In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

230 D uring the late 1920s and early 1930s, avant-garde experimentation with speed conspicuously diminished, as Soviet artists submitted to the pressures of the Stalinist regime.Whereas in the second decade of the century a poet like Mayakovsky could explore the chaotic dynamism of the urban world through his futurist verse, by 1930 he was coordinating his poetry with the first Five-Year Plan, instituted by Stalin in October 1928 as an economic program that called for rapid industrial development throughout the Soviet Union in accordance with a series of ambitious benchmarks. The hurried pace of industrialization stipulated by the first Five-Year Plan (other Five-Year Plans would follow) provides the ideological premise for Mayakovsky’s 1930 poem “March of the Shock Brigades” (“Marsh udarnykh brigad”), a celebration of the Soviet Union’s swift progress toward model industrial efficiency in the name of socialism. Dispensing with the complex urban imagery, shifts, and ambiguous semantics that had bolstered the impression of dynamism in his cubo-futurist poetry, Mayakovsky endorses the rigid time frame of the FiveYear Plan: Вперед беспрогульным гиганстсктим ходом! Не взять нас буржуевым гончим! Вперед! Пятилетку в четыре года Conclusion The Speed of Coercion The epoch demanded adventurism. And so, one must be an adventurist. The epoch did not spare those who fell behind or disagreed. —valentin katayev, Time, Forward! 1932 выполним, вымчим, закончим. Электричество лей, река-лиха!1 [Forward with a conscientious gigantic stride! They won’t catch us those bourgeois wolfhounds! Forward! The Five-Year Plan in four years we’ll fulfill it, we’ll rush it, we’ll finish it. Electricity flow, like a dashing river!] As in his earlier futurist verse, Mayakovsky champions speed in “March of the Shock Brigades,” but it is the Soviet people, rather than just the poet himself, who race ahead (“Forward with a conscientious gigantic stride!”). Mayakovsky’s tone has changed markedly from his futurist days, as his loud voice, now part of a broader unified chorus, echoes the popular slogan of the era that the FiveYear Plan must be fulfilled in four years. Conveyed through Stalinist thematics —“we’ll rush [the Five-Year plan]”—and the stepladder form of the verse lines, speed shapes the poem and its call to produce a “dashing river” of electricity , all for the greater Soviet good. The fast, unwavering pace demanded by Stalin likewise informed the era’s prose, most notably Valentin Katayev’s 1932 novel Time, Forward! (Vremia, vpered!).2 A fictionalized account of a brigade of workers at a Soviet metallurgical plant that breaks a world record for the production of concrete mixes, Time, Forward! conveys the ambitious spirit of the first Five-Year Plan, as it highlights speed and its conceptual counterpart, time, to exalt Soviet advancements . Promoting the Soviet Union’s efforts at rapid industrialization, Katayev creates a recurring refrain out of part of a 1931 speech by Stalin calling for an Conclusion 231 increase in the velocity of production throughout the nation’s industries: “To lower tempos means to fall back, and those who fall back are beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we will not have it.”3 Stalin’s demand for accelerated productivity looms over all of Time, Forward! for both the subject matter and the prose style of Katayev’s novel—an early example of socialist realism—reflect a strident, metonymic use of speed by both the government and artists to cultivate rapid progress throughout all facets of Soviet society.4 The speed of Time, Forward! I contend, signaled a sudden shift from the creative model of left artists to the aesthetic stridency of Stalinism, thus serving as a repudiation of present-day theories on the avant-garde, most notably that of Boris Groys, who has drawn close parallels between the avant-garde and Stalinist periods.5 Speed did link these two disparate periods,but by 1930,speed signified something quite distinct from the earlier decades’ experimentation, for Stalinist art offered fast, forward movement without any of the previous dynamism. Through its fictional depiction of Soviet industry’s extraordinary gains,Time, Forward! ushered in a new literary treatment of speed. An account of twentyfour hours at an industrial plant in Magnitogorsk, a city founded in 1929 on the edge of the Ural Mountains (which,Katayev emphasizes,separate East and West in Russia), Time, Forward! chronicles the Magnitogorsk brigade’s world-record production of cement mixes, an event signaling extraordinary Soviet productivity and growth. Many of the speed-infused images and themes of the previous two decades—the city, ferroconcrete, airplanes,American dynamism...

Share