Abstract
It has long been a commonplace to speak of the special role accorded to literature in Russia. From the Decembrist revolt onwards, Russia was remarkable for the contrast between the extreme backwardness of its social and political system and the remarkable intellectual intensity of one section of its educated elite. This Russian intelligentsia was denied any real involvement in social and political institutions; it therefore looked to imaginative literature to provide a forum for debate on all manner of social and political issues, from sex to national identity.
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Notes and References
M. Gor’kii, ‘O proze’ (1933), in Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, Moscow, 1947–53, vol. 26, p. 392. Note also Gorky’s story ‘Chitatel” (1898; ibid., vol. 2), where the author comes face to face with a highly demanding, even pitiless reader.
A. I. Nazarov, Oktiabr’ i kniga: Sozdanie sovetskikh izdatel’stv i formirovanie massovogo chitatelia 1917–1923, Moscow, 1968, p. 121.
The trade in pre-revolutionary books continued relatively freely until 1920, when book supplies all over the country were nationalized.
Nazarov, OktiaW i kniga, p. 81. Aleksandr Blok went so far as to insist that the old style of orthography be preserved.
Figures cited in Evgenii Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia: SotsiaVnye i esteticheskie predposylki retseptsii sovetskoi literatury, St Petersburg, 1997, p. 153. On publishing of the classics during the civil war and later in the Soviet period, see N. Dobrynina, Cherty dukhovnoi obshchnosti: Russkaia khu-dozhestvennaia literatura v chtenii mnogonatsional’nogo sovetskogo chitatelia, Moscow, 1983, esp. ch. 1.
V. Volkov, ‘The Limits of Propaganda: Soviet Power and the Peasant Reader in Early Soviet Russia’, in J. Raven (ed.), Non-Commercial Uses of Print, University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming, p. 329.
The sources for this and the previous paragraph include: M. Arbuzov, Knizhnaia torgovlia v SSSR, Moscow, 1976; Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929, Cambridge, 1985, esp. ch. 5; Nazarov, Oktiabr’ i kniga. Documents related to publishing in the early Soviet period are collected in the two volumes IzdateVskoe delo v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1972) and IzdateVskoe delo v SSSR (1923–1931) (Moscow, 1978).
Iu. Gorshkov, ‘Budushchnost’ kooperativnykh izdatel’stv: logika nas-toiashchego plius opyt proshlogo’, KIM, vol. 61, 1990, p. 69. Gorshkov adopts Glavlit’s categorization of private publishers into chastnokooperativnye, chast-noobshchestvennye, chastnokhoziaistvennye and avtorskie. He finds that the proportion of co-operatives proper rose steadily: in 1930 thirty of the remaining fifty-two non-state publishers had this form of organization.
The relationship between literature, publishing and the market in the 1920s has not been researched sufficiently. The importance of this topic is readily apparent in two recent bibliographical volumes edited by V. I. Kharlamov: Moskovskie i leningradskie knizhnye magaziny dvadtsatykh godov, St Petersburg, 1996, and Moskovskie i leningradskie izdateli i izdatel’stva dvadtsatykh godov, St Petersburg, 1997. A very revealing case-study is offered by D. M. Fel’dman in his dissertation ‘“Nikitinskie subbotniki” kak pisatel’skoe ob”edinenie i kooperativnoe izdatel’stvo v kontekste sovetskoi izdatel’skoi politiki i literaturnogo protsessa 1920–30-kh gg.’, Moscow, 1996.
A general statement of this position is provided by Katerina Clark in ‘The “Quiet Revolution” in Soviet Intellectual Life’, in S. Fitzpatrick et al (eds), Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, Bloomington, Ind., 1991.
For a revealing account of the Soviet censorship in its first years, see A. Blium, Za kulisami ‘ministerstva pravdy’: Tainaia istoriia sovetskoi tsenzury, St Petersburg, 1994. Michael S. Fox has looked specifically at Glavlit and its interaction with other institutions: see his ‘Glavlit, Censorship and the Problem of Party Policy in Cultural Affairs, 1922–28’, in Soviet Studies, vol. 44, no. 6, 1992, Note also M. V. Zelenov and M. Dewhirst’s,’ selected Bibliography of Recent Works on Russian and Soviet Censorship’ in Solanus, vol. 11, 1997.
By the time of the First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union, while lubki remained in ill repute, skazki had been accorded a place of sorts in the Soviet Marxist theory of literary history. Indeed, socialist realism, as presented in the most ambitiously historical speech at the Congress (Gorky’s), may be regarded as a dialectical synthesis of the fairy tale (an authentically popular, pre-modern form) and critical realism (an impeccably anti-capitalist mode of literature found in modern societies).
On library policy in the 1920s, see Blium, Za kulisami, ch. 3, and Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia, ch. 6. Debates on the subsequent history of the spetskhran (restricted access collection) are laid out in Dennis Kimmage (ed.), Russian Libraries in Transition: An Anthology of Glasnost Literature, Jefferson, Miss., 1992.
Fox, ‘Glavlit’, p. 1047.
For the full breakdown, see K. D. Muratova, Periodika po literature i iskusstvu za gody revoliutsii, Leningrad, 1933, pp. 32–3.
See esp. E. G. Elina’s excellent account of what she terms the ‘massovaia kritika’ of the 1920s in Literaturnaia kritika i obshchestvennoe soznanie v sovetskoi Rossii 1920-kh godov, Saratov, 1994.
Note, for example, A. Beletskii, ‘Ob odnoi iz ocherednykh zadach istoriko-literaturnoi nauki (izuchenie istorii chitatelia)’ (1922), in his Izbrannye trudy po teorii literatury, Moscow, 1964. This article raises several issues that are still current in literary theory. For example, Beletskii reflects on canonicity in the light of fluctuating taste, and adds that ‘all attempts to establish the aesthetic value of a literary work without reference to the ways in which it is perceived have so far proved unsuccessful’ (p. 29). In addition, the formalists took a great interest in mass literature, because they believed it expressed the underlying norms of a particular literary culture — and because, in their view, the ‘new’ forms of literature are secreted in the old. Shklovskii and Eikhenbaum also investigated the relationship between the market and the evolution of literary genres: see V. Shklovskii, Tret’ia fabrika, Moscow, 1926; and T. Grits, V. Trenin and M. Nikitin (under the editorial supervision of B. Eikhenbaum and V. Shklovskii), Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia (knizhnaia lavka A. F. Smirdina), Moscow, 1929. This interest in literature and the market was clearly stimulated by the conditions of cultural life in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, when literature and publishing had an extra-ordinarily close and intense relationship. The revised sociology of literature in post-Soviet Russia explicitly takes the legacy of the formalists as its starting point: see S. Kozlov’s introduction to Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 25, 1997.
For contemporary guides to this work, see M. A. Smushkova, Pervye itogi izucheniia chitatelia: Obzor literatury, Moscow and Leningrad, 1926, and the bibliography in M. I. Slukhovskii, Kniga i derevnia, Moscow and Leningrad, 1928. Evgenii Dobrenko’s recent book on the ‘making of the state reader’ (Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia) contains a valuable and very comprehensive bibliography of Soviet articles on reading from the 1920s to the early 1950s.
See J. Brooks,’ studies of the Reader in the 1920s’, Russian History, vol. 9, no. 2–3, 1982.
See for example ch. 3, ‘Rasprostranenie osobennostei rechi deiatelei revoli-utsionnoi epokhi v usloviiakh obshcheniia’, in A. M. Selishchev, Iazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhi: Iz nabliudenii nad russkim iazykom poslednikh let, Moscow, 1928.
For examples of this genre by the writers mentioned, see A. Blium (ed.), Knizhnye strasti: Satiricheskie proizvedeniia russkikh i sovetskikh pisatelei o knigakh i knizhnikakh, Moscow, 1987.
See R. Robin, ‘Popular Literature of the 1920s: Russian Peasants as Readers’, in Fitzpatrick et al. (eds), Russia in the Era of NEP.
See for example J. Brooks, ‘The Breakdown in Production and Distribution of Printed Material, 1917–1927’, in Abbott Gleason et al. (eds), Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, Bloomington, 1985, and ‘Official Xenophobia and Popular Cosmopolitanism in Early Soviet Russia’, American Historical Review, vol. 97, no. 5, 1992.
See Volkov, ‘The Limits of Propaganda’.
A. Bek and L. Toom, Litso rabochego chitatelia, Moscow and Leningrad, 1927.
G. Brylov et al. (comps), Golos rabochego cheloveka: Sovremennaia sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia literatura v svete massovoi rabochei kritiki, Leningrad, 1929.
Vechera rabochei kritiki, Moscow, 1927, p. 22.
See Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology, Princeton, NJ, 1997, esp. ch. 7. Naiman’s productive approach is to see the perceived malaise of NEP culturally encoded in anxieties about sexuality and the body; his source-base includes a suitably wide range of texts (from literary works to medical textbooks). For more on the socio-cultural context, see S. Fitzpatrick,’ sex and Revolution’, in her The Cultural Front, Ithaca, NY and London, 1992.
For more on the problems facing the early Soviet literacy campaign, see S. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–1934, Cambridge, 1979, esp. pp. 168–76.
Typical of this point of view is ‘Litso chitatelia’, ChitateV i pisatel’, vol. 27, 1928, p. 1.
This assumption that literary critics were in some way ‘giving voice’ to the opinion of the mass reader (even before the mass reader had had the opportunity to read the work in question) persisted well into the post-Stalin era. It was only in the 1970s that Soviet literary journals (notably Literaturnoe obozrenie) began to reflect on the cultural cleavage between the professional literary elite and other readers.
The difficulties facing cultural construction in the villages had already been registered in a number of accounts: see, for example, E. Evgen’ev and A. Mandel’shtam, ‘Krasnyi knigonosha’, in G. Porshnev and N. Nakoriakov (eds), Kniga i ee rabotniki, Moscow and Leningrad, 1926. The radical novelty of Toporov’s book was that it actually gave a voice to the peasant reader.
This point is further developed in Evgenii Dobrenko’s close reading of the peasants’ interpretations of a number of texts, notably another story from Konarmiia: ‘Zhizneopisanie Pavlichenki, Matveia Rodionycha’ (Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia, pp. 96–106). Dobrenko observes further that the congruence between the ‘Maiskoe utro’ aesthetic and socialist realism is even more pronounced in the peasants’ responses to Pushkin, which were pub-lished in the second edition of Krest’iane o pisateliakh (Novosibirsk, 1963; there were three subsequent editions, the most recent in 1982). Apparently, the hagiographic section on Russia’s national poet was omitted from the 1930 edition because Pushkin was not deemed to be ‘proletarian’ enough (V. Gusel’nikov, Schast’e Adriana Toporova, Barnaul, 1965, p. 71). However, it is interesting to note that the section on Babel’ was left out of the book in the 1960s. The precise reasons for this omission are unknown, but I would speculate that the peasants’ maverick readings of Babel”s stark and violent stories were considered too unsettling even thirty years after their first publication.
The campaign against ‘Toporovitis’ was led by M. Bekker in ‘Protiv toporovshchiny: O knige Krest’iane o pisateliakh!’, Na literaturnom postu, no. 23–24, 1930. Toporov tried to defend himself in ‘Vopros ostaetsia otkry-tym (Po povodu kritiki moei knigi Krest’iane o pisateliakh)’, Zemlia sovet-skaia, no. 9, 1932, but in vain. He was hounded into leaving the Altai in 1932, and in May 1937 was arrested. Full rehabilitation eventually came with the republication of Toporov’s work in the 1960s.
The ‘normalization’ of reading in the 1930s can be traced conveniently in the workings of the publishing system. The successive editions of Sholokhov’s Tikhii Don, for example, were marked not only by censorship on political grounds, but also by the purging of regionalisms and obscenities (see H. Ermolaev, Mikhail Sholokhov and His Art, Princeton, NJ, 1982, pp. 18–46.)
Contrast Toporov’s work with S. L. Val’dgard’s Ocherki psikhologii chteniia (Moscow and Leningrad, 1931), which, while it frames its argument in psychological terms, advances a normative social typology of readers.
V. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, enlarged and updated edn, Durham and London, 1990.
This sketch portrait is drawn from a general reading of self-education manuals of the mid-1920s and articles on reading from later in the decade. One of the earliest and best-known of the former was P. M. Kerzhentsev’s Kak chitat’ knigu, Khar’kov, 1924 (and several subsequent reprints and expanded editions). A bibliographical guide to this kind of advice literature is to be found in Z. A. Bogomazova, Literatura po samoobrazovaniiu: UkazateV v pomoshch’ rabotnikam samoobrazovaniia, Moscow and Leningrad, 1927. The advice literature of the first half of the Soviet period is treated more exhaustively in Catriona Kelly’s forthcoming Refining Russia: Gender and the Regulation of Behaviour from Catherine to Yeltsin.
See, for example, O. Shmidt, ‘Iubilei sovetskoi knigi’, in Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo za piat’ let, Moscow, 1924, esp. p. 20.
The most voluble defence of private publishers and critique of Gosizdat in the Civil War period is P. Vitiazev, Chastnye izdatel’stva v Sovetskoi Rossii, Petrograd, 1921. A more restrained commentary on Gosizdat’s activities under the limited market conditions of NEP is B. Udintsev, ‘Knizhnyi rynok i kooperatsiia’, Soiuz potrebitelei, no. 13–14, 1923. The publishing crisis of the 1920s is diagnosed by G. I. Porshnev in Krizisy i zatovarennost’ v knizhnom dele, Moscow, 1929. Porshnev shows very clearly that the crisis was triggered in 1924–5 by publishers who were too enthusiastic in increasing print-runs, lowering prices and reducing the number of titles, without making any serious attempt to find out which titles were likely to be popular.
This, for example, is the conclusion drawn by G. Porshnev (see Krizisy i zatovarennost’, esp. ch. 6). Note also the recommendations of A. Khalatov (then head of Gosizdat) in Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia i massovaia kniga, Moscow, 1928.
See, for example, L. E. Volkov, ‘Izdatel’stva SSSR v svete samokritiki’, Krasnaia pechat’, no. 8, 1928. A useful bibliography of contemporary articles on this and related subjects is T. A. Podmazova (comp.), Kniga i knizhnoe delo v SSSR 1922–1931 gg.: Ukazatel’ literatury, Moscow, 1979.
For more detail, see E. A. Dinershtein,’ soviet Publishing: Some Historical Landmarks in Soviet Russia’, Publishing History, vol. 35, 1994.
Quoted in L. Gudkov and B. Dubin, Intelligentsiia: Zametki o literaturno-politicheskikh illiuziiakh, Moscow and Khar’kov, 1995, p. 16. Similar is M. B. Vol’fson, Puti sovetskoi knigi, Moscow, 1929.
For more on library policy in the 1930s and before, see Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia, pp. 168–257.
See B. Bank and A. Vilenkin, Rabochii pokupateV knigi, Leningrad, 1930.
Note the articles ‘Eshche o kul’turnosti prodavtsa’ and ‘Protiv ogul’nogo obvineniia knizhnikov’, in Na knizhnom fronte, no. 1–2, 1929.
G. A. Brylov, Oblozhka knigi, Leningrad, 1929.
See V. N. Liakhov, ‘Puti oformleniia sovetskoi knigi za minuvshie sorok let’, KIM, vol. 1, 1959; and lu. Gerchuk, Sovetskaia knizhnaia grafika, Moscow, 1986. Although both these accounts suggest that the officially promoted change of style in book design was not effected immediately (at the beginning of the 1930s), the overall trend — in the direction of ‘realism’ and ‘monumentalism’ — was clear enough. The orthodoxy of mature Stalinism is clearly stated in M. Smelianov, V pomoshch’ khudozh-estvennomu redaktoru, Moscow and Leningrad, 1947.
See M. Friedberg, Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets, New York and London, 1962. For more detail on the fate of the classics under the censorship regime of the 1920s, see Blium, Za kulisami, ch. 3. Note also the discussions of the classics in Chitatel’ ipisatel’, nos. 3, 9 and 21, 1928.
See Laure Idir-Spindler, ‘La Résolution de 1925 a l’épreuve de la pratique: Littérature soviétique et lutte contre l’opposition d’après la Pravda de 1927’, Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, vol. 21, no. 3–4, 1980.
I. Shomrakova, ‘Massovyi chitatel’ pervoi poloviny 30-kh gg. xx v.’, in I. Barenbaum (ed.), Istoriia russkogo chitatelia, Leningrad, 1982, p. 82.
I. Shomrakova, ‘Izuchenie massovogo chitatelia v 1920–1930-e gg. Problema istochnika’, in I. Barenbaum (ed.), Sovetskii chitatel’ (1920–1980-e gody), St Petersburg, 1992, p. 17.
J. Barber, ‘Working-Class Culture and Political Culture in the 1930s’, in H. Günther (ed.), The Culture of the Stalin Period, Basingstoke, 1990.
These labels are used very much as ideal types: in practice, few historians have all the vices and/or virtues held to be characteristic of one or other of these schools. A more rewarding approach — the one employed here — is to look at what Sovietology and revisionism have in common.
R. Robin,’ stalinism and Popular Culture’, in Günther (ed.), The Culture of the Stalin Period, p. 31. Robin’s formulation is perhaps unsatisfactory in that it suggests that ‘genuine’ popular creation was, by the mid-1930s, possible outside the terms of Communist discourse.
S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley, Calif., 1995, p. 23.
See esp. J. Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931–1939)’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 44, no. 3, 1996.
O. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Soviet Russia: A Study of Background Practices, Berkeley, Calif., forthcoming.
V. Garros, N. Korenevskaya and T. Lahusen (eds), Intimacy and Terror, New York, 1995, p. 271. It is scarcely surprising that Potemkin met the addressee of this letter in a library.
Potemkin’s diary entries are not always dated precisely.
Ibid., p. 281.
The social constituency of kul’turnost’ in the 1930s has been the subject of some reflection. It seems highly probable that young upwardly-mobile men were the main ‘ideal readers’ of the 1930s. This group may well have over-lapped considerably with the new Soviet ‘intelligentsia’ (as defined by Sheila Fitzpatrick in, for example, The Cultural Front).
C. Kelly and V. Volkov, ‘Directed Desires: Kul’turnost’ and Consumption’, in C. Kelly and D. Shepherd (eds), Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940, Oxford, 1998, p. 303.
For the last pre-revolutionary generation of Russian ‘conscious workers’, writing was just as important a use of literacy as reading: see M. D. Steinberg, ‘Worker-Authors and the Cult of the Person’, in S. P. Frank and M. D. Steinberg (eds), Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, Princeton, NJ, 1994. This independent, productive use of language lived on in worker resistance of the 1920s: see J. J. Rossman, ‘Weaver of Rebellion and Poet of Resistance: Kapiton Klepikov (1880–1933) and Shop-Floor Opposition to Bolshevik Rule’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 44, no. 3, 1996. The chitatel’skaia kritika of the 1920s likewise placed a premium on worker self-expression.
The most sustained account of a single instance of such ‘negotiation’ is Régine Robin’s Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, Stanford, Calif., 1992. By focusing on the ‘cacophonous’ First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union, Robin interprets socialist realism as the outcome of intense collaboration between ‘the base of Soviet intellectual society’ and ‘the summit of the Communist Party’ (p. 48). For further interesting reflections on the origins and cultural content of socialist realism, see P. Kenez and D. Shepherd, ‘“Revolutionary” Models for High Literature: Resisting Poetics’, in C. Kelly and D. Shepherd (eds), Russian Cultural Studies: An Introduction, Oxford, 1998, esp. pp. 43–52.
Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia, p. 258. At the start of his excellent study, Dobrenko is careful to emphasize that he is not writing a social history of the Soviet reader. Rather, he is concerned with the discursive appropriation of the reader by Soviet culture — or, to put it another way, with the creation of a culturally hegemonic (in the Gramscian sense) model of reading. Of course, this epistemological caution should be applied more generally than just to the study of Soviet culture: as was argued at the start of Chapter 1, reading as an object of social analysis is always intertwined with the ways people in a given society think and talk about ‘the reader’ and readership.
The following information on the readers of Azhaev’s novel is taken from T. Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia, Ithaca, NY and London, 1997, ch. 11. The reception of particular literary works in the Soviet period is in general hugely difficult to research. Lahusen’s sophisticated account was made possible by his access to Azhaev’s personal archive, a remarkable cache of stenographic reports, readers’ letters, newspaper cuttings, and numerous other documents.
Iu. Tynianov, ‘Zhurnal, kritik, chitatel’ i pisatel” (1924), in his Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino, Moscow, 1977, pp. 147–8.
V. Volkov, ‘Glasnost’ kak praktika: K istorii politicheskoi kommunikatsii v SSSR’, Chelovek, no. 1, 1994, p. 125.
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Lovell, S. (2000). The Creation of the Soviet Reader. In: The Russian Reading Revolution. Studies in Russia and East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596450_2
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