Jonathan Brooks Platt, “Pushkin Now and Then: Images of Temporal Paradox in the 1937 Pushkin Jubilee”
The 1937 Pushkin jubilee has traditionally been interpreted as a cynical turn to Russian nationalist rhetoric on the eve of war, part of a general “great retreat” from the future-oriented myth of an international communist paradise back to the more emotionally resonant ideas of an eternal national spirit and a glorious collective past. In this essay, I will contend that the temporality of the jubilee was significantly more complicated than anything that can be expressed by the spatio-temporal metaphor of retreat. More sophisticated accounts of Stalinist culture in the 1930s suggest that the period witnessed an orientational shift, not form the future to the past, but from a radical to a conservative attitude towards time itself. Evolving away from an original iconoclastic or avant-garde temporal consciousness—founded on ideals of historical rupture, discontinuity, negation, novelty, and revelatory estrangement—Stalinism embraced the opposing, “monumentalist” principles of historical progress, continuity, affirmation, convention, and the accumulation and preservation of cultural value. However, the material of the 1937 jubilee suggests that this model of Stalinist temporality may also be inadequate. The different ways in which the propaganda campaign represented Pushkin’s immortal relevance exhibited both disjunctive and continuist temporalities. Indeed, one even finds examples of their paradoxical superimposition or synthesis. In support of this thesis, I examine the conceptual content of a wide variety of rhetoric and imagery produced for the jubilee, both in terms of its directly signifying surface and its deeper philosophical implications.
Sergei I. Zhuk, “Religion, ‘Westernization,’ and Youth in the ‘Closed City’ of Soviet Ukraine, 1964-84”
This paper is part of my research project about cultural consumption and identity formation in a big industrial city of Soviet Ukraine during late socialism before perestroika. This city, Dnepropetrovsk, was closed by KGB for visits of foreigners in 1959 because it became a location for one of the biggest missile factories in the Soviet Union. Given its “closed” sheltered existence, Dnepropetrovsk became a unique Soviet social and cultural laboratory in which various patterns of late socialism collided with the new Western cultural influences. The closed city of Dnepropetrovsk could be used as a micro model for an analysis of the entire closed Soviet society. In this sense it was a more typical Soviet city than the Westernized open cities of the USSR such as Moscow or Leningrad. Using archival documents, periodicals, personal diaries, and interviews as historical sources, this paper focuses on how different moments of cultural consumption among the youth of the Soviet “closed city” contributed to popular religiosity and various forms of religious identification.
Sofya Khagi, “From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens: Viktor Pelevin's Consumer Dystopia”
Boasting a rich tradition of utopian/dystopian fiction, Russian literature has seen the most recent burgeoning of the genre in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. This article examines Viktor Pelevin's Generation "P," one of the most conspicuous turn-of-the-century Russian novels, as an expression of dystopian imagination. I view Pelevin's work as marking a crucial watershed in the development of the genre in Russia. While dystopias written during perestroika, including Pelevin's own early work, were mainly preoccupied with the deconstruction of Soviet utopia, and with prognostications of the possible consequences of the country's breakdown, Generation "P" 'is the first major post-Soviet work to come to grips with the introduction of consumer capitalism and global pop culture. Following the termination of the Socialist experiment, one observes a retreat of militant collectivist dystopia, and a focus on the "consumer dream" as the remaining utopian venture. Generation "P" sets up the parameters for contemporary Russian techno-consumer dystopia and anticipates Pelevin's later works in the genre, as well as a veritable outburst of consumer dystopias produced in Russia during the first decade of the new millennium. The novel both builds upon and subverts traditional dystopian paradigms, offering a multilayered dystopian critique. I argue that, by portraying a self-perpetuating realized dystopia that subverts the saving qualities of art or erotic passion, implicates all the populace in the social impasse, fails to imagine ways of escape from the deadlock, and even develops its own monetary metaphysics, the novel, despite its dutiful ironies, and becoming bashfulness toward any claims to authority, reveals a more thorough social skepticism than its more solemn forebears.
Stephen M. Norris, “The Old Ladies of Postcommunism: Gennadii Sidorov’s Starukhi and the Fate of Russia”
This article analyzes Gennadii Sidorov's 2003 film Starukhi (Old Women) by focusing on three themes. As the author argues, the film is part of a longer cultural dialogue about the Russian village and its symbolic importance for understanding Russian nationhood. While Sidorov engages in this historic debate, his film also radically alters it by depicting a village without patriarchs, one inhabited instead by old women. Secondly, Starukhi offers a severe criticism about the nature of the post-Communist state and its interactions with provincial villages. Just as the film radically alters the debate over the Russian village, so too does it advocate a drastic separation between Russian villages and an oppressive, uncaring state. Finally, Sidorov’s film explores the dynamics of ethnic relations between the Russian women who live in the village and the Central Asian refugees who arrive there. This cinematic encounter between “us” and “them” provides not only a telling commentary on larger demographic and social issues, but also a message of toleration. Using mostly nonprofessional actors from the Kostroma village of Klokovo, Sidorov managed to film an ethnographic-like exploration of contemporary Russian life; or, as one Russian critic has termed it, “neo-neorealism.” In the end, the fictionalized yet very real old women provide a means for understanding how the past continues to matter but also for understanding how present changes might better Russia’s future.
Erik McDonald, “Russia’s Juvenal or Russia’s Horace? Nekrasov’s Satirical Personae”
At the beginning of Nekrasov’s poetic career, many Russian writers connected the genre of satire to the Roman satirists, especially Juvenal. During the 1840s Nekrasov wrote a series of poems, including the programmatic “Blessed is the unspiteful poet,” that were not satires in the Roman sense, but featured or advocated an angry and bilious Juvenalian persona. In this he followed Belinsky’s recommendation of Juvenal as a model for civic poetry, as well as an established tradition in Russian poetry that linked Juvenal, satire, bile (zhelch'), and anger/spite (zloba). In the late 1850s and 1860s, even as “satire” in Russian letters was treated less and less as an ancient genre and increasingly as a synonym of oblichenie, the “exposing” of social ills, Nekrasov planned a numbered cycle of satires that formally resembled Roman and neoclassical satires. The persona of these poems was a Horatian “smiling satirist,” no longer characterized by Juvenalian bile. Through this new persona Nekrasov participated in a widespread contemporary reaction against poetry as mere oblichenie, and he adapted to readers’ changing image of him at a time when Juvenalian railing against vice might have invited charges of hypocrisy. At the same time, by emulating the classical genre of satire, he attempted to create poetry that was at once topical and eternal.
Vladimir Wozniuk, “In the Shadow of the Anthill: Religious Faith, Individual Freedom, and the Common Good in the Thought of V. S. Solov’ev”
Vladimir S. Solov’ev, who was closely associated with Fedor M. Dostoevsky in the last years of the novelist’s life, believed Dostoevsky’s art aimed at the realization of a higher social ideal, anticipating an eventual perfect unity in and with God, or vseedinstvo. Dostoevsky used the literary metaphor of a human anthill to disparage Western political and economic values, which he believed promoted a false unity based on material considerations raised to the level of religion. This amounted to a renunciation of true unity in Christianity and threatened moral civilization, which Russia strove to preserve in its spiritual and social exceptionalism. Solov’ev appropriated the anthill metaphor while Dostoevsky lived and exploited it after he died, but abandoned Dostoevsky’s assumptions about Russian exceptionalism in favor of Christian ecumenicism and the rule of law. This essay explores Solov’ev’s deviation from Dostoevsky’s critique of Western liberalism by tracing his use of the anthill metaphor in his efforts to reconcile the requirements of individual freedom and the common good as he determined that the premises of Western liberalism did not require an abandonment of Christian faith.