprinin’s outspokenly critical position toward the nationalist poets and subsequent
rift with Stanislav Kuniaev, he included this introduction in his own book, Krupnym planom:
Poeziia nashikh dnei: problemy i kharakterisitiki (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1983), 186–95.
7. The following journals were under the exclusive control of this group: Nash sovremen-
nik (editor in chief, S. Vikulov), Molodaia gvardiia (editor in chief until 1970, A. Nikonov;
later from 1972, An. Ivanov), Moskva (editor in chief, M. Alekseev), Ogonek (editor in chief,
A. Sofronov), Roman-gazeta (editor in chief between 1978–1980, G. Gusev; after 1980: V.
Ganichev), as well as the publishing houses Sovremennik, Molodaia gvardiia, and Sovetskaia
Rossiia, all of which published books on literary criticism.
8. V. Chalmaev, “Neizbezhnost’,” Molodaia gvardiia 9 (1968): 263.
10. M. Lobanov, ”Prosveshchennoe meshchanstvo,” Molodaia gvardiia 4 (1968): 304.
11. V. Kozhinov, ”I nazovet menia vsiak sushchii v nei iazyk . . . ” Nash sovremennik 11
(1981): 175.
12. See the discussion on the legacy of the Slavophiles, which started in Voprosy literatury
in 1968 and continued in 1969 in the same journal and in Novyi mir. On this discussion, see also
G. Tihanov, “Continuities in the Soviet Period,” in A History of Russian Thought, ed.
D. Offord and W. Leatherbarrow (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 311–39, here 323–24.
13. V. Kozhinov, “Tsennosti istinnye i mnimye,” Literaturnaia gazeta 5 (1968): 5.
15. “Klassika i my,” Moskva 1 (1999): 186; all subsequent references to this text are in
16. For Kozhinov’s attacks on Iurii Trifonov and Arsenii Tarkovsky, see, respectively:
“Problema avtora i put’ pisatelia” in Kontekst-1977 (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 23–47; and
“Glubina traditsii i vysota smysla” in Poeziia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1981); both articles
are collected in his Stat’i o sovremennoi literature. For the discussion on “intellectual poetry,”
see A. Lanshchikov, “Ostorozhno— kontseptsiia!” Molodaia gvardiia 2 (1969): 275–80; for
Kurbatov’s exasperation at the abundance of bookish references in contemporary poetry, see
V. Kurbatov, “Gore ot uma,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 3 (1980): 38–42; for Kuniaev’s attacks on
Voznesensky, Samoilov, and Levitanskii, see S. Kuniaev, “O ‘veselykh drovakh’ i traditsiiakh
otechestvennoi poezii,” Nash sovremennik 2 (1985): 170–81; and for the war waged by the
younger Kazintsev against the “difficult” metaphorical poets of the early 1980s, see A.
Kazintsev, “Nachalo puti: zhiznennyi opyt i skhemy,” Nash sovremennik 12 (1983): 156–64.
17. I. Dedkov, “Stranitsy derevenskoi zhizni,” Novyi mir 3 (1969): 245.
18. See A. Marchenko, “Iz knizhnogo raia,” Voprosy literatury 4 (1969): 26–71.
19. Rodnianskaia’s article was first published in 1980 in the Petrozavodsk journal Sever and
later republished in her book Khudozhnik v poiskakh istiny (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989).
20. L. Anninskii, “Vasilii Shukshin i ego geroi,” Moskovskii komsomolets (27 December 1968):
5.
21. L. Anninskii, Tridsatye-semidesiatye (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1977), 262, 263, 259.
22. See G. Belaia, Zakonomernost’ stilevogo razvitiia russkoi sovetskoi prozy 1920-kh godov
(Moscow: Nauka, 1977).
23. G. Belaia, “Iskusstvo est’ smysl,” Voprosy literatury 7 (1973): 79.
24. See G. Belaia, “Paradoksy i otkrytiia Vasiliia Shukshina,” Khudozhestevnnyi mir
sovremennoi prozy (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), 92–117; on the “ontological” character of village
prose, 140–51.
25. A detailed analysis of the critical discussions on Trifonov is provided by N. Ivanova in
Proza Iuriia Trifonova (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1982).
26. N. Klado, “Prokrustovo lozhe byta,” Literaturnaia gazeta (12 May 1976): 9; Vs. Sakharov,
“‘Flamandskoi shkoly pestryi sor . . . ’,” Nash sovremennik 5 (1974): 188–91; Iu. Andreev, “V
zamknutom mirke,” Literaturnaia gazeta (3 March 1971): 8; G. Brovman, “Izmereniia malogo
mira,” Literaturnaia gazeta (8 March 1972): 9.
27. L. Anninskii, Tridsatye-semidesiatye, 224.
28. A. Bocharov, Beskonechnost’ poiska (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1982), 110.
29. Belaia, “Vechnye temy,” Literatura v zerkale kritiki: Sovremennye problemy (Moscow:
Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986), 179 (emphasis in the original); first published under the title “Nepov-
torimoe odnazhdy (Filosofsko-eticheskaia tema v proze Iuriia Trifonova),” Literaturnoe
obozrenie 5 (1983): 7–16.
30. V. Bondarenko, “Avtoritet pokoleniia,” Voprosy literatury 11 (1985): 100.
31. A. Bocharov, “Radost’ vechnogo dvizhenia: Cherty vremeni i obraz geroia,”
Literaturnaia gazeta 25 (1975): 5.
32. See, for example, Bondarenko, “Avtoritet pokoleniia,” Voprosy literatury 11 (1985):
79–114.
33. First in Literaturnoe obozrenie 8 (1981): 21–32; quoted here from I. Dedkov, Zhivoe litso
vremeni (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986), 220–58.
34. See A. Bocharov, “Kak slovo nashe otzovetsia?” Voprosy literatury 11 (1985): 115–54;
V. Kamianov, Doverie k slozhnosti: Sovremennost’ i klassicheskaia traditsiia (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1984), 128–40, 193–200, 254–72. On Vladimir Makanin, see A. Bocharov, “Na reke
s bystrym techeniem,” Druzhba narodov 1 (1984): 231–39; I. Rodnianskaia, “Neznakomye
znakomtsy: K sporam o geroiakh Vladimira Makanina,” Novyi mir 8 (1986): 230–47.
35. See A. Bocharov, “Epos, pritcha, mif,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 1 (1980): 35–37. Similar
ideas were later expressed by Vladimir Pertsovskii in his article “‘Avtorskaia pozitsiia’ v
literature i kritike,” Voprosy literatury 7 (1981): 66–105.
36. Kamianov, Doverie k slozhnosti, 32.
37. N. Ivanova, “Vol’noe dykhanie,” Voprosy literatury 1 (1983): 179–214.
38. See A. Latynina, “Da, istoricheskie fantazii! (O romane Bulata Okudzhavy ‘Svidanie s
Bonapartom’ i ne tol’ko o nem),” Znaki vremeni: Zametki o literaturnom protsesse, 1970-80-e gody
(Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), 295–301.
39. L. Anninskii, “Zhazhdu belletrizma!” Literaturnaia gazeta (1 March 1978): 6.
40. See B. Sarnov, “Ugl’ pylaiushchii i kimval briatsaiushchii,” Voprosy literatury 1 (1968):
21–49; V. Kardin, “Siuzhet dlia nebol’shoi novelly,” Voprosy literatury 5 (1974): 72–93; N.
Krymova, “Ne sviatoi kolodets,” Druzhba narodov 9 (1979): 232–42; I. Zolotusskii, Chas vybora
(Moscow: Sovremennik, 1976), 56–59; Latynina, Znaki vremeni, 208–15. Vladimir Gusev, Iurii
Trifonov, Elena Knipovich, Pertsovskii, and Bocharov were among the few who polemicized
against this point of view.
41. Kardin, “Vremena ne vybiraiut: Zametki o Iurii Trifonove,” Novyi mir 7 (1987): 236
(emphasis in the original).
42. Quoted from Tsena metafory, ili Prestuplenie i nakazanie Siniavskogo i Danielia (Moscow:
Kniga, 1989), 460; all subsequent references to this edition appear in parentheses in the main
text.
43. Iu. Galanskov, “Otkrytoe pis’mo deputatu XXIII S’ezda KPSS M. Sholokhovu,” in
Iurii Galanskov (Frankfurt: Posev, 1980), 101–28, here 118; for an English translation of Galans-
kov’s “Open Letter” (under the title “Sholokhov’s Barracks”), see Cornelia Gerstenmaier, The
Voices of the Silent (New York: Hart, 1972), 345–56.
44. See Iu. Andreev, “Svoevol’nye postroeniia i nauchnaia ob”ektivnost’,” Literaturnaia
gazeta 20 (1968): 5. Publication of Belinkov’s chapters (along with “Skazka o Troike” by Arka-
dii and Boris Strugatsky) was one of the reasons for the closing down of the journal Baikal.
45. One of the first literary samizdat journals, Aleksandr Ginzburg’s Sintaksis (1960), which
was important in the formation of unofficial literature, had no section for literary criticism.
46. A. Skuratov (A. Ivanov), “Pisatel’ Solzhenitsyn i professor Serebriakov,” Veche 4 (1972):
209.
47. Among the many publications especially worth mentioning are P. Komenov’s “Dve-
nadtsat’ apostolov (stat’ia o lirikakh): Osip Mandel’shtam,” Chasy 19 (1979); R. Topchiev’s
(pseudonym of D. Panchenko) articles “Dve zametki o Mandel’shtame: ‘Dremuchii les
Taigeta’ i ‘Pchely Persefony’” and “Mandel’shtamovskie reministsentsii v ‘Khulio
Khurenito’ Il’i Erenburga,” Chasy 20 (1979); G. Benevich and A. Shufrin’s “Vvedenie v
poeziiu Mandel’shtama,” Chasy 52 (1985).
48. See G. Medovoi, “Genezis Mandel’shtama,” Evrei v SSSR (December–January,
1978–1979): 249.
49. G. Pomerants, “Tolstoi i Vostok,” Poiski [New York] 1 (1979): 279; all subsequent
references are given in parentheses in the main text.
50. B. Ivanov, “Kanonicheskoe i nekanonicheskoe iskusstvo,” Chasy 16 (1979); later Ivanov
included this article into his monograph Konfiguratsiia dinamicheskoi estetiki, which also appeared
in samizdat.
51. We can see here a revised version of Pushkins’s advice “to judge a poet according to
the laws he himself accepts,” formulated 150 years before Ivanov’s theory of canonical and
noncanonical art.
52. This article was published under the pseudonym A. Kalomirov in the first double issue
(1979) of Severnaia pochta, a new journal for poetry and criticism, edited by Viktor Krivulin
and Sergei Dediulin. In the same year Krivulin delivered a paper based on this article at the
Second Conference on the Issues of Unofficial Culture in Leningrad. Subsequently the article
was many times reprinted in samizdat (in the collection Tserkov’, kul’tura, ideologiia [Leningrad,
1980], the journal Chasy, and in many other publications) and also in tamizdat: Russkaia mysl’
(Paris, 27 December 1985), and The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry (vol. 5B,
1986).
53. Mikhail Meilakh and Vladimir Erl’ prepared an edition of the collected works of
Kharms, the first volume of which appeared in Bremen in 1978, and of the complete works
of Vvedenskii (published in the United States in 1980–1984). For more on Meilakh and Erl’’s
editing and introducing the work of Kharms and Vvedenskii, see, for example, Meilakh’s
article “O poeme Aleksandra Vvedenskogo ‘Krugom, vozmozhno, Bog,’” later published in
the émigré journal Ekho 32 (1978), and Erl’’s article “Vokrug Kharmsa,” Transponans 21 (1984).
54. “V teni aidesskoi prokhlady: Popravki k panegiriku” was published under the regular
pseudonyms of the authors, A. Fomin and T. Chudinovskaia, in Chasy 44 (1983).
55. This article was republished in B. Ostanin and A. Kobak, Molniia i raduga: Literaturno-
kriticheskie stat’i 1980-kh godov (St. Petersburg: N. I. Novikov, 2003); quotation on p. 60.
56. These include the Religious Philosophical Seminar founded by Tatiana Goricheva
with the help of V. Krivulin, E. Pazukhin, and S. Stratanovskii (1974–1980) and the collection
Tserkov’, kul’tura, ideologiia (1980). The journal 37 also had a religious orientation before the
emigration of Goricheva. At the same time as the texts of the Moscow conceptualists began to
appear in the journal, its religious section began to shrink, and V. Antonov and E. Pazukhin
demonstratively left the editorial board.
57. Guchinskaia’s “Vos’merka Logosa” was published in Chasy 17 (1979); subsequently
an excerpt was reprinted by the journal Summa 2 (1979). Here quoted from the reprint in
“Summa” za svobodnuiu mysl’, ed. A. M. Vershik (St. Petersburg: Zvezda, 2002), 171.
58. B. Ostanin’s “Marsii v kletke: O poezii Eleny Shvarts” was published under the
pseudonym I. Bonch in Chasy 14 (1978) and recently reprinted in NLO 29 (1998): 259–77.
Other articles on the poetry of Elena Shvarts include Tatiana Goricheva, “Tvorets i tvar’:
Ideologicheskoe vvedenie k ‘Prostym stikham’ E. Shvarts,” 37 11 (1977), and R. Topchiev
(pseudonym of D. Panchenko), “Kinfiia Eleny Shvarts,” Metrodor 9 (1980).
59. Butyrin’s “Posle Vysotskogo” was published in Obvodnyi kanal 2 (1982) and subsequently
in Chasy 52 (1984); Krivulin’s article on Trifonov was published under the pseudonym
Ark. Berezhkov, “Intelligent pered litsom smerti (Poslednie knigi Iuriia Trifonova),” 37 21
(1980–1981); Ostanin’s article on Kushner was published under the pseudonym P. Neslukhov,
“Odezhdy Kushnera,” Chasy 22 (1979); and Ignatova’s “Soblazny poshlosti” was published in
Obvodnyi kanal 2 (1982).
60. One exception was the discussion at the Second Conference on Issues of Unofficial
Culture in December 1979. After Boris Groys had given his paper, provocatively titled
“Zachem khudozhnik nuzhen zdes’ i seichas?” (Why Is the Artist Needed Here and Now?),
Boris Ivanov defended the traditional understanding of art as “comprehensible.” Ivanov (using
the pseudonym I. Petrov) also published a synoptic description of Groys’s article “Veshchi,
govoriashchie o samikh sebe” in Summa (see “Summa” za svobobnuiu mysl’, 595). No other
written reaction to the new theoretical declarations seems to exist.
61. See B. Konstriktor, “Dyshala noch’ vostorgom samizdata,” Labirint/Ekstsentr (Sverd-
lovsk) 1 (1991): 35–50; S. Sigei, “Idite i ostanavlivaite vremia,” NLO 26 (1997): 239–44.
62. The last two volumes of 37 were edited by V. Krivulin, together with L. Zhmud’ and
S. Takhtadzhian.
11. Discoveries and Advances in Literary Theory, 1960s–1980s:
Neoformalism, the Linguistic Model, and Beyond
1. R. Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” Language in Literature (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1987), 64–65; P. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary
Field, trans. S. Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 177–208.
2. G. L. Abramovich, P. K. Gei, V. V. Ermilov, and M. S. Kurginian, eds., Teoriia literatury:
Osnovnye problemy v istoricheskom osveshchenii, 3 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk
SSSR, 1962–1965).
3. M. T. Iovchuk, A. G. Kharchev, and V. A. Iadov, “Aktual’nye teoreticheskie problemy
marksistsko-leninskoi sotsiologii v SSSR,” Nauchnye doklady vysshei shkoly: Filosofskie nauki 5
(1970): 7–8.
4. V. G. Belinskii, “Russkaia literatura v 1840 godu,” Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh
(Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1976–1982), 3: 195–98.
5. See, in this regard, the solemnification of the peasant reader in the sampling procedures
of A. M. Toporov, Krest’iane o pisateliakh: Opyt, metodika i obraztsy krest’ianskoi kritiki sovremennoi
khudozhestvennoi literatury (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1930).
6. V. V. Ivanov, Ocherki po istorii semiotiki v SSSR (Moscow: Nauka, 1976).
7. On the role of structuralism in this ongoing debate, see P. Seyffert, Soviet Literary
Structuralism: Background, Debate, Issues (Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1983), 60–61, 124–25,
140–42, and 177. On the shape of the debate, see C. Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail
Bakhtin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 39–48.
8. M. Waldstein, The Soviet Empire of Signs: A History of the Tartu School of Semiotics (Saar-
brücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008), 193.
9. Seyffert, Soviet Literary Structuralism, ch. 7 and 9.
10. M. Ryklin, Svoboda i zapret: Kul’tura v epokhu terrora (Moscow: Logos; Progress-
Traditsiia, 2008), 146–48. On such restriction of information flow, see Iu. M. Lotman, “O
Khlestakove,” Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii (Tartu) 26 (1975): 19–53, here 50–51 (English
translation by L. Vinton, “Concerning Khlestakov,” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History:
Essays by Iurii M. Lotman, Lidia Ia. Ginsburg, Boris A. Uspenskii, ed. A. D. Nakhimovsky and
A. S. Nakhimovsky (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 150–87.
11. See A. Schönle, ed., Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions (Madison:
Wisconsin University Press, 2006) for a persuasive set of critical applications.
12. Iu. M. Lotman, “Ideinaia struktura ‘Kapitanskoi dochki,’” Pushkin (St. Petersburg:
Iskusstvo, 1995), 212–27.
13. The two translations appear in I. Lotman and B. Uspensky, The Semiotics of Russian
Culture, ed. A. Shukman (Ann Arbor: Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University
of Michigan, 1984), 3–35; and The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, 30–66.
14. V. D. Stel’makh, “Kto, Gde, Pochemu . . . Kniga i chtenie v zerkale sotsiologii,”
Literaturnoe obozrenie 1 (1985): 91. An English translation of this discussion appears in Soviet
Studies in Literature 22, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 41–67.
15. E. A. Weinberg, The Development of Sociology in the Soviet Union (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul,1974), 9.
16. Such work appeared in a variety of periodicals, including Sovetskaia knigotorgovlia
(1931–1935) and Sovetskaia kniga (1946–1953); see E. Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader:
Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, trans. J. M. Savage (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997).
17. Iu. B. Kuz’menko, “Problemy istoriko-tipologicheskogo izucheniia sovetskoi
literatury,” in Literatura i sotsiologiia: Sbornik statei, ed. V. Ia. Kantorovich and Iu. B. Kuz’menko
18. For information on these studies of leisure activity and an assessment of their approach
to reading, see V. D. Stel’makh, “Research on the Literary Interests of Readers,” Soviet Studies
in Literature 25, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 68–82.
19. For examples of this historical and critical work, see L. D. Gudkov, “Transformatsiia
tsennostnykh osnovanii issledovaniia v protsesse formirovaniia nauchnoi distsipliny: Primer
sotsiologii literatury,” in Distsiplinarnost’ i vzaimodeistvie nauk, ed. B. M. Kedrov and B. G.
Iudin (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 192–223; and S. Shvedov, “Literaturnaia kritika i literatura
chitatelei (zametki sotsiologa),” Voprosy literatury 5 (1988): 3–31.
20. V. Perevedentsev, “Otkuda berutsia sotsiologi,” Literaturnaia gazeta 12 (18 March 1970):
12.
21. The papers on this last subject were translated and published in three issues of Soviet
Studies in Literature 22, no. 4 (Fall 1986); Soviet Studies in Literature 23, no. 1 (Winter 1986–1987);
and Soviet Studies in Literature 23, no. 2 (Spring 1987).
22. Western semioticians and literary sociologists have tended to use the more complex
model (addresser—message, contact, code, context—addressee) that Roman Jakobson
proposed in “Linguistics and Poetics,” 66.
23. Gudkov, “Transformatsiia tsennostnykh osnovanii,” 211–23.
24. G. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). The distinction
between epic and novel developed in this study, which first appeared in 1916, was amplified
and modified in Lukács’s later works, such as Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset
and Dunlap, 1964), written largely in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, in which Lukács took a
negative view of post-1848 European realism for its allegedly private themes, dead scenery,
shallow social relationships, and overwhelming detail (140–43).
25. W. Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1978). The German original appeared in 1976.
26. The proceedings of a seminal 1968 conference on reading appear in Problemy khu-
dozhestvennogo vospriiatiia (1968); an important early collection on Soviet theories of reading is
B. S. Meilakh, ed., Khudozhestvennoe vospriiatie: Sbornik I (Leningrad: Nauka, 1971).
27. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the Krupskaia Institute of Culture in Leningrad
published an important series of studies of the readership of the nineteenth century in the
Institute’s scholarly journal, Trudy Leningradskogo gosudarstvennogo instituta kul’tury imeni N. K.
Krupskoi.
28. Gudkov, “Transformatsiia tsennostnykh osnovanii issledovaniia,” 192.
29. For a comprehensive, thoroughly insightful study of this entire oeuvre, including the
unpublished manuscripts, see E. Buskirk, “Reality in Search of Literature: Lydia Ginzburg’s
In-Between Prose” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2008).
30. L. Ia. Ginzburg, O psikhologicheskoi proze, 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia
literatura, 1976); O literaturnom geroe (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1979).
31. L. Ia. Ginzburg, “Ob istorizme i o strukturnosti (teoreticheskie zametki),” O starom i
novom (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1982), 4–15.
32. R. Barthes, S/Z, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 211.
33. Ginzburg, O literaturnom geroe, 204.
34. Ibid., 90.
35. K. Clark and M. Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1984); G. S. Morson and C. Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1990); Emerson, First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. For an excellent set of
Russian and overseas studies of Bakhtin, pro and contra, see C. Emerson, ed., Critical Essays
on Mikhail Bakhtin (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999); particularly important are those by
the Russian scholars—Bocharov, Kozhinov, and Gachev—who played the leading role in
rediscovering and publishing Bakhtin’s legacy.
36. The question of the disputed texts, debated back and forth for twenty years, has now
generally been resolved in favor of Voloshinov and Medvedev, working as members of the
Bakhtin Circle, having authored their own texts. G. S. Morson and C. Emerson argue for
the separate authorship of the disputed texts in the introduction to their Rethinking Bakhtin:
Extensions and Challenges (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 31–49.
37. V. V. Ivanov, “Znachenie idei M. M. Bakhtina o znake, vyskazyvanii i dialoge dlia
sovremennoi semiotiki,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 6 (1973): 4–45 (for English translation,
see “The Significance of M. M. Bakhtin’s Ideas on Sign, Utterance and Dialogue for Modern
Semiotics,” in Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union, ed. H. Baran [White
Plains: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976], 310–67).
38. B. F. Egorov, “Iu. M. Lotman kak chelovek i iavlenie,” in Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman, ed.
V. K. Kantor (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), 13–81, here 68.
39. M. M. Bakhtin, “From Notes Made in 1970–71,” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed.
C. Emerson and M. Holquist, trans. V. W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986),
165.
40. M. M. Bakhtin, “Methodology for the Human Sciences,” Speech Genres, 165.
12. Literary Criticism and the End of the Soviet System, 1985–1991
The sections “Literary Criticism at the Soviet Epoch’s End” and “Norms and Functions of
Perestroika Criticism” were written by Boris Dubin; “Ideological Positions and Generation
Conflict” and “Discussions on the New, ‘Other’ Literature and Postmodernism” were written
by Birgit Menzel. “The Change in the Social Context of Literary Criticism” and the final
section of text were jointly written by the two authors. This chapter was translated from
Russian by Josephine von Zitzewitz.
This chapter is based on a significantly edited and expanded version of Birgit Menzel’s
monograph Bürgerkrieg um Worte: Die russische Literaturkritik der Perestrojka (Cologne: Böhlau,
2001; Russian edition: Grazhdanskaia voina slov: Rossiiskaia literaturnaia kritika perioda perestroiki,
trans. G. Snezhinskaia [St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2006]), and also on several
articles by Boris Dubin: “Dinamika pechati i transformatsiia obshchestva,” Voprosy literatury
9, 10 (1991): 84–97; “Igra vo vlast’: Intelligentsiia i literaturnaia kul’tura,” Svobodnaia mysl’
1 (1993): 66–78; “Zhurnal’naia kul’tura postsovetskoi epokhi,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 4
(1993): 304–11.
1. M. S. Gorbachev, O khode realizatsii reshenii XXIV S”ezda KPSS i zadachakh po uglubleniiu
perestroiki: Doklad na XIX Vsesoiuznoi konferentsii KPSS, 28 iiunia 1988 (Moscow: Politizdat,
1988).
2. Iu. A. Levada, ed., Est’ mnenie! Itogi sotsiologicheskogo oprosa (Moscow: Progress, 1990), 286.
3. “Nasha novogodniaia anketa,” Knizhnoe obozrenie 1 (1990): 6.
4. S. Zalygin, “God Solzhenitsyna,” Novyi mir 1 (1990): 233.
5. For more detail, see B. Dubin, Slovo—pis’mo—literatura (Moscow: NLO, 2001), 136–37.
6. The “thick” literary journals that preserved this appearance fulfill, in our opinion, two
main functions that ultimately serve to “internally” rally the literary and literary critical
communities: they offer a platform to beginning authors, build their initial reputation and
form groups of those who aim for excellence, as well as acting as a stage for an already formed
small circle of well-known guest performers and beneficiaries, sharing them somehow among
themselves. With the gradual dwindling of the mass audience and the crystallization of the
above-mentioned functions, journals of this type joined the new nongovernmental literary
prizes, such as the “Russian Booker,” which had been founded just after the mass audience had
dwindled, or initiated their own awards.
7. For a detailed overview of the critical and publicistic statements and tendencies during
the 1990s, see I. Kaspe, “Apokalipsis-90: ‘nastoiashchee,’ ‘proshloe,’ ‘budushchee’ v literaturnoi
publitsistike,” NLO 83 (2007): 538–60. The literary publications of 1990 and the critical
responses they elicited at the time are presented and analyzed in V. Shubinskii, “Medlennye
knigi bystrogo goda,” NLO 84 (2007): 753–866.
8. See S. Chuprinin, “Grazhdanskaia voina v literature,” Russkaia literatura segodnia: Zhizn’
po poniatiiam. Slovar’ (Moscow: Vremia, 2006), 116–18.
9. V. Erofeev, “Pominki po sovetskoi literature,” Literaturnaia gazeta 27 (4 July 1990): 8.
10. A. Kurchatkin, “Nuzhen li nam literaturnyi protsess?” Literaturnaia gazeta 15 (11 April
1990): 4; “Literarturnyi protsess: Segodnia i zavtra. Tri voprosa kritikam,” Literaturnaia gazeta
27 (4 July 1990): 5; Literaturnaia gazeta 28 (11 July 1990): 4.
11. See L. Gudkov and B. Dubin, “Uzhe ustali? Sotsiologicheskie zametki o literature i
obshchestve,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 10 (1991): 97–99. This article appeared in 1990 and was
followed by a series of journal articles by the authors about the state of the intellectual milieu
in Russia, later collected in L. Gudkov and B. Dubin, Intelligentsiia: Zametki o literaturno-
politicheskikh illiuziiakh (Moscow: Epitsentr; Kharkov: Folio, 1995; 2nd ed. St. Petersburg:
Izd-vo Ivana Limbakha, 2009).
12. For a more general analysis of the deficit in conceptual tools of reflecting upon and
analyzing the then cultural situation, see L. Gudkov and B. Dubin, “‘Epicheskoe’ literaturove-
denie: Sterilizatsiia sub”ektivnosti i ee tsena,” NLO 59 (2003): 211–31; and their “Nevozmozh-
nost’ istorii,” in Vittorio: Mezhdunarodnyi nauchnyi sbornik, posviashchennyi 75-letiiu Vittorio Strady,
ed. S. Bocharov and A. Parnis (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2005), 302–55.
13. See B. Dubin and A. Reitblat, “Literaturnye orientiry sovremennykh zhurnal’nykh
retsenzentov,” NLO 59 (2003): 557–70.
14. See Dubin, “Zhurnal’naia kul’tura,” 310. Here Dubin registered the fact that many
journals stopped appearing regularly in the early 1990s (for example, Iunost’, Zvezda, Druzhba
narodov); irrespective of the reasons, one can in such cases speak of a time gap and a loss of the
feeling of time suffered by the creators of the journals, as well as by their audiences.
15. See V. Ozerov, “Literaturnaia kritika: chetkost’ kriteriev, vysota trebovatel’nosti,”
Voprosy literatury 9 (1986): 3–30.
16. I. Dedkov, “Vozmozhnost’ novogo myshleniia,” Novyi mir 10 (1986): 229–34.
17. See A. Latynina, “Kolokol’nyi zvon—ne molitva,” Novyi mir 8 (1988): 235.
18. D. Granin, “O miloserdii,” Esli po sovesti: Sbornik statei, ed. V. Kanunnikova (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988), 107–17; Granin, “Ekho dal’nee i blizkoe,” Literaturnaia
gazeta 22 (27 May 1987): 4; Granin, “Mimoletnoe videnie,” Ogonek 6 (1988): 9–29; S. Aver-
intsev, “Vizantiia i Rus’: Dva tipa dukhovnosti,” Novyi mir 7 (1988): 210–20; D. Likhachev,
“Trevoga sovesti,” Literaturnaia gazeta 1 (1 January 1987): 11; Likhachev, “Ot pokaianiia k
deistviiu,” Literaturnaia gazeta 37 (9 September 1987): 2.
19. For information on the comparative analysis of literature, see N. Anastas’ev, “Naprav-
liaiushchaia ideia iskusstva (Zametki zarubezhnika) [Otvet na voprosy ankety “O chem my
molchim? I pochemu?”],” Voprosy literatury 3 (1989): 59–83. The ideological and methodological
positions of the critics and historians of literature who worked on material from foreign
literatures and the shifts in their notions towards the beginning of the 1990s are summarized
in the discussion “XX vek: Itogi khudozhestvennogo razvitiia,” Voprosy literatury 2 (1993):
25–30.
20. Iu. Burtin, “Real’naia kritika vchera i segodnia,” Novyi mir 6 (1987): 222–39.
21. See Kozhinov’s entry “Net istiny, gde net liubvi . . . ” in “Nezavisim li kritik?”
Literaturnaia ucheba 5 (1990): 99.
22. See A. Baigushev, “Russkost’, blagorodnaia i traditsionnaia natselennost’ na
stroitel’stvo dushi,” Voprosy literatury 11 (1988): 88 (Baigushev’s text is a response to a

questionnaire).
23. M. Chudakova, “Ne zasloniat’sia ot real’nosti,” Literaturnaia gazeta 1 (9 January 1991): 1,
10; N. Ivanova, “Gibel’ bogov (O slome literaturnoi epokhi),” Nezavisimaia gazeta (10 August
1991): 9.
24. L. Batkin, “Son razuma,” Znanie—sila 3 and 4 (1989); Iu. Burtin, “Vam, iz drugogo
pokaleniia . . . K publikatsii poemy A. Tvardovskogo ‘Po pravu pamiati,’” Oktiabr’ 6 (1987):
191–202.
25. See the materials of the round table discussion “Aktual’nye problemy izucheniia istorii
russkoi sovetskoi literatury,” Voprosy literatury 9 (1987): 3–78; A. Bocharov, “Pokushenie na
mirazhi,” Voprosy literatury 1 (1988): 40–77; E. Dobrenko, “Prevratnosti metoda,” Oktiabr’ 3
(1988): 179–90; E. Dobrenko, “‘I, padaia stremglav, ia probuzhdalsia . . . ’ (Ob istorii sovetskoi
literatury),” Voprosy literatury 8 (1988): 48–92; I. Zolotusskii, “Krushenie abstraktsii,” Novyi mir
1 (1989): 235–46.
26. S. Chuprinin, “Drugaia proza,” Literaturnaia gazeta 6 (8 February 1989): 4–5.
27. See A. Baigushev, “O saddukeistve i fariseistve,” Molodaia gvardiia 12 (1988): 167–98; P.
Gorelov, “Perestroika i podstroika (Zametki pisatelia),” Molodaia gvardiia 7 (1987): 220–45.
28. T. Glushkova, “Kuda vedet Ariadnina nit’?” Literaturnaia gazeta 12 (23 March 1988): 4.
29. S. Kuniaev, “Vse nachalos’ s iarlykov,” Nash sovremennik 9 (1988): 180–89; Kuniaev,
“Radi zhizni na zemle,” Molodaia gvardiia 8 (1987): 246–68.
30. See Iu. Levada and T. Shanin, ed., Otsy i deti: pokolencheskii analiz sovremennoi Rossii
(Moscow: NLO, 2005).
31. V. Toporov, “Na soiskanie. Ocherk p.-prozy,” Postskriptum 2 (1995): 273.
32. I. Dedkov, “Kogda rasseialsia liricheskii tuman . . . ” Literaturnoe obozrenie 8 (1981):
21–32; L. Anninskii, “Shestidesiatniki, semidesiatniki, vos’midesiatniki: O dialektike poko-
lenii v russkoi kul’ture,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 4 (1991): 10–16; L. Bakhnov, “Semidesiatnik,”
Oktiabr’ 9 (1988): 169–75.
33. D. Galkovskii, “Otkrytoe pis’mo Mikhailu Shemiakinu” (22 November 1991);
republished in Muleta S: Semeinyi al’bom (Moscow: Vivrisme, 1992), 18–23.
34. A. Ageev, “Konspekt o krizise,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 3 (1991): 15–19; M. Lipovetskii,
“Sovok-bliuz: Shestidesiatniki segodnia,” Znamia 9 (1991): 226–36; S. Beliaeva-Konegen,
“Poslednee obol’shchenie Rossii,” Literaturnaia gazeta 5 (29 January 1992): 11. In the course of
1992, discussions on the generation of the sixties were also broadcast on television and held in
literary clubs, for example, in the Green Lamp.
35. Lipovetskii, “Sovok-bliuz,” 226.
36. See, for example, G. Belaia, “Pereput’e,” Voprosy literatury 12 (1987): 75–103; E.
Dobrenko, “Krizis romana,” Voprosy literatury 6 (1989): 3–34; A. Ageev, “Konspekt o krizise,”
Literaturnoe obozrenie 3 (1991): 15–19.
37. See V. Kulakov, “E. Kropivnitskii—‘Ia poet okrainy . . . ,’” Vestnik novoi literatury 5
(1993): 171–75; I. Severin [Mikhail Berg], “Novaia literatura 70-80-kh,” Vestnik novoi literatury
1 (1990): 222–39; I. Iarkevich, “Literatura, estetika i drugie interesnye veshchi,” Vestnik novoi
literatury 5 (1993): 193–252; Z. Gareev, “Ferfichkin velel pushchat’ vsekh,” Strelets 3 (1991):
203–11; B. Paramonov, “Chapek, ili O demokratii,” Zvezda 1 (1990): 143–47.
38. See M. Epshtein, “Kontsepty . . . Metaboly . . . O novykh tendentsiiakh v poezii,”
Oktiabr’ 4 (1988): 194–203; and M. Lipovetskii, “Svobody chernaia rabota (Ob ‘artisticheskoi
proze’ novogo pokoleniia),” Voprosy literatury 9 (1989): 3–45.
39. S. Chuprinin, “Drugaia proza,” Literaturnaia gazeta 5 (8 February 1989): 4–5.
40. Chuprinin, “Drugaia proza,” 4–5.
41. N. Ivanova, “Namerennye neschastlivtsy (O proze ‘novoi volny’),” Druzhba narodov 7
(1989): 239–52.
42. See A. Zorin, “Muza iazyka i semero poetov: Zametki o gruppe ‘Almanakh,’” Druzhba
narodov 4 (1990): 239–49; A. Ageev, “Prevratnosti dialoga,” Znamia 4 (1990): 213–22.
43. E. Dobrenko, “Preodolenie ideologii: Zametki o sots-arte,” Volga 11 (1990): 164–84,
here 183 (emphasis in the original).
44. V. Slavetskii, “Posle postmodernizma,” Voprosy literatury 11–12 (1991): 3.
45. Mark Lipovetsky’s claim notwithstanding, postmodernism did not make it onto the
pages of the “thick” journals in 1989 (which had a large print run and a very large readership at
the time). This happened only in March 1991, that is, after the first open Moscow conference
on the topic “Postmodernizm i my” (Postmodernism and Us), which we mentioned above.
46. V. Kuritsyn, “Postmodernizm: Novaia pervobytnaia kul’tura,” Novyi mir 2 (1992):
223–32, here 229.
47. I. Iarkevich, “Literatura, estetika,” 243.
48. M. Lipovetskii, “Zakon krutizny: Printsip matreshki,” Voprosy literatury 11–12 (1991):
3–36.
49. Kuritsyn, “Postmodernizm,” 229.
50. D. Urnov, “Plokhaia proza,” Literaturnaia gazeta 5 (8 February 1989): 4–5.
51. K. Stepanian, “Vypavshie iz vremeni, ili chut’-chut’ ne schitaetsia: Zametki o proze,
poezii i kritike ‘tridtsatiletnikh,’” Druzhba narodov 11 (1988): 248–58, here 253.
52. See I. Rodnianskaia, “Zazhivem bez velikogo,” Literaturnaia gazeta 21 (29 May 1991):
11; I. Zolotusskii, “Nashi nigilisty,” Literaturnaia gazeta 25 (17 June 1992): 4; A. Mashevskii, “V
situatsii sorokonozhki,” Novyi mir 7 (1992): 228–31.
53. A. Kazin, “Iskusstvo i istina,” Novyi mir 12 (1989): 235–45.
54. “Orthodox Christian Marxism” is the label Irina Rodnianskaia applies to Kazin’s
conception; see I. Rodnianskaia, “Zametki k sporu,” Novyi mir 12 (1989): 222–35, here 247.
55. R. Gal’tseva, “Sem’ zleishikh dukhov,” Voprosy literatury 8 (1991): 37–49; see also A.
Prokof’eva, “Dva mneniia ob odnoi probleme,” Literaturnaia gazeta 6 (8 February 1989): 4; A.
Vasilevskii, “Bespredel,” Literaturnaia gazeta 37 (12 September 1990): 4.
56. M. Lipovetskii, “Patogenez i lechenie glukhonemoty,” Novyi mir 7 (1992): 213–23, here
215. Here, we want to also supply three examples of critics calling for a return to an extended
realist mode: V. Slavetskii called for a return to the religious roots of Russian culture as
understood by the émigré philosopher Vladimir Veidle; S. Nosov described contemporary
postmodernism as a literature that is devoid of an idea and even of God and is inimical not
only to the reader, but also to man (see his article “Vselennaia bezydeinosti,” Novyi mir 7
[1992]: 224–27). At the end of his article “Golos iz ar’ergarda,” Stanislav Rassadin expresses his
firm belief that the postmodernists will be in the wrong before the great tradition of Russian
literature, which never gave up on the hope to find something humane in man (see Rassadin’s
article in Znamia 11 [1991]: 199–218, here 218).
57. V. Erofeev, “Krushenie gumanizma No 2,” Moskovskie novosti (22 February 1991).
58. V. Kuritsyn, “Lekhko, radostno i pokoino,” Ogonek 18 (1991): 20–21.
59. Kuritsyn, “Postmodernizm,” 232.
13. The Alter Ego: Émigré Literary Criticism from World War II to the End of
the Soviet Union
1. J. Glad, Russia Abroad: Writers, History, Politics (Tenafly and Washington, D.C.: Hermit-
age and Birchbark Press, 1999), 347.
2. For accounts of these enterprises, see Glad, Russia Abroad, 346, 357; V. Zavalishin, “Chet-
vert’ veka zhurnala ‘Grani,’” in Russkaia literatura v emigratsii, ed. N. P. Poltoratskii (Pittsburgh:
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh, 1972), 301–9.
3. On the history of Novyi zhurnal, see R. Gul’, “‘Novyi zhurnal’,” in Russkaia literatura v
emigratsii, 321–31; see also his memoir Ia unes Rossiiu: Apologiia emigratsii, vol. 3, Rossiia v Amerike
(Moscow: B.S.G.-Press, 2001).
4. For brief accounts of Jakobson’s life and work and for relevant bibliographies, see L.
R. Waugh, “Roman Jakobson,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism,
ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman, 2nd ed. (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 542–45; S. S. Mulder, “Roman Jakobson,” in Dictionary
of Literary Biography, vol. 242, Twentieth-Century European Cultural Theorists, First Series, ed. P.
Hansom (Detroit and Washington, D.C.: The Gale Group, 2001), 226–37.
5. H. Grégoire, R. Jakobson, and M. Szeftel, ed., La geste du Prince Igor’: Epopée russe du
douzième siècle (New York: École libre des hautes études à New York and Université libre de
Bruxelles, 1948; Annuaire de l’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales et slaves, vol. 8, 1945–1947).
Szeftel has been proposed more than once as the model for the title character of his Cornell
colleague Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin. On the relationship between Nabokov and Szeftel,
see G. Diment, Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1997). Nabokov wrote a long review essay of the edition of the Igor Tale produced by
Jakobson and Szeftel, and Jakobson proposed to publish Nabokov’s translation of the work
before relations between the two soured (see B. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991], 136, 145).
6. V. Nabokov, “Notes on Prosody,” Eugene Onegin, trans. V. Nabokov (London: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 3: 465. The passage cited in the text of this article is reminiscent
of Nabokov’s famous comparison of the “Onegin stanza” to a spinning top in his introduction
to the translation.
7. Others worthy of mention in this respect include the second-wave émigrés Leonid
Rzhevsky and Boris Filippov (Filistinskii), both of whom taught in the United States and
were active in preparing much needed editions of writers banned or out of favor in the
USSR, in addition to publishing extensively on literature. In assessing the debt of Western
scholarship to the emigration in the latter half of the twentieth century we should remember
that a number of first-, second-, and later third-wave émigré writers and poets taught Russian
literature at universities in North America, Europe, and Israel, including Nina Berberova, Igor
Chinnov, Ivan Elagin, Yuri Ivask, Andrei Sinyavsky, Vasilii Aksenov, and Joseph Brodsky.
8. Among the tamizdat works published by the journal Grani, for instance, were Solzhenit-
syn’s Krokhotki (Prose Poems) and Georgii Vladimov’s novel Vernyi Ruslan (Faithful Ruslan).
The Posev Publishing House published miniature editions of banned Soviet works specifically
designed to be smuggled through Soviet customs.
9. Gul’, “‘Novyi zhurnal,’” 324.
10. M. Slonim, “Roman Pasternaka,” Novyi zhurnal 52 (1958): 94–108; here 94–95.
11. Slonim, “Roman Pasternaka,” 97.
12. F. Stepun, “B. L. Pasternak,” Novyi zhurnal 56 (1959): 187–206. Cited here from Victor
Erlich’s translation of an abbreviated version of Stepun’s article: F. Stepun, “Boris Pasternak,”
in Pasternak: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. V. Erlich (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1978),
110–25.
13. For a useful resource on the emigration in the United States, see T. Beyer’s website,
“Russians in America: The Third Wave,” http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/ratw/
index.htm.
14. R. Meyer, “Ardis Publishers,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Yearbook 1989, ed. J. M.
Brook (Detroit: Gale Research, 1990), 143–46, here 143.
15. “Notice,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 1 (1971): n.p.
16. See Ardis: 25 Years of Russian Literature, Library of Foreign Literature, Moscow, Russia, May
28–June 18, 1996/Ardis: 25 let russkoi literatury, Biblioteka inostrannoi literatury, Moskva, Rossiia, 28
maia 1996–18 iiunia 1996 (Dana Point: Ardis, 1996; a brochure published on the occasion of the
exhibit held in the Library of Foreign Literature, Moscow, May–June 1996; 20 pp.; includes an
unsigned essay, “Ardis,” by Ellendea Proffer, in English and Russian translation, followed by a
complete list of Ardis publications, 1971–1996).
17. V. Vigilianskii, [Untitled Article], Ogonek 45 (November 1989): 12.
18. For an overview of the life and works of Vail’ and Genis, see I. Tolstoi and A. Tolstoi,
“Petr L’vovich Vail’,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 285, Russian Writers Since 1980, ed.
M. Balina and M. Lipovetsky (Detroit and London: Gale, 2004), 336–49.
19. P. Vail’ and A. Genis, Sovremennaia russkaia proza (Ann Arbor: Hermitage, 1982), 10, 17.
20. See M. Shrayer’s review of Rodnaia rech’ in Slavic and East European Journal 36, no. 4
(1992): 496–98.
21. For a good overview, see E. R. Frankel, “The Tvardovsky Controversy,” Soviet Studies
34, no. 4 (1982): 601–15.
22. A. Solzhenitsyn, “Otvetnoe slovo na prisuzhdenie literaturnoi nagrady amerikanskogo
natsional’nogo kluba iskusstv, N’iu-Iork, 19 ianvaria 1993,” Novyi mir 4 (1993): 3–6. English
translation, “The Relentless Cult of Novelty and How It Wrecked the Century,” New York
Times Book Review (7 February 1993): 3, 17; all subsequent references are to the English transla-
tion and appear in parentheses in the main text,.
23. J. Brodsky, “Uncommon Visage: The Nobel Lecture,” On Grief and Reason: Essays
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1995), 44–58, here 46; all subsequent references to this text are in
parentheses in the main text. Compare, for instance, with Brodsky’s statement in his essay on
Osip Mandelstam, “The Child of Civilization”: “poetry is an extremely individualistic art, it
resents isms” (in Less Than One: Selected Essays [New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986],
133).
24. Compare with Brodsky’s statement, “the poet is the one who masters language,” in
“The Child of Civilization,” 127.
25. Brodsky, “Flight to Byzantium,” Less Than One, 393–446; all subsequent references are
in parentheses in the main text.
26. Here again Brodsky’s essay on Mandelstam resonates (“The Child of Civilization,”
124–26).
27. Brodsky, “Pendulum’s Song,” Less Than One, 57.
28. Brodsky, “A Guide to a Renamed City,” Less Than One, 79.
29. Despite the ongoing association of Maksimov’s Kontinent with Solzhenitsyn’s views and
supporters, the writer himself while in emigration came to publish primarily in the Paris-
based journal Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia.
30. “Ot redaktsii,” Kontinent 1 (1974): 5; all subsequent references to this text are in
31. For more on Sinyavsky’s strategic use of his signature, see C. Nepomnyashchy, Abram
Tertz and the Poetics of Crime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
32. It was perhaps inevitable that a new generation of émigré critics, with one foot in both
worlds, precursors of the post-Soviet era, would herald the advent of Russian postmodernism.
Boris Groys—literary theoretician, philosopher, and cultural critic—was probably the earliest
and most visible exemplar of this trend. Equally versed in the canon of largely French literary
and cultural theory and in the Soviet experience, such unofficial Soviet artistic trends as Sots
Art and conceptualism, beginning in the mid-1980s Groys published a number of articles in
Sintaksis revisioning the mechanisms of Soviet culture, most particularly the relationship
between the avant-garde and power, in light of poststructuralist theory, but also challenging
major Western thinkers with the experience of totalitarianism; see Groys’s, “Politika kak
iskusstvo,” Sintaksis 15 (1986): 188–99; “Stalinizm kak esteticheskii phenomen,” Sintaksis
17 (1987): 98–110; “Zhizn’ kak utopiia i utopiia kak zhizn’,” Sintaksis 18 (1987): 171–81; and
“Mezhdu Stalinym i Dionisom,” Sintaksis 25 (1989): 92–97.
33. For more on the controversy over Strolls with Pushkin, see Nepomnyashchy, Abram
Tertz, 22–34; Nepomnyashchy, “Andrei Siniavskii’s ‘Return’ to the Soviet Union,” Formations
6, no. 1 (1991): 24–44; and Nepomnyashchy, ed., “The Return of Abram Tertz: Sinivavskii’s
Reception in Gorbachev’s Russia,” special issue, Russian Studies in Literature 28, no. 1 (1991–
1992). See also S. Sandler, “Sex, Death and Nation in the Strolls with Pushkin Controversy,”
Slavic Review 51, no. 2 (1992): 294–308.
34. R. Gul’, “Progulki khama s Pushkinym,” Novyi zhurnal 124 (1976): 117–29, here 117;
all subsequent references are in parentheses in the main text. Gul’’s harangue was partially
republished at the height of glasnost in the Russophile newspaper Literaturnaia Rossiia 26 (30
June 1989): 18–19.
35. Solzhenitsyn, “ . . . Koleblet tvoi trenozhnik,” Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia
142 (1984): 133–52; all subsequent references to this text are in parentheses in the main text.
Like Gul’’s article on Strolls, Solzhenitsyn’s was reprinted in the USSR (Novyi mir 5 [1991]:
148–59).
36. I. Shafarevich, “Rusofobiia,” Veche 32 (December 1988): 167–92; Veche 33 (March 1989):
5–54; Shafarevich, “Rusofobiia,” Nash sovremennik 6 (1989): 167–92; Nash sovremennik 11 (1989):
162–72; all subsequent references to the text appear in parentheses in the main text.
37. Shafarevich, “Fenomen emigratsii,” Literaturnaia Rossiia 36 (8 September 1989): 4–5.
38. A. Siniavskii, “Puteshestvie na Chernuiu rechku,” Sintaksis 34 (1994): 3–51. For more on
this work, see C. Nepomnyashchy, “‘Puteshestvie na chernuiu rechku’ Abrama Tertsa,” in XX
vek i russkaia literatura. Alba Regina Philologiae: sbornik nauchnykh statei, ed. Iu. Troitskii (Moscow:
RGGU, 2002): 223–36.
39. Georges Nivat, ed., Odna ili dve russkikh literatur? (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1981);
and Olga Matich and Michael Heim, ed., The Third Wave: Russian Literature in Emigration (Ann
Arbor: Ardis, 1984); all subsequent references to either edited volume will appear in parenthe-
ses in the main text.
40. Cited by Efim Etkind from G. Struve, Russkaia literatura v izgnanii (New York: Chekhov
Publishing House, 1956), 6.
14. Post-Soviet Literary Criticism
Ilya Kukulin wrote the sections titled “The Diary Discourse” and “New Schisms”;
Mark Lipovetsky wrote “Main Critical Discussions of the 1990s” and “’Patriotic’ Criticism”;
“Liberal Criticism and Identity Crisis” was written jointly by the two authors. This chapter
was translated from Russian by Adam Siegel.
1. See N. Ivanova, “Mezhdu: O meste kritike v presse i literature,” Novyi mir 1 (1996):
78-85; S. Chuprinin, “Grazhdane, poslushaite menia . . . ,” in his Peremena uchasti (Moscow:
NLO, 2003), 341–56.
2. For a detailed analysis of this large-scale process, see L. Gudkov and B. Dubin,
“Paralich gosudarstvennogo knigoizdaniia: ideologiia i praktika,” Literatura kak sotsial’nyi
institut (Moscow: NLO, 1994); B. Dubin, “Literaturnoe ‘segodnia’: Vzgliad sotsiologa (1997),”
Slovo—pis’mo—literatura (Moscow: NLO, 2001); M. Berg, Literaturokratiia: Problema prisvoeniia i
raspredeleniia vlasti v literature (Moscow: NLO, 2001).
3. See B. Dubin, “Literaturnye zhurnaly v otsustvie literaturnogo protsessa,” NLO 9
(1994): 288–92; S. Lovell and R. Marsch, “Culture and Crisis: The Intelligentsia and Literature
after 1953,” in Russian Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. C. Kelly and D. Shepherd (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 53–95.
4. Rassadin’s essays from the 1990s are collected in his book Golos iz ar’ergarda: Portrety.
Polemika. Predpochteniia. Postsotsrealizm (Moscow: Vremia, 2007).
5. Nemzer’s essays, which have been published in Nezavisimaia gazeta (1991–1992), Segodnia
(February 1993–October 1996), Vremia MN (June 1998–February 2000), and Vremia novostei
(April 2000–present), have been collected, along with his journal essays, in the following
books: Literaturnoe segodnia: O russkoi proze. 90-e (Moscow: NLO, 1998); Pamiatnye damy: Ot
Gavrily Derzhavina do Iuriia Davydova (Moscow: Vremia, 2002); Zamechatel’noe desiatiletie russkoi
literatury (Moscow: Zakharov, 2003); Dnevnik chitatelia: Russkaia literatura v 2004 godu (Moscow:
Vremia, 2005); Dnevnik chitatelia: Russkaia literatura v 2005 godu (Moscow: Vremia, 2006);
Dnevnik chitatelia: Russkaia literatura v 2006 godu (Moscow: Vremia, 2007); Dnevnik chitatelia:
Russkaia literatura v 2007 godu (Moscow: Vremia, 2008); and Dnevnik chitatelia: Russkaia literatura
v 2008 godu (Moscow: Vremia, 2009).
6. See, for example, M. Epshtein, Postmodern v Rossii: Literatura i teoriia (Moscow: R. Elinin,
2000).
7. See Ryklin’s collection of essays Vremia diagnoza (Moscow: Logos, 2003).
8. See the concluding part of his book Psikhodiakhronologika (Moscow: NLO, 1995).
9. Boris Paramonov also adopted a Frankfurt School approach in his work; see his
Frankfurt School interpretation of the late Gorky in his essay, “Gor’kii, beloe piatno,”
Oktiabr’ 5 (1992): 146–67. Paramonov’s essays (most of them originally published in the journal
Zvezda) have been collected in his books Konets stilia (Moscow: Agraf, 1997; 2nd ed. 1999) and
Sled: Filosofiia. Istoriia. Sovremennost’ (Moscow: Nezavisimaia gazeta, 2003). For many years
Paramonov has been a cultural commentator for Liberty radio station.
10. See Zorin’s collection of critical essays Gde sidit fazan: Ocherki poslednikh let (Moscow:
NLO, 2003).
11. Vladimov’s General i ego armiia focused upon Andrei Vlasov (1901–1946), the Soviet
general who switched sides during the Second World War to fight for the Nazis. The debate
was centered on the ethics of Vlasov’s actions.
12. Novyi mir 4 (1993): 3–6. Available in English as “The Relentless Cult of Novelty, and
How It Wrecked the Century,” New York Times Book Review (3 February 1993): 3, 17.
13. I. Rodnianskaia, “Zametki k sporu,” Novyi mir 12 (1989): 247.
14. See N. Leiderman and M. Lipovetskii, “Zhizn’ posle smerti, ili Novye svedeniia o
realizme,” Novyi mir 7 (1993): 233–52; K. Stepanian, “Realizm kak zakliuchitel‘naia stadiia
postmodernizma,” Znamia 9 (1992): 231–38.
15. See K. Stepanian’s articles “Realizm kak preodolenie odinochestva,” Znamia 5 (1996):
203–10; “Realizm kak spasenie ot snov,” Znamia 11 (1996): 194–200; “Krizis slova na poroge
svobody,” Znamia 8 (1999): 204–14; “Otnoshenie bytiia k nebytiiu,” Znamia 3 (2001): 207–18.
See also N. Ivanova, “Zhizn‘ i smert‘ simuliakra v Rossii,” Druzhba narodov 8 (2000): 183–91.
16. V. Erofeev, “Russkie tsvety zla,” Moskovskie novosti (27 June 1993): 4–5. Later Erofeev
published an anthology of contemporary Russian prose under the same title.
17. See B. Groys, Utopiia i obmen (Moscow: Znak, 1993); Groys, Iskusstvo utopii (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal, 2003); see also E. Petrovskaia, ed., Dialogi, 1990–1994: Il’ia Kabakov
i Boris Grois (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1999).
18. Highly instructive are the contradictory attempts of Sergei Chuprinin to articulate
“axioms” of secular liberalism in his essay “Vybor” (Choice, 1993), republished in his collec-
tion Peremena uchasti (Moscow: NLO, 2003), 213–41.
19. See R. Arbitman, “My odni plius razbitnoe zerkalo (Fantastika segodnia: Vospomi-
naniia o budushchem i predskazaniia nazad),” Druzhba narodov 9 (1994): 174–83; “Printsessa na
bobakh: Polemicheskie zametki o rossiiskoi fantastike na grani vekov,” Ural 12 (2000): 174–81;
“Zolushka v otsutstvii printsa: Otechestvennaia nauchnaia fantastika v ee privychnom
voploshchenii umerla s nastupleniem svobody,” Itogi 38 (19 September 2000): 68–71; see also
his numerous reviews in the newspaper Segodnia, 1993–1995. See O. Slavnikova, “Supergeroi
nashego vremeni,” Znamia 12 (1998): 162–67; “Ia liubliu tebia, imperiia,” Znamia 12 (2000):
188–97; see also T. Cherednichenko, “Siloviki,” Novyi mir 9 (2002): 160–70.
20. See N. Ivanova, “Pochemu Rossiia vybrala Putina: Aleksandra Marinina v kontekste
sovremennoi ne tol’ko literaturnoi situatsii,” Znamia 2 (2002): 198–206; “Novyi agitprop: V

‘pravom’ inter’ere i ‘levom’ peizazhe,” Znamia 10 (2003): 178–88; “Kliukvennaia poliana: O
teleseriale ‘Moskovskaia saga’ i ne tol’ko o nem” and ‘’Profil’ Stalina,” in her Nevesta Bukera,
244–51 and 252–62 respectively.
21. Ivanova, Nevesta Bukera, 34.
22. See B. Dubin, “Ispytanie na sostoiatel’nost’: K sotsiologicheskoi poetike russkogo
romana-boevika” and “O banal’nosti proshlogo: Opyt sotsiologicheskogo prochteniia
rossiiskikh istoriko-patrioticheskikh romanov 1990-kh godov,” in Dubin, Slovo—pis’mo—
literatura, 218–42 and 243–61 respectively.
23. See N. Ivanova, “Literatura i liberal’noe soznanie,” Nevesta Bukera, 84–112.
24. Dubin, Slovo—pis’mo—literatura, 181 (emphasis in the original).
25. See one of the first assessments of the shift in critical “format” from journal to
newspaper in the materials of the roundtable “Poiski zamerzshego siroty,” published in
Druzhba narodov 6 (2001): 190–208.
26. See S. Kuznetsov, Oshchupyvaia slona: Zametki po istorii russkogo Interneta (Moscow: NLO,
2004).
27. Kuznetsov, Oshchupyvaia slona, 258.
28. Kuritsyn’s columns have been published as a book: Kuritsyn-Weekly (Moscow:
Emergency Exit, 2005).
29. His novel ZhD (Moscow: Vagrius, 2006), which Bykov called in the foreword his life’s
work, was dedicated to this subject.
30. Essays of this type are collected in the section “Prokliatye poety,” in Bykov, Vmesto
zhizni (Moscow: Vagrius, 2006), 169–209.
31. See Molodaia gvardiia 11 (1994); and Molodaia gvardiia 1, 2, 6, and 7 (1995).
32. Molodaia gvardiia 11 (1994): 177.
33. Molodaia gvardiia 6 (1995): 205.
34. In his book about Prokhanov, Vladimir Bondarenko cites the following words by his
hero: “The collapse of the USSR is the woeful break up of these lands, the height of insanity;
these sprawling and hostile continents are dissolving the backbone of Eurasia. . . . We are liv-
ing through a geopolitical tragedy” (V. Bondarenko, Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh rossiian: Aleksandr
Prokhanov [Moscow: Paleia, 1992], 25).
35. See M. Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1987); D. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of
Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
36. See, for example, V. Osipov, Tainaia zhizn’ Mikhaila Sholokhova: Dokumental’naia
khronika bez legend (Moscow: Libereia; Raritet, 1995); Osipov, Sholokhov (Moscow: Molodaia
gvardiia, 2005); N. Fed’, Paradoks geniia: Zhizn’ i sochineniia Sholokhova (Moscow: Sovremennyi
pisatel’, 1998); P. Palievskii, Sholokhov i Bulgakov (Moscow: IMLI RAN; Nasledie, 1999);
V. Petelin, Zhizn’ Sholokhova: Tragediia russkogo geniia (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2002); Petelin,
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov: Zhizn’, lichnost’, tvorchestvo: Khronika, 1905–1984 (Moscow:
RITS MGOPU, 2006); A. Vorontsov, Sholokhov: Roman (Moscow: ITRK, 2003); Feliks
Kuznetsov, “Tikhii Don”: Sud’ba i pravda velikogo romana (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2005).
37. See, for example, S. Semanov, “Edinstvo? Tol’ko vo imia Rossii,” Nash sovremennik 7
(1996): 177–80.
38. V. Bondarenko, Krakh intelligentsii: zlye zametki Zoila (Moscow: Paleia, 1995), 62, 63.
39. V. Bondarenko, Plamennye reaktsionery: Tri lika russkogo patriotizma (Moscow: Algoritm,
2003), 6; all subsequent references are given in parentheses in the main text.
40. “Can it be that the ‘eternal values’ [of Orthodoxy] . . . rather than moving circuitously
ad absurdum, used European Marxist ideology to last until the coming of a pan-European
crusade with Germany at its head?” (Bondarenko, Plamennye reaktsionery, 9).
41. The first essay-response on the meetings between Prokhanov and the editorial board
of Ad Marginem was written by one of the leading critics who made their debut in the late
1990s, Lev Pirogov.
42. D. Ol’shanskii, “Kak ia stal chernosotentsem,” Ex Libris NG (11 April 2002), http://
exlibris.ng.ru/lit/2002-04-11/2_black.html.
43. L. Danikin, “Zadonshchina,” Afisha (4–17 August 2003): 10.
44. See, for example, V. Krivulin, “Skhvatka dvukh kul’tur,” Okhota na Mamonta (St.
Petersburg: BLITS, 1998), 127–29.
45. Dubin, Slovo—pis’mo—literatura, 265.
15. Post-Soviet Literary Studies: The Rebirth of Academism
1. A. Dmitriev quoted in “O proze real’noi i virtual’noi” (Roundtable), Druzhba narodov 11
(1999): 198.
2. NLO, the Russian initials of the journal Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, customarily refers
to the Russian abbreviation for unidentified flying object or UFO (neopoznannyi letaiushchii
ob”ekt).
3. L. D. Gudkov, “Institutsional’nye ramki chteniia: konservatsiia kul’turnykh razryvov,”
Chitaiushchii mir i mir chteniia: Sbornik statei po materialam mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii, ed. V. D.
Stel’makh (Moscow: Rudomino, 2003): 20–38.
4. On the Internet and “thick” journals, see J. Givens, guest ed., Russian Studies in Literature
41, no. 2 (Spring 2005). For a snapshot of differences in social practices between the late
1980s and the early 2000s, compare two special issues in English devoted to the sociology of
literature: W. M. Todd, guest ed., Soviet Studies in Literature 25, no. 3 (Summer 1989); and Soviet
Studies in Literature 26, no. 1 (Winter 1989–1990); and J. Brooks and A. Reitblat, guest eds.,
Russian Studies in Literature 40, no. 1 (Winter 2003–2004).
5. A. Bliumbaum, “V Leningrade pod redaktsiei kritika Mikhaila Sheinkera i prozaika
Mikhaila Berga vykhodit pervyi nomer zhurnala Vestnik novoi literatury [ianvar’ 1990],” in
Noveishaia istoriia otechestvennogo kino 1986–2000, 7 vols., ed. L.’ Arkus, et al. (St. Petersburg:
SEANS, 2001–2004), 5: 414.
6. Quotation from Kommentarii 1 (1992): 3; see http://commentmag.ru/ for all issues.
7. Henceforth, the italicized initials NLO refer to the journal, while the nonitalicized
initials NLO refer to the enterprise as a whole, including the publishing house.
8. See I. Esaulov, Kategoriia sobornosti v russkoi literature (Petrozavodsk: Izd-vo Petrozavod-
skogo universiteta, 1995); in English, see I. A. Esaulov, “The Paschal Archetype of Russian
Literature and the Structure of Boris Pasternak’s Novel Doctor Zhivago,” trans. M. Tejerizo,
Literature and Theology 20, no. 1 (March 2006): 63–78 (the authors thank Alexandra Smith for
this citation). See also M. N. Virolainen, Istoricheskie metamorfozy russkoi slovesnosti (St. Peters-
burg: Amfora, 2007); M. M. Dunaev, Pravoslavie i russkaia literatura. F. M. Dostoevskii (Moscow:
Khram sviatoi muchenitsy Tatiany pri MGU, 2002); V. S. Nepomniashchii, Da vedaiut potomki
pravoslavnykh: Pushkin, Rossiia, My (Moscow: Sestrichestvo vo imia prepodobnomuchenitsy
velikoi kniagini Elizavety, 2001); K. A. Stepanian, “Soznat’ i skazat’”: “Realizm v vysshem
smysle” kak tvorcheskii metod F. M. Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Raritet, 2005).
9. See R. Hughes, Review of De visu 0’92, Slavic Review 54, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 247–49;
N. Condee and V. Padunov, “The ABC of Russian Consumer Culture: Readings, Ratings,
and Real Estate,” in Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia, ed.
N. Condee (London: British Film Institute; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995),
130–72; here 158–59, 169n45 and figs. 21a and 21b.
10. M. Gasparov, “K obmenu mnenii o perspektivakh literaturovedeniia,” NLO 50 (2001):
324–25.
11. C. Emerson, “25 let spustia: Gasparov o Bakhtine,” Voprosy literatury 2 (2006): 12–47,
here 17–18. For other remarks on Gasparov, see the cluster by G. Smith, G. Knabe, and S.
Bocharov in the same issue of Voprosy literatury. See also A. Dmitriev, I. Kukulin, and M.
Maiofis, “Zamechatel’nyi M. L. Gasparov: Akademik-eretik (‘Antiiubileinoe prinoshenie’
redaktsii NLO),” NLO 73 (2005): 170–78.
12. Among works engaged with a revision of the Russian classical canon, noteworthy
contributions include A. Arkhangel’skii, ed., Russkaia literatura XVII–pervoi poloviny XIX veka
(Moscow: Drofa, 2001); M. Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evropam: Literaturnoe obshchestvo “Arzamas”
i rossiiskii modernizatsionnyi proekt 1815–1818 godov (Moscow: NLO, 2008); V. Markovich and
V. Shmid, eds., Paradoksy russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg: INAPRESS, 2001); M. Mogil’ner,
Mifologiia “podpol’nogo cheloveka”: Radikal’nyi mikrokosm v Rossii nachala XX veka kak predmet
semioticheskogo analiza (Moscow: NLO, 1999); A. V. Shcherbenok, Dekonstruktsiia i klassicheskaia
russkaia literatura: Ot ritoriki teksta k ritorike istorii (Moscow: NLO, 2005); and I. Iu. Vinitskii,
Dom tolkovatelia: Poeticheskaia semantika i istoricheskoe voobrazhenie V. A. Zhukovskogo (Moscow:
NLO, 2006).
13. On Viacheslav Ivanov, see S. S. Averintsev, “Skvoreshnits vol’nykh grazhdanin . . .”
Viacheslav Ivanov: Put’ poeta mezhdu mirami (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2001); but also S. P. Purgin,
Filosofiia v kruge Slova: Viacheslav Ivanov (Ekaterinburg: Sfera, 1997). On Osip Mandelstam,
see, on the one hand, O. Ronen, Poetika Osipa Mandel’shtama (St. Petersburg: Giperion,
2002); but, on the other, see N. A. Petrova, Literatura v neantropotsentricheskuiu epokhu: opyt O.
Mandel’shtama (Perm’: Permskii gos. pedagog. universitet, 2001). On Vladimir Nabokov,
see A. M. Zverev, Nabokov (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2001); but also A. V. Mlechko,
Igra, metatekst, trikster: Parodiia v “russkikh” romanakh V. V. Nabokova (Volgograd: Izd-vo
Volgogradskogo gos. universiteta, 2000). On Boris Paternak, see N. Ivanova, Boris Pasternak.
Vremena zhizni (Moscow: Vremia, 2007); but also V. S. Baevskii, Boris Pasternak—lirik.
Osnovy poeticheskoi sistemy (Smolensk: Trast-imakom, 1993). On Mikhail Bulgakov, see M.
N. Zolotonosov, “Master i Margarita” kak putevoditel’ po subkul’ture russkogo antisemitizma (St.
Petersburg: INAPRESS, 1995); but also G. M. Rebel’, Khudozhestvennye miry romanov Mikhaila
Bulgakova (Perm’: PRIPIT, 2001), V. V. Khimich, V mire Mikhaila Bulgakova (Ekaterinburg: Izd.
Ural’skogo Universiteta, 2003), and V. I. Nemtsev, Tragediia istiny (Samara: Samarskii nauchnyi
tsentr RAN, 2003). On Isaac Babel, see, of course, A. K. Zholkovskii and M. B. Iampol’skii,
Babel’/Babel (Moscow: Carte blanche, 1994); but also I. A. Smirin, Babel’ v literaturnom kontekste
(Perm’: Permskii gos. pedagog. universitet, 2005).
14. See also M. Chudakova, Literatura sovetskogo proshlogo i novye raboty (Moscow: Iazyki
slavianskoi kul’tury, 2001).
15. B. Egorov, Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo Iu. M. Lotmana (Moscow: NLO, 1999), 87–92.
16. See also the encyclopedia Samizdat Leningrada, 1950–1980-e gody, ed. D. Ia. Severiukhin
(Moscow: NLO, 2003).
17. A. K. Zholkovskii, “Anna Akhmatova piat’desiat let spustia,” Zvezda 9 (1996): 211–27;
“K tekhnologii vlasti v tvorchestve i zhiznetvorchestve Akhmatovoi,” in Lebenskunst—
Kunstleben. Zhiznetvorchestvo v russkoi kul’ture XVII-XX vv., ed. S. Schahadat (Munich: Otto
Sagner, 1998), 193–210; Zoshchenko: Poetika nedoveriia (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 1999);
“Dve versii strakha: Akhmatova i Zoshchenko,” in Semiotika strakha, ed. N. Buks and F. Kont
(Moscow: Russkii Institut “Evropa,” 2005), 249–60; “K pereosmysleniiu kanona: sovetskie
klassiki-nonkonformisty v postsovetskoi perspektive,” NLO 29 (1998): 55–68.
18. See D. Tokarev, Kurs na khudshee: Absurd kak kategoriia teksta u Daniila Kharmsa i
Semiuelia Bekketa (Moscow: NLO, 2002); A. Kobrinskii, Poetika “OBERIU” v kontekste russkogo
literaturnogo avangarda, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo kul’turologicheskogo litseia,
1999).
19. See also the five volumes of Bakhtinskii sbornik, edited by Vitalii Makhlin (1990-2004);
more on the post-Soviet Bakhtin boom see in C. Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail
Bakhtin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

20. The Center for Humanities Education, the first private school, located in Obninsk near
Moscow, opened in 1987. See L. Lur’e, “Poiavliaiutsia chastnye shkoly i gimnazii—al’ternativa
gosudarstvennomu srednemu obrazovaniiu [iiun’ 1989],” in Noveishaia istoriia otechestvennogo
kino, 5: 176-77. The first recipient of the Booker Prize was novelist Mark Kharitonov for Liniia
sud’by, ili sunduchok Milashevicha (Line of Fate, or Milashevich’s Little Footlocker).
21. The firm’s elegant foreign name derives from the founders’ surnames (Oleg Vasil’ev,
Vladimir Grigor’ev, and Gleb Uspenskii).
22. For a profile of Salon and other nonprofit bookstores, see E. Gracheva, “V Moskve
otkryvaetsia pervyi chastnyi knizhnyi magazin dlia ‘novykh umnykh’—Salon 19 oktiabria
Marka Freidkina [oktiabr’ 1992],” in Noveishaia istoriia otechestvennogo kino, 6: 135.
23. Quoted in A. Markov, “Putevody psevdosa. Rossiiskie intellektual’nye zhurnaly
1990-kh: retseptsiia ‘zapadnykh’ diskursov,” NLO 50 (2001): 373–90, here 380.
24. For these and comparative print runs (Druzhba narodov, Nash sovremennik, Znamia,
Zvezda), see T. Il’inskaia, “Dzhordzh Soros ob”iavliaet o tselevoi podderzhke ‘tolstykh’
zhurnalov [dekabr’ 1994],” in Noveishaia istoriia otechestvennogo kino, 6: 483.
25. For NLO’s theorizing in sociology, philosophy, and political science, as well as the
other arts, see Kalugin on Vysotskii (NLO 15 [1995]); Iampol’skii on Sokurov and Chekhov
(NLO 7 [1994]); and on art, broadly conceived (tattoos, photography, drawing), see NLO 33
(1998); NLO 39 (1999); and NLO 65 (2004).
While NLO is philological in its orientation, its relation to the word is markedly differ-
ent from that of, say, Voprosy literatury. As Caryl Emerson suggests, “The focus [of Voprosy
literatury] remains literature—that is, the printed word on the page, rather than a more capa-
cious definition of ‘cultural text’” (Emerson, “Ob odnoi postsovetskoi zhurnal’noi polemike
[razmyshleniia storonnego nabliudatelia],” trans. K. Blank, Voprosy literatury 4 [2005]: 4–40,
here 7).
Rare articles on earlier periods include Viktor Zhivov on Byzanto-Russian holy fools
(NLO 24 [1997]), a cluster on Homeric and post-Homeric Greece (NLO 68 [2004]) and a piece
on Domostroi (NLO 81 [2006]).
26. See contributions in NLO on Michel Riffaterre (NLO 1 [1992]; NLO 2 [1993]; and
NLO 27 [1997]), whose work in certain ways paralleled that of Lotman’s disciples (see Markov,
“Putevody psevdosa,” 377); Paul De Man (NLO 2 [1993]; NLO 23 [1997]; NLO 59 [2003]);
Roland Barthes (NLO 5 [1993]); Michel Foucault (NLO 49 [2001]; NLO 71 [2005]); Jacques
Derrida (NLO 72 [2005]); as well as Alain Badiou (NLO 63 [2003]) and Gilles Deleuze (NLO
5 [1993]; NLO 63 [2003]). Prominent, too, were francophone figures arguably distinct from
poststructural and post-Marxist theorizing, such as Georges Bataille (NLO 13 [1995]; NLO 61
[2003]; NLO 68 [2004]; NLO 71 [2005]); Michel de Certeau (NLO 28 [1997]); Roger Chartier
(NLO 13 [1995]; NLO 60 [2003]; NLO 66 [2004]); Pierre Nora (NLO 30 [1998]); as well as
Pierre Bourdieu (NLO 45 [2000]; NLO 60 [2004]; NLO 71 [2005]) and Paul Ricoeur (NLO 65
[2004]).
27. While NLO was not in existence when the early conference, Postmodernizm i my (Post-
modernism and Us), was held at the Gorky Literary Institute (March 1991), the intellectual
communities of Moscow and St. Petersburg were still in the heat of those debates, filling the
pages of Voprosy literatury, Inostrannaia literatura, and Voprosy filosofii. Key NLO authors and texts
include Viacheslav Kuritsyn (NLO 11 [1995]), Mikhail Epshtein (NLO 16 [1995]), Petersburg
postmodernism (NLO 19 [1996]), Mikhail Berg on utopic postmodernism (NLO 24 [1997]),
Viktor Krivulin (NLO 27 [1997]), analysis of Viktor Pelevin as postmodernist writer (NLO 28
[1997]), broader overviews of Russian postmodernism (NLO 30 [1998]; NLO 39 [1999]; NLO
41 [2000]; NLO 51 [2001]), Internet literature and the end of postmodernism (NLO 32 [1998]),
and—in case this was insufficient—post-postmodernism (NLO 50 [2001]).
28. In NLO, see Hans-Robert Jauss (NLO 12 [1995]; NLO 23 [1997]) and Wolfgang Iser
(NLO 27 [1997]); Umberta Eco (NLO 21 [1996]; NLO 32 [1998]); Hannah Arendt (NLO 26
[1997]; NLO 67 [2004]); Carl Schmitt (NLO 38 [1999]); Clifford Geertz (NLO 29 [1998]; NLO
69 [2004]; NLO 70 [2004]); Georg Simmel (NLO 43 [2000]); Max Weber (NLO 53 [2002]; NLO
71 [2005]); Émile Durkheim (NLO 80 [2006]); Carlo Ginzburg (NLO 30 and 33 [1998]; NLO 52
[2001]; NLO 65 [2004]; NLO 80 [2006]); Friedrich Nietzsche (NLO 50 [2001]; NLO 80 [2006]);
Slavoi Žižek (NLO 41 [2000]); Walter Benjamin (NLO 46 [2000]; NLO 60 [2003]; NLO 68
[2004]); Hayden White (NLO 59 [2003]); Karl Mannheim (NLO 30 [1998]); Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri (NLO 65 [2004]); and Giorgio Agamben (NLO 44 [2000]; NLO 46 [2000]).
29. The 17 August 1998 default had a deleterious effect on new journals, as across all
cultural fields. NLO was one of the sturdier houses; it managed not only to survive, but also
to keep its new journal in print.
30. The Bath House Readings at Moscow’s Bath Lane (the editorial office’s first site) began
in 1993. From 1994, initially as an April Fool’s prank, the Minor Bath House Readings began
as a mock-serious conference but became associated with Neprikosnovennyi zapas.
31. For examples of what might reasonably be viewed as Russian New Historicism, see
A. Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii: Rossiia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh (Moscow: NLO,
2001); Etkind, “Fuko i tezis vnutrennei kolonizatsii,” NLO 49 (2001): 50–74; Etkind, “Russ-
kaia literatura XIX veka: Roman vnutrennei kolonizatsii,” NLO 59 (2003): 103–24; A. Zorin,
“Ideologiia i semiotika v interpretatsii Klifforda Girtsa,” NLO 29 (1998): 39–54; Zorin, Kormia
dvuglavogo orla: Literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII- pervoi treti XIX
veka (Moscow: NLO, 2001). See also Kozlov, “Na rendez-vous,” NLO 42 (2000) and “Nashi
‘Novye istoristy,’” NLO 50 (2001); Etkind, “Novyi istorizm, russkaia versiia” and “Dva goda
spustia,” NLO 47 (2001), with articles by Igor’ Smirnov and collaboratively by Lev Gudkov
and Boris Dubin in the same issue; Proskurin, “Istoriia literatury,” NLO 50 (2001). For
Western responses, see Emerson, “Ob odnoi,” and K. Kelli, “Eshche raz o ‘novom istorizme,’”
Voprosy literatury 4 (2003): 48–60.
32. I. Shaitanov, “‘Bytovaia’ istoriia,” Voprosy literatury 2 (2002): 3–24, here 24.
33. Shaitanov, “Delo No. 59: NLO protiv osnov literaturovedeniia,” Voprosy literatury 5
(2003): 135–51, here 149–50.
34. Mladofilologi (young philologists), a reference to generational and methodological dif-
ferences with Soviet-era liberals, suggests an analogy with the Young Turks as a generational
elite pushing for radical reform. Quoted in S. Chuprinin, “Grazhdane—poslushaite menia,”
Znamia 5 (2003): 188–96. Caryl Emerson (“Ob odnoi,” 17) raises similar issues with regard to
NLO research on Bakhtin: “the openness in NLO toward borrowed ideology and the absence
of such openness toward Bakhtin, could not fail to strike the outside reader.”
35. Quoted in S. Chuprinin, Russkaia literatura segodnia: putevoditel’ (Moscow: Olma-Press,
2003), 396.
36. This issue also contains key texts on Leningrad samizdat, including unofficial poetry of
the 1960s–1970s, and on Konstantin Kuz’minskii’s Blue Lagoon.
37. Of enormous value, too, are the peripheral genres—visual and concrete poetry (NLO
16 [1995]), palindromes and minimalist poetry (NLO 23 [1997]), slam poetry and sound poetry
(NLO 58 [2002]), necro-poetry (NLO 52 [2001]; NLO 63 [2003])—as well as popular culture:
kitchen songs, comics, action novels (NLO 22 [1997]); jokes and mat [obscenities] (NLO 43
[2000]); or Stalinist detective novels (NLO 80 [2006]).
38. An exception is Mariia Maiofis’s article on parallels to Gadamer in the scholarship of
Pushkinist V. E. Vatsuro (NLO 59 [2003]).
39. Some exceptions include an overview on histories of Russian women’s literature (NLO
24 [1997]), a report on the U.S. Masculinities conference (NLO 64 [2003]), and on a gender
seminar (NLO 71 [2005]).
40. See Emerson (“Ob odnoi,” 4): “Central to cultural studies is a commitment to the
social relevance of art and a fascination with power. In contrast, the many sources of Russian
culturology—which include Eurasianism from the 1920s, Losev’s mythopoetics, Bakhtin’s
dialogism, and later the cultural semiotics of Iurii Lotman and the Moscow-Tartu School—
considered power in its old institutional forms worthless as a value and destructive as a force.”
41. For these reasons (as for others), M. Gasparov’s “Lotman i marksizm,” NLO 19 (1996):
7–13, is of great interest.
42. See K. Bogdanov, Vox populi: Fol’klornye zhanry sovetskoi kul’tury (Moscow: NLO,
2009). See also S. B. Borisov, Rukopisnyi devichii rasskaz (Moscow: OGI, 2002); Borisov, Mir
russkogo devichestva: 70-90-e gody XX veka (Moscow: Ladomir, 2002); A. F. Belousov, ed., Russkii
shkol’nyi fol’klor (Moscow: Ladomir, 1998).
43. The journal Gendernye issledovaniia came out with support from the MacArthur Foun-
dation from 1998 and is available online at: http://www.gender.univer.kharkov.ua/gurnal.
shtml. See also Riabov, Russkaia filosofiia zhenstvennosti (Ivanovo: Iunona, 1999); Riabov,
Matushka-Rus’: Opyt gendernogo analiza poiskov natsional’noi identichnosti Rossii v otechestvennoi
i zapadnoi istoriosofii (Moscow: Ladomir, 2001); Savkina, Razgovory s zerkalom i zazerkal’em:
Avtodokumental’nye zhenskie teksty v russkoi literature pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow: NLO,
2007); Ushakin, Posle pola (Vil’nius: EGU, 2007); Zherebkina, Strast’: Zhenskoe telo i seksual’nost’
v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2001); Zherebkina, Gendernye 90-e, ili Fallosa ne sushchestvuet
(St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2003); Zherebkina, Feministskaia interventsiia v stalinizm, ili, Stalina ne
sushchestvuet (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2006). The perspectives of Russian feminist criticism
are summarized in Savkina, “Faktory razdrazheniia: O vospriiatii i obsuzhdenii feministskoi
kritiki i gendernykh issledovanii v russkom kontekste,” NLO 86 (2007): 207–29.
CONTRIBUTORS
Mikhail Berg is a writer and literary critic, one of the internationally most visible
representatives of Russian postmodernism. Born in 1952, he obtained his PhD
at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of nine novels and a monograph,
Literaturokratiia, in which he discusses the appropriation and redistribution of power
through acts of writing. He is also the author of volumes of scholarly and literary-
critical essays translated into many European languages. He was awarded the Malyi
Buker Prize (in his capacity as the editor in chief of the first independent review,
Vestnik novoi literatury), and the “Franc-Tireur” Silver Bullet Prize (2010) for his entire
oeuvre.
Katerina Clark is professor of comparative literature and of Slavic languages and
literatures at Yale University. Her publications include The Soviet Novel: History
as Ritual (1981; 2000); Mikhail Bakhtin (with Michael Holquist, 1985); Petersburg:
Crucible of Cultural Revolution, 1913–1931 (1995); and Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism,
Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (2011).
Nancy Condee is professor of Slavic studies at the University of Pittsburgh and
director of its Global Studies Center. Her work includes Imperial Trace: Recent
Russian Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2009); Antinomies of Art and Culture:
Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, with Terry Smith and Okwui Enwezor
(Duke University Press, 2008); Endquote, with Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko
(Northwestern University Press, 2000); and Soviet Hieroglyphics (Indiana University
Press/British Film Institute, 1995). Her writing has appeared in PMLA, the Nation,
October, Sight and Sound, as well as Voprosy literatury, Iskusstvo kino, Novoe literaturnoe
obozrenie, and Znamia. She has worked as a paid consultant for the Edinburgh Film
Festival, the Library of Congress, and the Public Broadcasting Frontline series.
Evgeny Dobrenko is professor and head of the department of Russian and
Slavonic studies at the University of Sheffield. He is the author and (co)editor of
twenty books, including Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the
Revolution (Yale University Press, 2008); Political Economy of Socialist Realism (Yale
University Press, 2007); Aesthetics of Alienation: Reassessment of Early Soviet Cultural
Theories (Northwestern University Press, 2005); The Making of the State Writer: Social
and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture (Stanford University Press, 2001); The
391
392  CONTRIBUTORS
Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature
(Stanford University Press, 1997); and others.
Boris Dubin is head of the department of social and political studies at the Levada-
Center in Moscow and deputy editor of the influential Vestnik obshchestvennogo
mneniia (Herald of Public Opinion). His research interests include the sociology of
elites; development studies; public opinion studies; sociology of religion, culture,
literature, and the mass media; and translation studies. He is the author of many
books in Russian, including Word–Writing–Literature (2001); Intellectual Groups and
Symbolic Forms (2004); Classics: After and Near (2010). He was awarded the Andrei
Belyi Prize for research in the humanities (2005) and the Efim Etkind International
Distinction (2006). He is Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite (France, 2008).
Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages
and Literatures at Princeton University, where she chairs the Slavic department
with a coappointment in comparative literature. Her research interests have focused
on Mikhail Bakhtin, nineteenth-century Russian classics (Pushkin, Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky), and Russian opera and vocal music. Among her books are The First
Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (1997), The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
(2008), and The Life of Musorgsky (1999). Current projects include Tolstoy, Bernard
Shaw, and Shakespeare; the prose, drama, and literary criticism of Sigizmund
Krzhizhanovsky (for which she received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in
2009–2010); and the adaptation of Russian literary classics to the Stalinist-era stage.
Stefano Garzonio is professor of Russian literature at the University of Pisa, Italy.
For ten years (1999-2009), he was president of the Italian Society of Slavists and a
member of the Mezhdunarodnyi komitet slavistov (MKS). He has been executive
member of ICCEES since 2005. In 2007 he was awarded the Pushkin Medal by
the President of the Russian Federation for services to the Russian-Italian cultural
dialogue. His research focuses on the theory of Russian verse, eighteenth-century
Russian literature, the history of Russian poetry, and Russian and Italian cultural
contacts. He is the author of several books and numerous articles in Italian, Russian,
English, French, and Lithuanian. He has translated into Italian works by Lermontov,
Turgenev, and Dostoevsky.
Hans Günther is professor emeritus of Slavic studies at the University of Bielefeld,
Germany. His authored and edited books include Die Verstaatlichung der Literatur
(1984); The Culture of the Stalin Period (ed., 1990); Der sozialistische Übermensch
(1993); Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (coedited with E. Dobrenko, 2000); Sovetskaia vlast’
i media (coedited with Sabine Hänsgen, 2006). A new book on Andrei Platonov is
forthcoming in 2011.
Ilya Kalinin graduated from the philological faculty of St. Petersburg State
University; there he also defended his doctoral dissertation on Russian literary
utopia. Since 2002 he has been on the editorial staff of Neprikosnovennyi zapas, a
journal for political and cultural debate published in Moscow, becoming editor in
chief in 2006. He is associate professor at the Smolny College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences and has also taught at the European University (both in St. Petersburg).
CONTRIBUTORS  393
His publications have appeared in Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sign Systems Studies,
Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, Logos, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, and other journals.
Natalia Kornienko is corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences
and head of one of the departments at the Maxim Gorky Institute of World
Literature in Moscow. She is the author of more than 500 publications, including
four books: Istoriia teksta i biografiia A. Platonova (1993); “Skazano russkim iazykom . . .”
Andrei Platonov i Mikhail Sholokhov: Vstrechi v russkoi literature (2003); Chitateli i nechitateli
Mikhaila Sholokhova (2003); Nepovskaia ottepel’: Stanovlenie instituta sovetskoi literaturnoi
kritiki (2010). She is the chief editor of the scholarly edition of Andrei Platonov’s
works and editor of several series of publications, among which are Arkhiv A. P.
Platonova and Tekstologicheskii vremennik.
Ilya Kukulin is a literary critic and sociologist of culture. He is associate professor
at the Moscow Pedagogical University for the Humanities and the State University–
Higher School of Economics (Moscow). He is the author of articles on contemporary
Russian poetry, the forms of imagination in late Soviet and post-Soviet society,
Soviet science fiction and film, the aesthetic adaptation of the experience of the
Second World War, and of numerous essays in other fields of enquiry.
Evgeniia Kupsan is a scholar and translator who works in the field of Soviet and
post-Soviet culture. Her translations include Emma Widdis’s “A Country with
New Blood Circulation: Cinema, Electrification, and the Transformation of Soviet
Space,” in Hans Günther and Sabine Hänsgen, eds., Sovetskaia vlast’ i media (St.
Petersburg: Academic Project, 2006).
Mark Lipovetsky is associate professor of Russian studies at the University of
Colorado, Boulder. He has authored seven books on Russian literature and culture,
among which are Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (1999); Paralogies:
Transformations of the (Post)Modernist Discourse in Russian Culture of the 1920s–2000s
(2008); Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama
(with Birgit Beumers); and Charms of the Cynical Reason: the Trickster’s Transformations
in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (2011). He is also the author of a major university
textbook (in Russian), Modern Russian Literature: 1950s–1990s (with Naum Leiderman,
2001; several reprints). He has (co)edited several volumes, including Russian Writers
Since 1980 (2003; for the series Dictionary of Literary Biography) and A Non-Canonical
Classic: D. A. Prigov (2010).
Birgit Menzel is professor of Slavic literatures and culture at the University of
Mainz, Germersheim, Germany. She has published two monographs, on the
reception of Mayakovsky in Stalin’s Russia (1992) and on Russian literary criticism
of the perestroika (2003), and has (co)edited six volumes on contemporary Russian
and East European culture, including Reading for Entertainment: Post-Soviet Popular
Literature in Historical Perspective (2006); Culture and/as Translation: Russian-German
Relations (2011); and The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (2011).
Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy is Ann Whitney Olin Professor and chair
of the Slavic department at Barnard College and former director of the Harriman
Institute, Columbia University. Her books include Abram Tertz and the Poetics of
394  CONTRIBUTORS
Crime (Yale University Press, 1995); Strolls with Pushkin (Yale University Press, 1993);
Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness (Northwestern University
Press, 2006); and Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference (Slavica
Publishers, 2008). She has published extensively on Soviet and post-Soviet literature
and popular culture, Pushkin, Russian ballet, Russian émigré literature and culture,
and the future of regional studies. She is currently working on a book titled Nabokov
and His Enemies: Terms of Engagement.
Galin Tihanov holds the George Steiner Chair of Comparative Literature at Queen
Mary, University of London. He has held fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu
Berlin, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and Collegium Budapest, as well
as visiting professorships at Yale University and the University of St. Gallen. He is
one of the honorary presidents of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. Among
his authored and (co)edited books are The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and
the Ideas of Their Time (2000; Polish translation, 2010); Materializing Bakhtin (2000);
The Bakhtin Circle: In the Master’s Absence (2004); A Companion to the Works of Robert
Musil (2007); Gustav Shpet’s Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory (2009);
Critical Theory in Russia and the West (2010); and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism (2011).
He is currently completing books on the uses of the romantic tradition in twentieth-
century European and American culture and on Russian literary and cultural theory
between the World Wars.
William Mills Todd III is Harvard College Professor and Harry Tuchman Levin
Professor of Literature at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1988. He
was educated at Dartmouth College, the University of Oxford, and Columbia
University. Among his publications are The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the
Age of Pushkin; Literature and Society in Imperial Russia: 1800–1914 (ed.); Fiction and Society
in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, Narrative; and Sovremennoe amerikanskoe
pushkinovedenie (ed.), as well as articles on nineteenth-century Russian literature and
on theory of literature. He is currently completing a book on the serialization of the
novel in the nineteenth century.
Maria Zalambani is associate professor of Russian literature at the School for
Interpreters and Translators, Bologna University, Forlì campus. She was educated
at Bologna University and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in
Paris (where she obtained a PhD in history and civilization). Her research interests
focus on twentieth-century Russian literature, culture, and the history of ideas. She
has written books and essays, some of which have also been published in translation.
At the moment she is writing on the institute of marriage in Anna Karenina and has
started a monograph, provisionally titled “Literary Journals as a Social Institution
in the Soviet Union.” Her authored books include L’arte nella produzione: Avanguardia
e rivoluzione nella Russia sovietica degli anni ’20 (1998; Russian translation: Iskusstvo v
proizvodstve, 2003); La morte del romanzo (2003; Russian translation: Literatura fakta: Ot
avangarda k sotsrealizmu, 2006); Censura, istituzioni e politica letteraria in URSS (1964–1985)
(2009).
INDEX
Abramov, Fedor, 185, 187–88, 190, 198, 211, 214 All-Russian Union of Peasant Writers (VSKP),
academicism, xii, 65 41, 42, 46, 59
Academy of Sciences, 114, 131, 230–32, 304, 315 All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers
acmeism, xv, 3, 5, 6, 226, 227, 330n4 (VAPP), 20–21, 34, 37–39, 58, 335nn82–83,
Adamovich, Georgii, 5, 6, 146, 149–51, 155, 336n91, 336n100
157–62, 359n30, 359n36, 360n38, 360n40, All-Union Congresses of Soviet Writers, xiv,
361n54, 361n63, 363n81, 363nn84–87, 363n90, 95, 97–98, 102, 104, 106, 110, 113–14, 116, 120,
364n97, 364n100, 364n103, 365n110 162, 179, 187, 312
Ad Marginem (publishing house), 302–3, 306, Althusser, Louis, 320–21
315, 316–17, 386n41 Al’tman, Iogann, 92, 175, 178
Aesopian language/speech, 94, 260, 312 Andreev, Iurii, 209, 215
aesthetics, 18, 74, 110, 186, 193, 197, 213, 217–19, Anninskii, Lev, 208, 214, 216, 218, 265, 288
234, 242, 267, 278, 282, 293, 295, 301; of the anticosmopolitan campaign, xiii, 175, 177
image, 33 anti-Semitism, 62, 175, 177, 201, 211, 213, 259,
Ageev, Aleksandr, 260, 288–89, 296–97 296, 301, 311
Agitprop. See Department of Agitation and architechtonics, 74, 122, 128
Propaganda (Agitprop) Ardis (publishing house), 275–77, 382n16
Aikhenval’d, Iulii, 3, 4, 146, 359n30 Arkhangel’skii, Aleksandr, 260, 288, 296
Aitmatov, Chingiz, 218, 244, 251 Arvatov, Boris, 30–32, 62, 318
Aizenberg, Mikhail, 228, 289, 293, 303 Aseev, Nikolai, 25, 27, 30, 40, 167, 331n14
Akhmadulina, Bella, 186, 199, 298 Asmus, Valentin, 57, 92
Akhmatova, Anna, 35, 218, 221, 223, 225, 251, Association of Painters of the Revolution
279, 312, 314 (AKhR), 44, 45
Aksenov, Vasilii, 186, 199, 252, 274–75, 285, 300, Astafiev, Victor, 205, 214, 251, 264, 294, 300, 301
381n7 automatization, 68, 70, 72
Aldanov, Mark, 154–56, 270, 361n54 avant-garde (avant-gardism), 2, 14, 25, 30–31,
Aleksandrovskii, Vasilii, 9, 10 50, 55–57, 73, 111, 119, 145, 157, 206, 212,
Alekseev, Mikhail N., 210, 299, 371n7 218, 228, 246, 259, 264–65, 277, 291, 293, 296,
Alekseev, Mikhail P., 2, 172, 366n29 301–2, 310, 350n53, 382n32
Aleshkovsky, Yuz, 275, 285 Averbakh, Leopold, 21, 22, 37, 48–52, 57, 59, 61
Aliger, Margarita, 120, 185, 188 Averintsev, Sergei, 142, 257, 315
allegory, 189, 217, 218
All-Russian Central Executive Committee Babel, Isaac, 78, 79, 95, 187, 198, 312, 387n13
(VTsIK), 15, 145, 356n6 Baigushev, Aleksandr, 258–59, 379n22
All-Russian Society of Peasant Writers Bakhtin, Mikhail, xiii, xv, 65, 66–68, 71–77, 80,
(VOKP), 50, 59–60 83–87, 109–10, 116, 120–31, 142–43, 159, 211,
All-Russian Society of Proletarian Architects 215, 231, 233, 235, 242, 245–50, 310, 315–16,
(VOPRA), 44, 45 319, 322, 339n8, 340n20, 340nn22–23, 341n25,
395
396  INDEX
343n50, 348nn26–28, 348n31, 349n34, 349n36, Brik, Osip, 8, 30, 56, 57

349nn38–39, 349n41, 355nn104–5, 363n90, Brodsky, Joseph, 252, 255, 274–75, 277–79,
376n35, 387n19, 389n34, 390n40 381n7, 382nn23–24, 382n26
Bakhtin Circle, 66, 67, 71–72, 77, 80, 84, 129, Brovman, Grigorii, 176, 215
340n20, 341n25, 349n43, 355n105, 377n36 Bryusov, Valery, 3, 32, 40, 330n4
Baklanov, Grigorii, 251, 300 Bukharin, Nikolai, 22, 25, 26, 33, 39, 40, 41, 103,
Balzac, Honoré de, 101, 115–18, 120, 136 120, 174, 347n15
Barthes, Roland, 237, 246–47, 388n26 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 22–23, 31, 33, 46, 48,
Basinskii, Pavel, 260, 289, 293 187, 221, 259, 310, 312, 314, 316, 387n13;
Batkin, Leonid, 258, 293 bulgakovshchina (Bulgakov influence), 22
Bednyi, Demyan, 21, 36, 41, 47, 146 Bunin, Ivan, 2, 41, 62, 78, 96, 145–46, 187, 205,
Belaia, Galina, 55, 215–16, 252, 258–59 270
Belaia kniga (The White Book), 219–21, 229 Burliuk, David, 7, 331n14
Belinkov, Arkadii, 221–22, 290, 373n44 Burtin, Iurii, 192, 194, 202, 257, 258, 369n24
Belinsky, Vissarion, 29, 100, 111–12, 147, 172, Butyrin, Kirill (pseud. K. Mamonov), 227,
179, 232, 246, 257, 334n54 374n59
belles lettres, 55, 56, 277 Bykov, Dmitrii, 288, 296–98, 303, 311, 313,
Belov, Vasilii, 211, 214, 301 385n29
Belyi, Andrei, 2, 5–6, 26, 29–30, 65, 93–94, Byron, Goerge Gordon, 120, 173
96, 154, 330n4, 363n90; literary prize in his byt (everyday life), 67, 68, 72, 149, 215, 319
name, 292 bytovizm (obsession with the everyday), 145, 216,
Bem, Alfred, 146, 148, 151, 159–61, 357n13, 357n10
358n24, 360n36, 361n54, 364n97, 365n110
Berberova, Nina, 150, 381n7 canon, 11, 14, 24, 65–67, 79, 82, 90, 92–93, 96,
Berdyaev, Nikolai, 252, 274, 307, 308 98, 102, 105–6, 109–11, 116, 117, 123–25, 129,
Berg, Mikhail (pseud. I. Severin), 263, 289, 291, 140, 143, 145–46, 149, 150, 156–62, 178, 198,
293, 307–8, 379n37, 388n27 200, 212, 222, 224–25, 226, 229, 230, 236, 237,
Berggol’ts, Olga, 169, 185, 188, 189 243, 254, 255–56, 258, 261, 272, 275, 276, 281,
Beskin, Osip, 61–62 301, 374n51, 382n32, 387n12
Beskina, Anna, 140–41, 353n92 Cassirer, Ernst, 137, 352n74
beskonfliktnost’ (conflictlessness), 168, 178 Cavafy, Constantine, 278, 279
Bespalov, Ivan, 49, 53 censorship, xv, 14–16, 91, 156, 170, 184, 192, 196,
Bezymenskii, Aleksandr, 21, 37 222–23, 234, 251–53, 259, 267, 281, 284, 286,
Bialik, Boris, 176, 177, 179 294, 308, 332n45, 332n48, 343n9
Bitov, Andrei, 209, 215, 217, 309, 313 Central Auditing Committee of the CPSU
Bitsilli, Pyotr, 2, 359n36, 363n84 (Central Control Commission), 22, 196
Blanchot, Maurice, 231, 308 Central Committee of the Communist Party,
Blok, Alexander, 3–6, 154, 330n4 xi, xiii, 12, 14, 15, 19, 20–21, 22, 39, 45, 46,
Bocharov, Anatolii, 207, 216–17, 258, 373n40 49, 90, 103, 120, 166–68, 169, 170, 171, 181,
Bocharov, Sergei, 121, 186, 231, 315, 341n25, 184, 190, 194, 196, 202, 207, 209, 250, 300; and
343n50, 377n35, 387n11 Agitprop, 14, 19, 164, 167, 169, 173, 175, 189,
Bogatyrev, Pyotr, 147–48, 150, 356n5, 357n18, 333n3; and “O literaturno-khudozhestvennoi
358n23, 359n27 kritike” (On Literary Criticism; decree of
Bogdanov, Alexander (Aleksandr Malinovskii), 1972), 207; and “O perestroike literaturno-
9–11, 13, 31, 103, 331n21 khudozhestvennykh organizatsii” (On
Bol’shevik (periodical), 111, 113, 167, 175, 178 the Restructuring of the Literary-Artistic
Bondarenko, Vladimir, 216, 260, 300–302, Organisations; decree of 1932), 90; and “O
385n34 politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi
Bondarev, Iurii, 259, 299 literatury” (On Party Politicis in the Area of
Borshchagovskii, Aleksandr, 175, 178 Belles Lettres; resolution of 1925), 12, 21, 36,
Bourdieu, Pierre, 230, 291, 307, 388n26 37, 39, 45
Braun, Iakov, 26, 29 Cervantes, Miguel de, 69, 115
Brezhnev, Leonid, 196, 242, 257, 274 Chalmaev, Viktor, 202, 204, 210–12
INDEX  397
Chasy (periodical), 224–29, 374n52 determinism, 11, 65, 79, 87, 237
Chatman, Seymour, 233, 247 dialectical materialism, 77–78, 89, 101, 102
Chekhov, Anton, 8, 9, 51, 220, 311, 316, 388n25 diaspora, xv, 1, 4, 46, 205, 270
chelovecheskii dokument (human document), 157, discourse analysis, 231, 312
159 dissident(s), xiii, 209, 221, 224, 232, 284, 299, 307
Chernichenko, Iurii, 252, 300 Dmitriev, Andrei, 290, 306
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 100, 111, 113, 172–73, Dobrenko, Evgeny, 79, 258, 260, 263, 312
179, 192, 197 Dobrolyubov, Nikolai, 111, 113, 172, 173, 192,
Chief Directorate of Literature (Glavlit), 16, 22, 246, 257
34, 46, 332n45, 332n48 Doctors’ Plot, the, 171, 177, 181
Chisla (periodical), 152, 159–60, 162, 361n48, Don (periodical), 187, 307n47
364n100 Dos Passos, John, 91, 97–100
Chkheidze, Konstantin, 148, 358n26 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 7, 30, 36, 38, 66, 75, 76,
Chomsky, Noam, 235, 271 84, 85, 87, 96, 126, 127, 129, 143, 147, 155, 157,
Chudakova, Marietta, 234, 258 158, 161, 220, 224, 248, 249, 280, 309, 315,
Chukovskaya, Lidiya, 220–21 316, 341n27, 358n24, 362n76, 363n90; and the
Chukovsky, Kornei, 4, 47, 167, 316 Dostoevsky Seminar in Prague, 148; and his
Chuprinin, Sergei, 207–9, 258, 260, 262, 264, Pushkin speech, 211
289, 292, 298, 300, 320, 369n21, 371n6, 384n18 Dovlatov, Sergei, 274, 275, 285, 290, 294
Chuzhak, Nikolai, 30, 31, 33 Drozhzhin, Spiridon, 39, 40
Clark, Katerina, 312, 346n4 Druzhba narodov (periodical), 251–54, 293,
Cold War, 191, 270, 272, 275, 302, 312, 348n30 378n14, 388n24
collectivism, 103, 265 Dubin, Boris, 255, 288, 295, 304, 318, 378n14,
Communist Academy, 30, 34, 53, 58, 114, 117, 389n31
197; the Institute of Literature and Art at Dudintsev, Vladimir, 185, 187, 190–91, 196, 251
the, 111 dukhovnost’ (spirituality), 211–12, 226–27
conceptualism, 267, 291, 294, 382n32. See also Durkheim, Émile, 318, 389n28
Moscow (romantic) conceptualism Dvořak, Max, 130, 349n38
constructivism, 30, 46, 56, 100, 113, 157
cosmopolitanism, 147, 169, 171, 173–77, 195, Eagleton, Terry, x, xi, 320
200, 210, 298, 300 Efimov, Igor, 275, 276
cubo-futurists, 7–8, 9, 331n14 Efros, Anatolii, 210, 213
cult of personality, 191, 198 Egorov, Boris, 248, 313
Ehrenburg, Ilya, 26, 33, 48, 164, 165, 185, 187
Daniel, Yuli, 184, 219–21, 274 Eikhenbaum, Boris, xii, xv, 20, 27, 29, 67, 69,
Danilkin, Lev, 288, 298, 303 70, 83, 85, 86, 129, 134, 172, 176, 220, 234, 245,
Dark, Oleg, 260, 263, 293 246, 349n43, 351n62, 363n90, 366n29
Davydov, Iurii, 288, 293 Eisenstein, Sergei, 98, 235, 315, 344n31
deconstruction, 231, 248, 308, 316 El’sberg, Iakov, 53, 189
Dediulin, Sergei, 229, 374n52 Emerson, Caryl, 310, 311, 377n36, 388n25,
Dedkov, Igor, 195, 209, 214, 216, 217, 256, 389n34
259–60 émigré literary criticism, xiii, xv, xvi, 2,
Deev-Khomiakovskii, Grigorii, 42, 59, 60 144–62, 222, 252, 269–86, 290, 300, 356n5
degeneration, xiv, 59, 105, 170, 176, 264, 283 emotionalism, 6, 29
Deleuze, Gilles, 291, 388n26 Enlightenment, the, x, 172
Dement’ev, Aleksandr, 195, 213 Epshtein, Mikhail, 260, 262, 264, 291, 293, 294,
“deposits,” semantic (otlozheniia), 132, 138, 141 307, 308–9, 388n27
Department of Agitation and Propaganda Erl’, Vladimir, 225, 374n53
(Agitprop), 14, 19, 164, 167, 169, 173, 175, Erlich, Victor, xv, 65, 272, 381n12
189, 333n3. See also Central Committee of the Ermakov, Ivan, 81, 82, 86, 87–88, 316, 343n53
Communist Party Ermilov, Vladimir, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 57, 107,
Derrida, Jacques, 308, 316, 388n26 162, 176, 179, 181–82, 183, 346n75
“despitists” (voprekisty), 117, 120, 136 Ermolin, Evgenii, 289, 293
398  INDEX
Erofeev, Venedikt, 222–23, 255, 262, 265, 309, futurism, 3, 4, 5, 7–10, 12, 13, 15, 18, 25, 27, 30,
310 32, 40, 43, 55, 64, 65, 66, 73, 77, 149, 272,
Erofeev, Viktor, 254, 260, 266, 294, 301, 309, 331n14
384n16
Esenin, Sergei, 5, 6, 22, 31, 33, 36, 39, 40, 41, 58, Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 320, 389n38
60, 61, 62, 63, 210; and eseninshchina (Esenin Galanskov, Iurii, 221, 229
influence), 22, 31, 36 Galkovskii, Dmitrii, 260–61
“estrangement” (ostranenie), 68, 69, 71, 74, Gal’tseva, Renata, 259, 266, 289, 293
357n17 Gasparov, Mikhail, 245, 310–11, 386n11
Etkind, Aleksandr, 80, 82, 316, 319, 342n39 Gastev, Aleksei, 9, 10
Etkind, Efim, 228, 280, 285, 383n40, 392 Gazdanov, Gaito, 153–54, 155, 361n54, 361n63
Eurasianism (Eurasian literary studies), 148, 149, Geertz, Clifford, 291, 307, 389n28
150, 359n27, 359n33, 390n40 Genis, Aleksandr, 260, 263, 275–77, 280, 290,
Evtushenko, Evgeny, 186, 199, 212, 225, 298, 293, 312, 382n18
300, 313 Gide, André, 153, 159
expressionism, 6, 36, 117, 119, 347n13 Ginzburg, Aleksandr, 219, 229, 280, 373n45
Ginzburg, Lydia, 176, 228, 233, 245–47, 249
Fadeev, Alexander, 47, 49–50, 52, 57, 96, 99, Gippius, Zinaida, 2, 15, 150, 151, 158, 159, 160,
120, 171, 172, 175, 179, 185, 199, 264, 265, 270, 311, 359n35
366n26 Gladilin, Anatoly, 186, 199, 275, 276, 285
Fedin, Konstantin, 6, 23, 25, 33, 40, 41, 167, 185 Gladkov, Fedor, 36, 93, 96, 97
Fedotov, Georgii, 162, 252 glasnost, 243, 245, 250, 255, 270, 284, 383n34
fellow-traveler, 12, 19–21, 27, 29, 32–35, 37, Glavlit. See Chief Directorate of Literature
39–41, 46–48, 52, 53, 55, 58, 59, 60, 76, 101, (Glavlit)
102, 103 Glavnoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie (Main
Fel’zen, Iurii (Nikolai Freidenshtein), 144, Political Administration, GPU), 18, 19
160–61, 364n103 glottogenesis, 131, 132, 136
First Five-Year Plan, 44, 55, 76, 90 Glushkova, Tatiana, 259, 260, 299
Fischer, Ernst, 111, 112 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 115, 129, 133,
formalism, xiii, xv, 3, 18, 25, 28–30, 32, 56, 143, 173, 223
64–90, 96, 99–100, 104–5, 107, 110, 117, 119, Gogol, Nikolai, 28, 38, 66, 72, 76, 82, 83–88, 96,
125, 128–30, 141, 166–67, 172–76, 199, 212, 101, 107, 146, 147, 158, 179, 180, 220, 281, 314,
230–35, 238, 245–46, 273, 319; Russian, xii, 315, 316, 342n47
46, 64–77, 88–89, 134–35, 147–49, 150, 234, Gol’dshtein, Aleksandr, 291, 303
248, 271, 272, 322, 341n24, 359nn29–30 Golomshtok, Igor’, 279, 280, 312
Forsh, Olga, 94, 95 Golubkov, Mikhail, xiv, xv
“forty-year-olds” (sorokaletnie), 215–17, 260, Gorbachev, Georgii, 50, 52
262, 300 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 250, 256, 257
Foucault, Michel, xii, 248, 309, 321, 388n26 Gorbatov, Boris, 171, 185, 198
Frankfurt School, 112, 384n9 Gorbov, Dmitrii, 27, 29, 42, 52, 53, 54, 56, 145
Frank-Kamenetskii, Izrail, 133–38, 141, 143, Gorenshtein, Fridrikh, 266, 294
350n55, 351nn58–59, 352n74, 354n98 Goricheva, Tatiana, 229, 374n56
Freidenberg, Olga, 133–36, 138–43, 350n55, Gorky, Maxim, 3, 10, 13, 15, 16, 24, 25, 26, 40,
350n57, 351nn59–60, 352n70, 352n74, 352n79, 41, 47, 52, 62–63, 93–97, 100, 103–6, 110, 114,
352n81, 353n89, 353n92, 354nn97–100, 116, 133, 154, 167, 180, 199, 220, 241, 336n97,
355nn104–5 339nn78–79, 384n9
Freud, Sigmund, 29, 30, 53, 65, 78, 80–82, 87, Gorodetskii, Sergei, 5, 24
88–89, 148, 246, 248, 291, 307, 316–17, 358n25; Gosizdat (State Publishing House), 15, 16, 18,
Freudianism, 30, 53, 80, 248, 343n50. See also 26, 332n48, 333n3
psychoanalysis Granin, Daniil, 185, 190, 215, 257
Friche, Vladimir, 79, 110, 242, 318 Great Patriotic War, the, 167–68, 176, 190, 259,
Furmanov, Dmitr,y 96, 198 300
INDEX  399
Gribachev, Nikolai, 176, 185, 188 intelligentsia, xii, 1, 2, 8, 12, 15, 22, 39, 44, 46,
Grigor’ev, Apollon, 147; the literary prize in his 62, 87, 154, 170, 171, 204–5, 211,216, 226,
name, 292 231, 250–51, 253–56, 258–59, 282, 287–88,
Gromov, Pavel, 169, 366n20 292, 294, 297, 299, 301, 306, 315–18, 321;
Grossman, Leonid, 172, 173 bourgeois, 7, 11, 58; dissident, 232; liberal,
Grossman, Vasilii, 190, 301 185, 191, 210, 213, 284, 289, 300; nineteenth-
Groys, Boris, 178, 227, 228, 264, 280, 294, 312, century, 234, 244; postrevolutionary, 232;
374n60, 382n32 prerevolutionary, 232; proletarian, 12;
Gruzdev, Il’ia, 23, 25, 26 revolutionary, 259; Western-oriented, 209
Gudkov, Lev, 244, 295, 307, 318, 389n31 internationalism, 69, 110, 113, 170, 177, 195, 206
Gulag, 82, 221, 252 Internatsional’naia literatura (periodical), 164, 186
Gul’, Roman, 270, 273, 283–84, 383nn34–35 intuitivism, 53, 56
Gumilyov, Nikolai, 4, 5, 6, 251 Ioffe, Ieremeia, 139–40, 353n82
Günther, Hans, 312, 315 irrationalism, 139, 201
Gurvich, Abram, 107, 175, 176, 346n74 Isakovskii, Mikhail, 63, 167, 188
Iser, Wolfgang, 244, 388n28
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 29, 70, 74, 77, Iskusstvo kommuny (periodical), 7, 8, 9, 13
100, 113, 115, 117, 123, 124, 334n54, 339n10, Iudin, Pavel, 101, 112, 113, 351n65
346n3; Hegelianism, 29, 335n54 Iunost’ (periodical), 186, 196, 199, 222, 253,
Hemingway, Ernest, 298, 313 378n14
hermeneutics, 130, 231, 320 Iuzovskii, Iosif, 168, 175, 176, 367n47
Herzen, Alexander, xiv, 4, 11, 232, 245 Ivan the Terrible, 198, 203
Herzfelde, Wieland, 98, 102 Ivanov, Anatolii 202, 206, 222, 254
heteroglossia, 121, 126–27, 248 Ivanov, Boris, 224, 373nn50–51, 374n60
historical materialism, 231, 240, 244 Ivanov, Georgii, 5, 6, 151
Hohendahl, Peter, ix–x, xi Ivanov, Viacheslav, 3, 312, 316
Homer, 115, 116, 118, 133, 350n55 Ivanov, Viacheslav V., 220, 234–35, 237, 248, 315
humanism, 53, 73, 114, 130, 131, 155, 193, 257 Ivanov, Vsevolod, 23, 26, 33, 39, 40, 41, 95, 96
Ivanova, Nataliia, 216, 217, 258, 260, 262, 289,
Iakovlev, Aleksandr, 209, 213, 300 292, 293, 295
Iakovlev, Boris, 174, 175 Ivanov-Razumnik (presud. Razumnik
Iakovlev, Iakov, 23, 333n2 Vasilievich Ivanov), 4–5
Iakubinskii, Lev, 94, 128 Ivnev, Riurik, 4, 6
Iakubovskii, Georgii, 27, 35, 36, 42 Izvestiia (periodical), 56, 93
Iampol’skii, Mikhail, 314–15, 388n25
ideal hero, the, 183, 187, 188 Jakobson, Roman, 67, 68, 69, 70, 75, 89, 147–49,
ideinost’ (ideological content; ideological 150, 230, 232, 237, 270, 271, 281, 339n4,
correctness), 167, 211 350n51, 356n5, 358n27, 376n22, 381nn4–5
Il’f, Ilya 2; and Evgeny Petrov, 310 Jauss, Hans Robert, 318, 388n28
imaginism, 3, 6, 7, 330n4 Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, 175, 177
impressionism, 3, 4, 7, 65, 214, 289–92, 297, Joyce, James, 91, 93, 97, 98–100, 115, 153, 157,
359n30 159, 166, 344n31, 348n31, 365n108
industrialization, 21, 44, 55, 90, 203, 259 Jung, Carl, 246, 307
Inostrannaia literatura (periodical), 186, 253,
388n27 Kabakov, Ilya, 228, 309
Institute of Philosophy, 112, 113, 114, 315 Kalinin, Fedor, 9, 13
Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History Kamenskii, Vasilii, 7, 331n14
(IFLI), 109, 120 Kamianov, Viktor, 214, 217
Institute of Russian Literature (IRLI), 309, 322 Kant, Immanuel, 74, 77, 92, 113, 346n3;
Institute of World Literature (IMLI), or Gorky Kantianism, 65; neo-Kantianism, 53, 80, 247
Institute of World Literature, 172, 189, 197, Kataev, Valentin, 2, 199, 205, 218
301, 322, 388n27 Kaverin, Veniamin, 23, 24, 26, 47, 168, 185, 187
400  INDEX
Kazarkin, Aleksandr, xiv, xv Kuritsyn, Viacheslav, 260, 263, 264, 266–67,

Kazin, Aleksandr, 265–66, 380n54 288, 293, 294, 296–97, 308, 385n28, 388n27
Kazintsev, Aleksandr, 213, 260, 372n16 Kusikov, Aleksandr, 4, 6
Kerzhentsev, Platon, 9, 104 Kuzmenko, Iurii, 209, 241–42, 244
Kharms, Daniil, 225, 314, 374n53 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 5, 6, 29
Khlebnikov, Velimir, 8, 94, 96, 149, 150, 174, Kuz’minskii, Boris, 288, 293, 296
221, 314, 331n14 Kuznetsov, Feliks, 209, 217, 259, 299
Khodasevich, Vladislav, 3, 146, 149, 150, 151, Kuznitsa (periodical), 10, 34, 36
155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 225, 226, 251, 359n29, Kuznitsa (The Smithy; literary group), xiii,
360n36, 360n38, 361n54, 363nn86–87 9–10, 27, 34, 35–36, 38, 39, 41, 46, 332n44
Kholodov, Efim, 175, 177
Khomyakov, Aleksei, 147, 211 Lakshin, Vladimir, 192, 259
Khrushchev, Nikita, xiv, 184, 185, 186, 189–91, Latynina, Alla, 208, 218, 257, 258, 287, 288
193, 251, 254, 272, 313 Lavrenev, Boris, 33, 168
Kireev, Ruslan, 216, 301 Lebedev-Polianskii, Pavel (Valer’ian Polian-
Kirillov, Vladimir, 9, 35 skii), 6, 9, 14, 24, 46, 61, 332n45, 332n48
Kirpotin, Valerii, 98, 103, 104, 120, 172, 173 Lef (periodical), 26, 30, 31–33, 35, 37, 55, 57
Klychkov, Sergei, 40–41, 58, 61, 62 Left Front of the Arts, the (LEF), xiii, 13, 18,
Klyuev, Nikolai, 4, 5, 39, 40, 41, 58, 61, 62 20, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35–36, 46, 50, 55–58, 62,
Knipovich, Evgeniia, 168, 373n40 149, 205
Kochetov, Vsevolod, 185, 194, 196–98, 200, 202 Leiderman, Naum, 313, 393
Kogan, Pyotr, 24, 34 Lelevich, Grigorii, 27, 37, 335n82
kolkhoz literature, 41, 42, 58, 59–61, 63, 185, Lenin, Vladimir, xiv, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16,
188, 193–94 17, 18, 20, 31, 45, 77, 81, 93, 98, 101, 111, 112,
Komsomol, 25, 34, 35, 194, 202, 253; literature 113, 117, 185, 201, 223, 242, 257, 300, 341n30,
of the, 22, 36, 37, 39, 41, 79 342n40
Kontinent (periodical), 279, 280, 282, 292, 293, Leningrad (periodical), xiv, 167, 169, 171, 180
382n29 Leningrad State University (LGU), 172, 227
Kopetskii, Leontii, 148, 358n26 Leonov, Leonid, 33, 40, 58, 210, 254, 363n90
Korneichuk, Aleksandr, 164, 182 Lermontov, Mikhail, 71, 86, 87, 96, 134,
Korolenko, Vladimir, 3, 9, 15 156–62, 172, 245, 362n77, 362n80, 363n81,
Korostelev, Oleg, 356n9, 365n110 363nn83–84, 364n100, 364n103, 365nn105–6,
Korotich, Vitalii, 251, 300 365n108, 365nn112–13
“kowtowing” (nizkopoklonstvo), 169–74 Leskov, Nikolai, 9, 66
Kozhinov, Vadim, 121, 129, 186, 202, 203, 208, Levitanskii, Iurii, 213, 372n16
209, 211–12, 213, 231, 254, 257, 259, 299, Lezhnev, Abram, 23, 27, 28, 29, 32, 41, 42, 52,
370n50, 372n16, 377n35 53, 54, 56
Krasnaia nov’ (periodical), xv, 16, 22, 27, 29, 45, Libedinskii, Iurii, 37, 49 57, 110
47, 53, 56, 78, 107, 145, 164 Lichutin, Vladimir, 300, 301
Kristeva, Julia, 129, 131 “life building” (zhiznestroenie), 7, 8, 31, 50, 56
Kriticheskaia massa (periodical), 291, 293, 304, 321 Lifshits, Mikhail, xii, 109, 111–14, 116–17, 119,
Krivulin, Viktor, 224–25, 227, 289, 303, 308, 120, 122, 143, 185, 187, 190, 201, 346n4, 347n9
374n52, 374n56, 374n59, 375n62, 388n27 Likhachev, Dmitry, 231, 257, 315
Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 8, 331n14, 350n53 Likhonosov, Viktor, 214, 300
Krupin, Vladimir, 218, 299 Limonov, Eduard, 225, 252, 274, 275, 285, 297,
kulak, 22, 25, 47, 48; kulak literature, 42, 58, 299, 314
60–62 linguistics, 68, 69, 72, 128, 131–32, 140–41, 148,
Kulakov, Vladislav, 289, 313 233–37, 248–49, 271, 349n39, 358n27
Kuniaev, Stanislav, 209, 212, 213, 254, 259, 300, Lipovetsky, Mark, 260, 262, 263, 264, 266, 309,
301, 371n6, 372n16 313, 380n45
Kurbatov, Valentin, 213, 372n16 Litauer, Emiliia, 150, 359n33
Kurchatkin, Anatolii, 216, 301 literature-centrism, ix, xi, xii, 14, 228, 295, 317
INDEX  401
“literature of fact” (literatura fakta), 31, 33, 50, Marxism, xi, xii, xiv, 6, 35, 58, 60, 65–67, 72,
55, 56, 57 76–80, 82, 86–87, 103, 109, 115–20, 141, 143,
Literaturnaia gazeta (periodical), 47, 53, 93, 94, 95, 195, 197, 200–201, 209, 231, 234, 242–43, 246,
96, 107, 111, 119, 120, 172, 175, 176, 179, 180, 320–21; Marxist criticism, 1, 11–14, 29, 72,
181, 186, 188, 191, 209, 241, 253, 254, 258, 262, 197; Marxist theory, 111, 120
264, 266, 288 Marxism-Leninism, 60, 73, 78–79, 98, 110–18,
Literaturnaia Rossiia (periodical), 187, 192, 253, 178, 209, 231
284, 370n47, 383n34 Maslov, Sergei, 227, 228
Literaturnoe obozrenie (periodical), 207, 241, 291, mass media, 251, 254, 304, 317
315, 317 materialism, 77–78, 81, 82, 88, 318, 341n31
Literaturnyi kritik (periodical), xii, xiii, 92, Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 7, 8, 13, 18, 27, 30, 31,
101–2, 107–9, 112–13, 115, 117–20, 123, 143, 36, 47, 53, 55, 77, 98, 119, 149, 187, 198, 314,
347n7, 348n28, 349n38 331n14
literaturovedenie (literary studies; literary schol- Medvedev, Pavel, 71, 72–73, 74, 82, 129, 248,
arship), ix, xii, 112, 124, 148, 281, 354n93 339n11, 341n24, 359n33, 377n36
Litfront (literary group within RAPP), 47, 50, Meilakh, Boris, 176, 178
51, 52 Meilakh, Mikhail, 225, 374n53
Livak, Leonid, 144, 356n2, 356n5 Meletinsky, Eleazar, 231, 237, 245
Lobanov, Mikhail, 202, 204–5, 210–11, 212, “men of the sixties” (shestidesiatniki), 251,
254, 299 260–61, 264
Losev, Aleksei, 142, 390n40 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 2, 15, 157–58, 159, 160,
Losev, Lev, 276, 313 311, 360n36, 362n77, 364n92
Lotman, Iurii, 73, 142, 235–39, 246, 248, 307, Meshchaninov, Ivan, 143, 355n105
311, 313, 321, 354nn99–100, 388n26, 390n40 Meshcheriakov, Nikolai, 16, 26, 333n3
Lukács György, xii, 109–20, 122–24, 127, 139, metaphysics, 65, 72, 86, 133, 211, 213, 224, 226,
142, 143, 243, 244, 347n7, 347n11, 347n13, 266
348n28, 376n24 Metchenko, Aleksei, xiv, 209
Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11–12, 13, 16, Metrodor (periodical), 142, 229
20, 22, 32–33, 75, 92, 101, 111, 112, 335n68 Metropol’ (almanac), 208, 218, 320
Lunts, Lev, 23, 24–26, 27 “metropolitanism” (stolichnost’), 160, 161
Lyotard, Jean-François, 130, 309 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 105, 176, 177, 210;
“lyric,” the (lirika), 117, 119, 120, 217, 245; Meyerholdism, 105
“lyricists” and “physicists,” clash between, Mezhirov, Aleksandr, 186, 300
186, 235, 248 Mikhailovsky, Nikolai, 3, 192
Mikhalkov, Sergei, 174, 254
Maguire, Robert, xv, 339n9 Mirsky, Dmitry (Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky),
Makanin, Vladimir, 216, 217, 266, 292, 301, 98, 116, 149, 151, 360n38, 360n40
373n34 Mitin zhurnal (periodical), 225, 308
Makar’ev, Ivan, 49, 52 mladofilologi (young philologists), 320, 389n34
Makarov, Aleksandr, 173–74, 176 Mochul’skii, Konstantin, 2, 146, 365n6
Maksimov, Vladimir, 279, 280, 300, 382n29 modernism, 50, 55, 67, 99, 119, 123, 127, 130,
Malenkov, Georgii, 167, 175, 180, 181 144, 145, 157, 161, 188, 205, 209–10, 212–13,
Mandelstam, Osip, 2, 5, 29, 198, 218, 221, 223, 217–19, 226, 263, 290, 294, 301, 304, 314
259, 279, 312, 314, 330n2, 331n10, 382n23, Molodaia gvardiia (periodical), 34, 53, 164, 187,
382n26, 387n13 194–96, 200, 202, 206, 210, 222, 264, 265, 288,
Marcel, Gabriel, 144, 145 299, 300, 370n47, 371n7
Marchenko, Alla, 199, 214, 259 Molodaia gvardiia (publishing house), 307, 313,
Markov, Dmitrii, 208–9, 272 371n7
Marr, Nikolai, 96, 131–33, 136, 139, 140, 141, Molodaia gvardiia (The Young Guard; literary
142, 143, 350n51, 350n53, 350n57, 351n58, group), 34, 36, 38
352n73, 353nn89–90, 354n98, 355n101, Molotov, Vyacheslav, 19, 171
355n105 Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers
(MAPP), 34, 35, 37, 335n83
402  INDEX
Moscow (romantic) conceptualism, 219, 227, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (NLO; publish-
228, 229 ing house), 306, 313, 319, 389n29
Moscow (State) University, 114, 172, 241 Novyi Lef (periodical), 30, 53, 55, 56
Moscow-Tartu School, xii, 233–37, 247, 349n41, Novyi mir (periodical), xiv, 27, 47, 48, 53, 60, 75,
390n40 108, 164, 167, 173, 174, 176, 184–85, 187–206,
Moskva (periodical), 253, 288, 371n7 214, 222, 241, 251, 252, 253, 254, 257, 258, 263,
277, 288, 292, 293, 317, 320, 371n12
Nabokov, Vladimir (Sirin), 145, 149, 153, 155, Novyi zhurnal (periodical), 270, 273, 275, 283,
160, 251, 265, 270–72, 275, 277, 278, 290, 301, 380n3
312, 356n3, 364n100, 381nn5–6, 387n13 Nusinov, Isaac, 53, 58, 101, 102, 172, 173, 174,
Na literaturnom postu (periodical), 37, 47, 53, 146 345n56, 366n26
Na postu (On Guard; literary group), 20–21,
22, 27–29, 32, 33, 34–39, 41–42, 46, 48, 51–52, obrazovanshchina ([the reign of] morally empty
332n44 education), 204, 210
Na postu (periodical), 20, 22, 26, 34–35, 45 October Revolution, 1, 2, 4, 9, 10, 11, 95, 150,
Narkompros. See People’s Commissariat for 152
Education (Narkompros) Ogonek (periodical), 192, 251, 252, 253, 320,
narodnichestvo (populism), 1, 4, 41; neo- 371n7
narodnichestvo 4 Oksenov, Innokentii, 5, 6
narodnik (populist), 2, 103 Oktiabr’ (October; literary group), 10, 34
narodnost’ (popular spirit; orientation toward Oktiabr’ (periodical), xiv, 34, 37, 53, 164, 167,
the people), 49, 50, 97, 104–6, 192, 194–95, 168, 172, 173, 174, 176, 179, 189, 192, 193, 194,
197, 203, 211 196–200, 202–3, 253, 258, 284, 288, 292, 293,
narratology, 233, 238, 248, 349n39 367n34
Nash sovremennik (periodical), 187, 196, 206, 209, Okudzhava, Bulat, 210, 218, 288, 314
222, 253, 284, 288, 300, 370n47, 371n7, 388n24 Olesha, Yuri, 205, 221, 314
National Bolshevism, 200, 299 Opoyaz. See Society for the Study of Poetic
National Socialism, 102, 105, 347n13 Language (Opoyaz)
nationalism, 35, 62, 69, 110, 113, 117, 120, 147, Oreshin, Pyotr, 40, 58, 61, 62
170, 177, 193, 195–96, 200–203, 209–13, 217, ornamentalism, 79, 96
222, 229, 231, 253–57, 280, 288, 294, 297–303, Orthodox Christianity (Russian), 66, 201, 222,
313 259, 299, 301, 309; “Orthodox Christian
Nekrasov, Viktor, 187, 252, 279, 285 Marxism,” 266, 380n54
Nemzer, Andrei, 260, 263, 287, 288, 289–90, orthodoxy: formalist, 69, 72, 82, 341n24; and
296, 383n5 literary sociologism, 141; and Marxist
Neverov, Aleksandr, 39, 41, 58 criticism, xii, 200; religious, 309; socialist
New Economic Policy (NEP), 6, 16, 17–23, 31, realist, 79, 217and Soviet criticism, 196, 200,
32, 34, 35, 37, 39–42, 43–44, 52, 53 309, 311
New Historicism, 319, 321, 322, 389n31 Osipov, Nikolai, 148, 358n25
Nezavisimaia gazeta (periodical), 293, 383n5 Osipov, Vladimir, 222, 229
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 85, 130, 316, 342n39, Osorgin, Mikhail, 2, 146, 150–51, 155, 360n41,
389n28 361n54, 361n63
Nikitin, Nikolai, 23, 40 Ostanin, Boris, 226–27, 228
Nikolaeva, Galina, 185, 188 Ostrovsky, Alexander, 32, 33
Nikonov, Aleksandr, 202, 206, 371n7 Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 176, 199
nonconformist, 219, 224–26, 228, 288, 314; Otsup, Nikolai, 6, 160
criticism and critics, 224–26, 228 Ovcharenko, Aleksandr xiv, 209
Novikov, Vasilii, xiv, 185 Ozerov, Vitalii xiv, 176, 185, 256
Novikov, Vladimir, 260, 293, 313
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (NLO; periodical), Pakentreiger, Solomon, 28, 53
64, 89, 291, 293, 304, 308, 317, 318, 320, Palievskii, Pyotr, 186, 212, 231, 301
321–22, 388nn25–28, 389n34 Panchenko, Dmitrii, 229, 373n47, 374n58
INDEX  403
Panferov, Fedor, 39, 47, 59, 61, 93, 95, 176 Pomerantsev, Vladimir, 185, 187, 188–90, 198,
Pan’kov, Nikolai, 315, 348n26 369n16
Papernyi, Vladimir, 228, 276, 312 Poplavsky, Boris, 161, 365n108
Paramonov, Boris, 291, 293, 384n9 Popov, Evgeny, 262, 308, 309
“Paris note” (parizhskaia nota), 156–57, 362n71 Posev (publishing house), 269, 279, 381n8
partiinost’ (party-mindedness), 11, 34, 49, 92, 111, “positive hero,” 108, 115, 180
182, 194, 199, 203, 208, 211 Pospelov, Gennadii, xii, 172
Pasternak, Boris, 149, 158, 177, 185, 187, 196, postmodernism, 130, 217–19, 261–67, 288,
218, 221, 252, 259, 273–74, 298, 311, 312, 313, 290–95, 301, 304, 308–10, 313, 317, 319,
331n14 380n45, 380n56, 382n32, 388n27
“patriotic” criticism, 200, 202, 298–302 poststructuralism, 129, 130, 237, 291, 302, 309,
Paustovsky, Konstantin, 167, 168, 185, 187 316–18, 319, 382n32, 388n26
“peasant-imitating writers” (muzhikovstvuiush- Potebnya, Alexander, 68, 100, 137, 339n13
chie), 31, 39, 40, 41, 42 Prague Linguistic Circle, 147, 148, 271, 350n51
Pechat’ i revoliutsiia (periodical), 3, 16, 27, 53, 57 Prague Spring, 207, 210
Pelevin, Viktor, 255, 388n27 Pravda (periodical), 19, 20, 22, 25, 52, 93, 95, 104,
People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkom- 105, 111, 164, 166, 175, 177, 179, 366n4
pros), 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 23, 25 Prigov, Dmitry, 228, 252, 255, 288, 308
perestroika, xi, xiv, 177, 183, 196, 207, 209, 229, Prishvin, Mikhail, 2, 47
240, 243, 245, 253–54, 256–58, 262, 264, 267, Proffer, Ellendea, 275, 382n16
287, 288, 312, 320 Prokhanov, Aleksandr, 254, 259, 296, 298, 299,
Pereval (group of writers), xiii, 18, 23, 27–30, 301, 302–3, 385n34, 385n41
33, 46, 52–55, 56, 58, 146, 198, 205; Pereval Prokof’ev, Aleksandr, 169, 210
critics, 26, 27–30, 38, 41, 51, 53–55, 102, 145 Proletkult, xi, xiii, 8–10, 12–15, 17, 30, 31, 34,
Pereverzev, Valerian, 52, 58, 76, 78, 79, 82, 35, 38, 43, 45, 55, 57, 58, 62, 79, 205, 331n21,
85–87, 110, 116, 117, 242, 318, 341n31 332n43, 332n45
Pertsov, Viktor, 30, 97, 98, 99, 165 Propp, Vladimir, 172, 174, 314, 319, 320, 353n89,
Pertsovskii, Vladimir, 216, 373n35 366n29
Petrov, Petre, 79, 340n18 Proskurin, Oleg, 311, 319
Petrushevskaya, Ludmila, 216, 255, 262, 266 Proskurin, Pyotr, 217, 254
phenomenology, 65, 216, 244, 317 Proust, Marcel, 30, 115, 145, 153, 155, 157, 159,
Piast, Vladimir, 2, 5 160–61
Pilnyak, Boris, 19, 24, 33, 35, 39, 40, 46, 48, 187 Prozorov, Valerii, xiv, xv
Pil’skii, Pyotr, 4, 146 psychoanalysis, 29, 30, 80, 81, 129, 134, 291,
Pirogov, Lev, 303, 386n41 307; psychoanalytic literary criticism, 65, 71,
Platonov, Andrei, 32, 46, 106–8, 167, 176, 177, 80–82, 86, 87–89, 148, 149, 316, 359n29. See
187, 221, 251, 346n75 also Freud, Sigmund
Plekhanov, Georgii, 11, 47, 77, 110, 334n54 Pumpianskii, Lev, 71, 84–85, 340n21, 342n47
Pletnev, Valerian, 9, 13 Pushkin, Alexander, 3, 7, 29, 38, 54, 56, 57,
pochvenniki, 201, 203–6, 253; neo-pochvenniki, 66, 68, 71, 78, 79, 82, 85, 86, 87, 96, 156–62,
194, 200 172, 173, 211, 220, 226, 231–32, 237, 258,
pochvennost’ (national orientation), 194 271, 280–85, 301, 309, 311, 313, 314, 316,
Podoroga, Valerii, 315, 317 318, 358n26, 362n72, 363nn86–87, 364n98,
Pogodin, Nikolai, 91, 176, 177 364n100, 364n103, 365n106, 365n108, 373n51
Pokrovskii, Mikhail, 16, 34 Putin, Vladimir, 295, 298, 299, 304
Polevoy, Boris, 176, 177, 185
Poliakova, Sofia, 142, 354n98 Rabelais, François, 109, 115, 121, 123–24, 129,
Polonskii, Viacheslav, 16, 27–29, 32, 38, 42, 48, 131, 142, 143, 248, 249, 348n25, 348n31,
52, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61 349n38, 355n104
polyglossia, 89, 147 Rabochaia vesna (Workers’ Spring; literary
polyphony, 75, 85, 121, 126–27, 215, 248, 340n22 group), 34, 36
Pomerants, Grigorii, 223, 224, 228 Rasputin, Valentin, 211, 214, 218, 244, 251, 254,
299, 301
404  INDEX
Rassadin, Stanislav, 259, 288, 293, 380n56, 383n4 Schiller, Friedrich, 49, 50, 113
realism, 2, 14, 28–30, 32, 36, 38, 43, 49–52, 56, Schlegel, Friedrich, 67, 122
65, 79, 115, 138, 141, 145, 166, 173, 177, 179, science fiction, 27, 252
189, 192, 213, 217, 218–19, 240, 262, 266, 273, Scythianism (Scythians), 4–5, 40, 89
280, 290, 292–93, 311, 313; antirealism, 205; Seifullina, Lidiia, 33, 41, 58
critical realism, 98, 136, 141, 261; neorealism, Selivanovskii, Aleksei, 37, 49, 52, 61
28 Sel’vinsky, Ilya, 167, 188
Reitblat, Abram, 255, 318 Semanov, Sergei, 202, 204
Remizov, Aleksei, 5, 62 semantic paleontology, 109, 131–43, 353n81,
Renaissance, the, 114, 116, 247, 346n4 353n89
Reviakin, Aleksandr, 42, 59, 61 semiotics, xiii, 73, 142, 233–39, 245–49, 289, 318,
revolutionary democrats, 21, 172, 191, 192, 197, 322, 376n22, 390n40
201, 204, 257 Serafimovich, Alexander, 52, 93, 94, 95
Revzin, Issak, 235, 237 Serapion Brothers, xiii, 23–29, 40
Rodnianskaia, Irina, 212, 214, 217, 259, 289, Shafarevich, Igor, 254, 284, 299
293, 372n19, 380n54 Shaginyan, Marietta, 6, 24, 26, 91, 95, 103, 176,
Rodov, Semyon, 9, 25, 37 185
Rohde, Erwin, 124, 354n98 Shakespeare, William, 78, 120, 136
romanticism, 28, 36, 38, 49, 51, 78, 178–79; Shalamov, Varlam, 221, 264, 294
revolutionary romanticism, 92, 103, 199 Shcheglov Iurii, 235, 310
Romashov, Boris, 174, 176, 177 Shcheglov, Mark, 185, 187, 190
Rozanov, Vasilii, 2, 147, 158, 222–23, 252, 281, Shcherbakov, Aleksandr, 163, 167
308, 363n81 Sheinker, Mikhail, 227, 228, 308
Rozanova, Mar’ya, 280–82, 285 Shershenevich, Vadim, 4, 6, 7
Rozental’, Mark, 101–2, 176, 345n56 Shklovsky, Viktor, xii, xv, 8, 25–27, 29, 30, 33,
Rozhdestvensky, Robert, 186, 199 35, 46, 66–69, 71, 73, 83, 134, 147, 148, 149,
Rubanov, G. I., 148, 358n26 150, 172, 290, 339nn11–13, 340n19, 346n7,
Rubinshtein, Lev, 227, 228, 252 356n5
Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians Sholokhov, Mikhail, 48, 61, 124, 210, 220–21,
(RAPM), 44, 45 229, 300
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers Shpet, Gustav, 121, 124–26, 235, 349n34
(RAPP), xi, xii, xiii, xv, 10, 14, 30, 37, 44–62, Shtein, Aleksandr, 174, 176
76, 79, 101–2, 106, 107, 108, 110, 117, 162, 171, Shukshin, Vasilii, 211, 214–15, 241, 244
198–99, 205, 332n44, 337n19 Shvarts, Elena, 225, 227, 374n58
Russian Organization of Proletarian-Kolkhoz Silver Age, xiii, 17, 50, 223, 225, 226, 275, 311,
Writers (ROPKP), 59–61 316
Russkaia mysl’ (periodical), 2, 15, 279, 320 Simonov, Konstantin, 120, 171, 174, 176, 185,
Russkoe bogatstvo (periodical), 2, 15 187, 188, 190, 191
Ryklin, Mikhail, xiii, 236, 291, 316, 317 Sintaksis (periodical), 279, 280–81, 285, 382n32
Sinyavsky, Andrei (Abram Tertz’), 184, 197, 199,
Said, Edward, 148, 320 219–21, 252, 274, 279, 280–85, 286, 290, 381n7
Sakharov, Andrei, 279, 299 skaz, 26, 39, 83, 84, 96, 220, 221
samizdat, 212, 219, 221–22, 224–25, 227–29, 240, Slavnikova, Ol’ga, 290, 295
261, 280, 290, 373n45, 373n50, 374n52, 389n36 Slavophilism, 62, 201, 211, 304, 370n45, 371n12;
Samoilov, David, 190, 213, 300, 372n16 neo-Slavophilism, 195, 259
Sarnov, Benedikt, 218, 259, 288 Slonim, Marc, 2, 146, 151, 272, 273–74, 360n38
satire, 4, 160, 180, 184 Slonimskii, Mikhail, 23, 25
Sats, Igor, 112, 201, 346n7 Slutsky, Boris, 186, 300
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 233, 248, 249 Smena vekh (Change of Signposts; émigré
Savitsky, Pyotr, 148, 358n26–27 ideological current), 19, 21–22, 29
Sazonova, Yuliya, 144, 356n2 Smirnov, Igor’, 291, 316, 389n31
Scheler, Max, 129, 340n22 Smirnov, Nikolai, 28, 29
Schelling, Friedrich, 72, 74, 340n22 sobornost’ (conciliarity; conciliarism), 265, 309
INDEX  405
“social mandate” (sotsial’nyi zakaz), 31, 57–58, Surikov Circle, 41; surikovets (member of the
156 Surikov Circle), 39
socialist realism, 36, 43, 49–50, 52, 65, 79, Surkov, Aleksei, 47, 164, 185, 188
90–108, 110–11, 113–17, 119, 166, 177, 178–79, Surov, Anatolii, 174, 175, 176
181, 183, 184, 189, 195, 197–99, 208–9, 211, Surovtsev, Iurii, 207, 209, 213, 242–43
217, 218, 230, 245, 257–59, 261, 264–65, Sviatopolk-Mirsky, Dmitry. See Mirsky,
280–82, 302, 310, 314, 343n5, 371n2 Dmitry
Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) 3, 24; and symbolism, 3, 5, 6, 18, 26, 28, 35, 40, 59, 62, 65,
literary criticism, 3–7 72, 81, 85, 86, 88, 89, 96, 145, 273, 310
Society for the Study of Poetic Language
(Opoyaz), 32, 65, 69, 71, 147 Takhtadzhian, Suren, 229, 354n100, 375n62
sociology of literature, 239–45, 249, 318, 386n4 Tamarchenko, David, 102, 141
Sofronov, Anatolii, 174, 175, 185, 371n7 tamizdat, 222, 223, 240, 272–74, 281, 282,
Sokolov, Sasha, 265, 274, 275, 285, 309 374n52, 381n8
Soloukhin, Vladimir, 214, 299 Tarasenkov, Anatolii, 47, 174, 178
Solovyov, Vladimir, 5, 147, 157–58, 252 Tarkovsky, Arsenii, 213, 372n16
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 184, 185, 187, 196, Tendriakov, Vladimir, 185, 219
199, 200, 204, 208, 210, 218, 222, 232, 252, Terapiano, Iurii, 152, 153
274, 276, 277, 279, 280, 283–84, 293, 299, 313, Tertz, Abram. See Sinyavsky, Andrei
381n8, 382n29, 383n35 “thankists” (blagodaristy), 117, 136
Sorokin, Vladimir, 252, 255, 262, 291, 294, 301, Thaw, the, xi, xiii, 102, 108, 184–85, 187–90,
306, 317 196, 198, 199, 200, 208, 223, 250, 251, 254, 257,
Sots Art, 263–64, 267, 311, 382n32 259–60, 264, 270, 272, 312–14, 318, 320
Sovremennye zapiski (periodical), 145, 154, 155, “thick” journal, 2, 16, 222, 252–54, 262–63, 279,
160, 270, 356n8 289, 292, 297, 306–7, 380n45
stadialism (stadial’nost’), 132, 133, 138, 140, 141, Third Wave, of emigration (tret’ia volna), 252,
142 261, 270, 274–86
Stagnation, Era/epoch of, xi, 177, 185, 217, 231, Tihanov, Galin, 89, 340n16
249, 258, 260, 265, 297, 312, 313, 314 Tikhonov, Nikolai, 6, 23, 185
Stalin, 184–86, 188–90, 192, 197, 203, 230–31, Timofeev, Leonid, xii, 99–100
234, 243, 245, 257, 258, 300, 312, 313; de- tipichnost’ (typicality), 92, 182
Stalinization, 185, 191–92, 201; Stalinism, Tolstoy, Aleksei, 33, 35, 48, 198
44, 89, 90, 178, 183, 190, 194, 196, 212, 213, Tolstoy, Leo (Lev), xiv, 7, 11, 28, 29, 30, 33, 37,
257, 298, 309, 341n27; Stalinist, 191, 196, 201, 38, 51, 53, 66, 70, 71, 73, 83, 86, 87, 89, 96, 99,
212–13, 257, 259, 299; re-Stalinization, xiv, 101, 111, 115, 118, 120, 127, 133, 155, 157, 161,
185, 196, 198 172, 174, 204, 222, 223–24, 231, 242, 265, 314
State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN), Tomashevsky, Boris, 69, 70, 71, 74, 176, 230,
124, 125 340n17
Stavskii, Vladimir, 47, 49, 107 Toporov, Vladimir, 142, 237, 311
Stel’makh, Valeriia, 239, 240 transrational (zaumnyi), 8, 36
Stenich, Valentin, 97, 99 Tretyakov, Sergei, 30, 33, 55
Stepanian, Karen, 260, 265, 293, 294, 309, Trifonov, Iurii, 200, 213, 215–17, 219, 227, 244,
384n15 300, 372n16, 372n25, 373n40, 374n59
Stepun, Fyodor, 2, 152–53, 154, 273–74, 360n38 Trotsky, Leon (Lev), 12, 13, 18–22, 24, 25, 28,
Stratanovskii, Sergei, 227, 374n56 32, 36, 37, 38, 39–40, 41, 45, 48, 53, 61, 76–77,
Strelianyi, Anatolii, 252, 300 81–82, 110, 112, 174, 206, 316, 333n3
structuralism, xii, 128–30, 136, 142, 148, 229, Trubetzkoy, Nikolai, 147, 148, 233
231, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 243, 247, 248, 249, Tsekh poetov (Guild of Poets), 3, 5
271, 291, 317, 322, 358n23, 359n27, 375n7 Tsetlin, Mikhail, 152, 360n40, 360n46
Strugatsky, Arkadii and Boris, 310, 373n44 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 187, 218, 221, 270, 279,
Struve, Gleb, 144, 160, 272, 286, 356n2 356n5, 360n40
Struve, Pyotr, 2, 144, 160 Tsyrlin, Lev, 140, 141, 353n92
Subotskii, Lev, 176, 177 Turbin, Vladimir, 186, 259
406  INDEX
Turgenev, Ivan, 71, 87, 147 Voronskii, Aleksandr, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27–30,
Tvardovsky, Alexander, 63, 108, 184, 188, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 45, 51, 52, 53, 58,
190–91, 193, 195–96, 200, 202, 206, 251, 257, 78, 102, 110, 187, 198; voronshchina (Voronskii
258, 277 influence), 21, 27
Tynianov, Yuri, xii, xv, 24, 27, 67, 69, 84, 134, Voznesensky, Andrei, 186, 199, 212, 213, 225,
147, 150, 232, 234, 245, 246, 359n30 300, 372n16
“vulgar sociologism,” in literary studies, 82, 86,
underground culture (unofficial culture), 101, 102, 110, 112, 117, 134, 136, 141, 143, 162,
219–20, 222–24, 226–27, 228, 245, 252, 264, 166, 345n6
265, 287, 289, 294, 313 Vvedenskii, Aleksandr, 225, 374n53
Union of Soviet Writers, xi, 15, 43, 46, 52, Vygotsky, Lev, 78, 220, 235, 246, 341n32
91, 92, 102, 107, 111, 162, 166, 167, 168, 169, Vykhodtsev, Pyotr, xiv, 209
171, 172, 175, 190, 196, 219, 221, 232, 253, Vysotskii, Vladimir, 227, 313, 388n25
256; First Congress of, xiv, 110, 113, 114,
116, 120, 162, 312; Fourth Congress of, 184; war prose, 185, 199, 219
Second Congress of, 183, 185, 187, 188; Third Wellek, René, 230, 246
Congress of, 185, 189 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 129, 130, 134, 349n43
Usievich, Elena, 112, 117, 119, 120, 168, 347n15 World War II, xvi, 163–64, 169, 244, 269, 270,
Uspensky, Boris, 238–39, 246 272, 356n5
utopia (utopianism), 8, 13, 32, 50, 55, 90, 103,
123, 249, 251, 260, 264, 348n31 xenophobia, 201, 290, 299, 302
Vail’, Pyotr, 260, 263, 275, 276–77, 280, 290, 312 Zaitsev, Boris, 159, 270
Vaiskopf, Mikhail, 312, 314 Zaitsev, Kirill, 146–47, 357n15
Vampilov, Aleksandr, 215, 217 Zalygin, Sergei, 214, 251, 252
Vardin, Ilarion, 21, 37 Zamoshkin, Nikolai, 27, 42, 53
“varnishing” (lakirovka), 168, 178, 180, 182, 185, Zamyatin, Evgeny, 15, 24, 27, 28, 29, 46, 48, 62,
188, 199; “antivarnishers” (antilakirovshchiki), 79, 252
188 Zenkevich, Mikhail, 5, 6
Varshavskii, Iakov, 175, 177 Zhdanov, Andrei, xiv, 49, 103, 110, 115, 167,
Varshavskii, Vladimir, 152, 153, 155, 360n47, 169–71, 175, 179–80, 197; zhdanovshchina
361n54 (Zhdanov influence), 170
Veidle, Vladimir, 144, 146, 270, 356n2, 360n36, Zhirmunsky, Viktor, 74, 142, 172, 173, 174, 176,
380n56 353n81, 355n101, 355n103
Vertov, Dziga, 98, 338n54 Zhmud’, Leonid, 229, 354n100, 375n62
Veselovsky, Alexander, 172–74 Zholkovsky, Alexander, 235, 237, 314
Vikulov, Sergei, 202, 206, 254, 370n47, 371n7 Zhukovsky, Vasilii, 147, 311
village prose, 185, 190, 193–94, 200, 202, Zinoviev, Grigory, 21, 37, 45
210–12, 214–15, 217, 219, 254, 264, 300, 307, Zola, Émile, 115, 118, 136, 220
372n24 Zolotonosov, Mikhail, 260, 288, 291, 307, 316
Vinogradov, Igor’, 192, 194, 202, 370n28 Zolotusskii, Igor’, 208, 212, 218, 258, 259
Vishnevsky, Vsevolod, 94, 97–98, 176, 198 Zonin, Aleksandr, 37, 52, 53
Vladimov, Georgii, 209, 222, 292, 381n8, 384n11 Zorin, Andrei, 260, 263, 291, 307, 319
Voinovich, Vladimir, 252, 274, 285 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 23, 81, 94, 167, 218, 314
Voloshinov, Valentin, 71, 77, 80, 82, 89, 128, Zvezda (periodical), xiv, 34, 105, 167, 169, 171,
235, 248, 377n36 173, 176, 180, 181, 292, 293, 378n14, 384n9

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(Pitt Russian East European) Evgeny Dobrenko, Galin Tihanov - A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism - The Soviet Age and Beyond (2011, University of Pittsburgh Press)

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A History of Russian Literary

Theory and Criticism

Jonathan Harris, Editor

University of Pittsburgh Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

9. Literary Criticism during the Thaw 184

We have used the Library of Congress system of transliteration of Russian

In the age of Enlightenment the concept of criticism cannot be separated from

higher echelons of power. This instrumentalization of literary criticism was another

The Intelligentsia, the Revolution, and the Civil War

The landscape of Russian criticism in the early post-October years is excep-

Socialist Revolutionary Criticism

method as “philosophical-ethical,” he described it even before the revolution thus:

cheniia (Department of Fine Arts of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment;

From Marxist to Party-based Criticism

Lunacharsky defined the difference between socialist (classless) and proletarian

The Problem of Cultural Legacy

The Institution of Criticism and Its Role

Literary Policy, Ideology, and “Kremlin Criticism”

The particular attention paid to the fellow-traveler wing of contemporary lit-

The Serapion Brothers as Critics in the First Period of NEP

tention to language, psychologism, everyday life, and tendencies in society. Because

The Literary Criticism of Pereval

i revoliutsiia. Voronskii’s long article “Freidizm i iskusstvo” (Freudianism and Art,

The Avant-Garde in Literary Criticism

The radical left-wing of literary criticism, represented by the journals Lef

criticism of the “backward” slogans of Lunacharsky and Voronskii remained consis-

The Literary Criticism of Na postu

with organizational shake-ups and the proclamation of a new aesthetic platform.

The Peasant Question in the Literary and

Literary Politics and Cultural Dynamics

RAPP and the Political Instrumentalization of Literary Criticism

Vladimir Ermilov wrote, “proletarian literature needs to be accompanied by criti-

ward conventional realist style can be regarded, to some extent, as an equivalent

“reflected”—using the methods of nineteenth-century realism—through the un-

The End of Pereval and the Crisis of the Fellow-Travelers

(Contemporaries, 1927), Literaturnye budni (Literary Workdays, 1929), and Razgovor

Social Mandate and the End of Left Art

Proletarian-Kolkhoz Criticism and the End of Peasant Literature

In 2001, the prominent post-Soviet journal of scholarship in the humanities, Novoe

of Poetic Language (Opoyaz), appealed to this revolutionary decade. Formalism of-

of the dominant cultural ideology sponsoring a weighty periodical to propagate its

Organizing the Literary World

Each of these four groups—formalists, Bakhtinians, Marxists, psychological

cal internationalism, many literary theorists were keen on discovering panhuman,

view, a higher-order authenticity residing in the very structure or movement of nar-

The Bakhtin Circle

sion to Marxist sociological criticism in 1927, was a classicist, quasi-symbolist theo-

The Sociological School and the Marxists

We can now turn to the heterogeneous group of materialists, fellow-travelers,

The Psychoanalytic Critics

A Gogol Practicum through Four Lenses

Marxists and Sociologists

Very different from both Eikhenbaum and Pumpianskii is the “Marxist-

The Psychoanalytic Method

The resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party

The Assertion of a Neutral Style

transparent, language excludes “illegally imported” and “dangerous” subtexts, and

heresy” accurately characterizes the situation in which “verbal rubbish” is identified

Dos Passos and Joyce, Montage or Composition?

In March 1933, on the initiative of Vsevolod Vishnevsky, a discussion took

Logocentrism or “Spontaneous Impressions”

The discussion on method and worldview, which took place in 1933–1934 on