The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture (review)

In his introduction to The Making of the State Writer, Evgeny Dobrenko argues that most available histories of Soviet literature "amount to descriptions of the history of essentially non-Soviet literature" (xiii). Dobrenko embarks on an ambitious journey that leads us away from the well-known path of the great (and mostly dissident) authors, such as Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak, and takes us into the "backyard" of Russia's history (226). It is indeed by traveling "along the 'shoulder' of Russian literature's road" (xix-xx) that we can, according to Dobrenko, discover the authentic Soviet literature. As it turns out, the "shoulder" is larger than any possible highway, judging from the astonishing statistics promulgated by the Second Congress of Soviet writers in 1954: in 1934, 3,085 works of Soviet writers were issued in printings totaling 40,135,000 copies; in 1953, these numbers rose to 4,285 and 198,327,000, respectively (xiv). Socialist realism, the dominant literary doctrine of Soviet literature, was "not a dozen or so texts, but indeed a boundless sea of 'artistic' production'" (xiv). Far from being mere propaganda or a simple canon, Dobrenko argues, that Soviet literature was the "synthesis of the wishes and directives of the state and 'mass graphomania,'" such that "between the Soviet writer (to the degree, of course, that he remained Soviet) and authority, no 'gap' existed" (210, 405). Socialist realism reproduced itself as reader became both writer and critic. Thus its "true products . . . are people: readers and writers" (xviii). Socialist realism (and Soviet literature in general) constituted a "third path" (47) that was neither high literature nor mass literature.

The Making of the State Writer is the history of this "third path." The "sources of ideological graphomania" (the title of chapter 1) can be found in the literary production of a number of self-taught peasant writers of the 1820s and 1830s. The practice is further developed in the phenomenon of 1860s raznochinets literature, the writings of people of "mixed ranks," such as the utopian author Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the critics Dmitri Pisarev and Nikolai Dobroliubov, and their numerous disciples. In the "self-reproduction, endless 'ideological debates,' and political demarcations" that occupied these writers, Dobrenko sees an entirely new literary way of combining high and low genres for political purposes. The "wild symbiosis" of highbrow satire, ode, and folk song becomes the "nutrient media for the new literary generation . . . the real domain of ideological graphomania, which later spilled forth into 'proletarian literature' and then into Soviet literature" (12-13). Continuing his journey "on the shoulder," Dobrenko examines the "artistically barren" populist and revolutionary poetry of the 1870s and 1880s (13), paralleled by another manifestation of "mass graphomania": the "Surikovian" autodidacts, whose products poured into the book market from the 1870s to the 1900s. Their name comes from the self-taught peasant poet Ivan Surikov, whose immense following included literary circles, publishing enterprises, "people's editions," compendia, newspapers, journals, and official unions with their own staffs and administrative organs (56).

Chapter 2 is devoted to the activity and publications of Lev Kleinbort, an employee of the legal Marxist and Menshevik presses before 1917 and, after the Revolution, of the People's Commissariat of Education and the Petrograd Proletkult organization. Dobrenko's rediscovery of Kleinbort's collections, Essays on Workers' Journalism, Essays on Popular Literature, and The Russian Working-Class Reader, published in 1924 and 1925, provides fascinating insights into the development of proletarian literature from 1900 to the October Revolution. Together with Dobrenko, we discover familiar names of Soviet authors from the 1920s and beyond, emerging from the lower depths of self-taught writing, published, for instance, in Maxim Gorky's Anthology of Proletarian Writers and, above all, in the "main fountainhead of...