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19. Fashioning "Our Lermontov" Canonization and Conflict in the Stalinist 1930s
- University of Wisconsin Press
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The Stalinist regime inducted pre-revolutionary literary “classics” such as M. Iu. Lermontov (–) into the Soviet literary canon during the s in an attempt to use tsarist-era culture to legitimize itself both historically and politically. Such a revised narrative of the past represented the Soviet state as a historical inevitability and allowed the regime to flatter its subjects by asserting their right to inherit the pre-revolutionary cultural legacy. Moreover, the canonization process emphasized the cultural superiority of the Soviet regime and people, as evidenced by their ability to discover once and for all a single, correct interpretation of the past. Finally, canonization of the classics helped to forge a coherent identity for the new Soviet society by placing a reinterpreted Russian cultural narrative at its core. All of these aims emphasized unity and unanimity, the distinctive desiderata of high Stalinist social policy. Leaving behind the divisive politics of the chaotic Cultural Revolution (–), the regime sought during the mid-s to promote a unified political program in many areas of Soviet life, among which culture was especially prominent. The formation of the Soviet Writers’ Union () and the conclusion of a campaign against “vulgar sociology” in literary criticism (ca. –) reflected the regime’s official rejection of class-based attacks on all but a few pre-revolutionary writers.1 In a startling turnabout, the regime now aimed to build unity in the cultural sphere by mounting massive union-wide celebrations of particular classics deemed worthy of canonization.2 Although the selection of candidates for rehabilitation took place within the highest echelons of power, it fell to the literary intelligentsia —scholars, journalists, and writers—to produce ideologically “cleansed” Fashioning “Our Lermontov” Canonization and Conflict in the Stalinist s D P interpretations of the individual authors and their works. Their task, it would seem, was crystal clear, the outcome overdetermined. The goals dictated the necessary methods, leaving little room for disagreement: accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Ultimately, the banal interchangeability and ideological blandness of the “cleansed” classics that emerged from the s—the revolutionized avatars of such diverse authors as Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol’, and Tolstoi—also suggest a process that was, if anything, too unanimous and glib. Each author was revealed to be a “humanitarian,” a true friend of “the people,” a critic of bourgeois social vices and injustice, and a “realist.” According to the official Stalinist vision, the classic authors emerged as fundamentally sympathetic to the progressive values of the Revolution, despite having had the misfortune of living and writing in the reactionary Russia of the past. Yet as several contributions to this volume suggest, such a matter-offact account of Stalinist cultural processes obscures as much as it reveals. A close examination of Lermontov’s canonization shows that the production of these revolutionized classics could be surprisingly contentious and chaotic in ways that had more to do with the political realities of the present than with either the literature of the past or the process of canonization itself. Although conflicts usually remained hidden beneath the surface discourse of such all-Soviet celebrations of unity, traces of these disagreements occasionally surfaced in the public record, at times with explosive hostility. In such instances, arguments nominally concerning literary issues actually reflected deeper political tensions and rivalries, often exacerbated by unstated cultural policies of the regime. These outbursts provide useful insights into the conflicts, concerns, and anxieties that beset the literary intelligentsia and shaped the canonization process during the s. An Insult to Lermontov’s Memory On July , Literaturnaia gazeta observed under its “Literary Calendar ” rubric that the following day would mark the anniversary of Lermontov ’s fatal duel, and quoted at length from an eyewitness account of that event by Prince A. I. Vasil’chikov, Lermontov’s friend and one of the seconds .3 The entry stuck largely to facts and direct quotation, editorializing very little. But this seemingly innocuous little article drew a surprisingly impassioned attack from one P. Litoshenko, a reader from Novocherkassk, Mikhail Lermontov whose letter to the editor was published by Komsomol’skaia pravda under the provocative title “An Insult to Lermontov’s Memory.”4 According to Litoshenko, everyone knew that Vasil’chikov had been a secret enemy of the poet and had “unconscionably distorted reality” in order to “cover the tracks of the crime that he had committed with N. S. Martynov,” Lermontov ’s opponent in the duel. Citing another account of the duel by P. K. Mart...
