Introduction: Carnival and Cultural Politics

Abstract

The question of relations between carnivalesque popular culture and the novel was one that was raised in the Soviet Union at a time when both phenomena were being subjected to strict regulation aimed at curtailing the oppositional tendencies implicit in each. The vestiges of the avant-garde, which had aimed to take up and organize the egalitarian impulses of popular culture and turn them into a force for the revolutionizing of social consciousness were finally being eradicated by the campaign against formal experimentation. The chief architect of a strategy to remind the avant-gardistes, the literary professions and the Soviet authorities of the popular base of parodic, anti-authoritarian, irreverent, materialistic culture was the famous cultural theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). A veritable flood of material about Bakhtin’s ideas has appeared in both Russia and the West in recent years and there is no need to provide yet another outline of his general theories here, but there has not been any serious attempt to present Bakhtin’s ideas in relation to the development of carnival culture in the Soviet modernist novel. However, the forms of Soviet culture, perhaps more obviously than other cultures of the time, display a clear dependence upon the changing institutional framework within which they developed.