-
2. Tradition and Contemporaneity
- Northwestern University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
44 Chapter Two Tradition and Contemporaneity Power is amorphous; myth gives it form. —Gilbert Morris Cuthbertson The more insistent the call for the epic, the more likely the appearance of anekdoty. —I. Shaitanov BY THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, the anekdot had evolved into a form of popular expression well suited to the sociocultural and even the physical environment of the city, with its demographic density, staccato rhythms, and dynamic sensory and cognitive stimuli. The genre was an increasingly prominent part of a generically and stylistically diverse pre-Revolutionary popular culture that Richard Stites described as “an amalgam of folk, high, and light urban entertainment genres of old Russia in a context of commercialism, the quickening of technology, [ . . . ] and increased contact with foreign culture.”1 The rather motley pedigree of the anekdot again broadened its utility and appeal in this environment of cultural amalgamation. The popularity of the literary-historical anekdot among Russian literati in the previous century, in combination with the emergent prominence of the oral anekdot in the culture of “the folk” (who would have an unprecedented level of participation in and influence on urban verbal culture by the eve of the Revolution), gave the contemporary genre a multifaceted utility and appeal. The wave of sociopolitical sea changes about to beset the country would create an atmosphere in which the rise in the cultural stock of the anekdot could only accelerate. The institutionalization of Bolshevism was predated (and, of course, influenced) by another dramatic change in Russian social reality that made its own contributions to the cultural significance of the anekdot: mass urbanization . The total urban population of Russia tripled between 1863 and 1913. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had given peasants unprecedented freedom of movement and, by the end of the century, the number of Russian city-dwellers with peasant backgrounds had increased by nearly Tradition and Contemporaneity 45 400 percent.2 Many of these urbanized peasants held temporary passports that allowed them to retain land and homes in their villages while working or doing business in the city, which meant that the link between rural and urban was not simply one of historical demographic change but an ongoing physical fact. The respective forms of popular culture associated with the two habitats commingled with an intensity that matched that of the migrations themselves. The steep rise in the literacy rate following emancipation contributed to the process of cultural intercourse, as well. The decades between emancipation and the October Revolution, wrote Jeffrey Brooks, saw the rapid development of “a popular culture based on common literacy.” The literate peasants, Brooks said, “tended [ . . . ] to divide all books into two categories, the godly and the humorous. The Scriptures were the model for the first sort of text, and the frivolous fairy tale the exemplar of the second. The fairy tale was ungodly, untrue, useless, amusing, and uninstructive.”3 As godliness became less of a necessary element in Russian letters (and completely anathema after 1917), its frivolous counterpart was, if briefly, free to come to the fore of folk (and, increasingly, urban) cultural consumption. Although the rural-urban connection in Russian culture began to accelerate as never before at the end of the nineteenth century, it certainly did not originate then. The frequency of urban themes and settings in folktales, ballads, historical songs, and other traditional folk genres attests that the cultural symbiosis of village and city is in fact a centuries-old phenomenon (in some part traceable to the traveling minstrels I discussed in chapter 1). The influence of professional written culture (which in Russia, as elsewhere, has always been largely urban) on oral forms such as religious verse, the legend, and the folktale also predates by centuries the mass urban migrations of the peasantry that began after emancipation.4 Yet if the influence of the city and its culture on Russian folklore was previously detectable primarily on a thematic level, the large-scale urbanization of the folk created opportunities for new kinds of cross-pollination. The rhythm and structure of newly generated folk texts, for instance, began to reflect the new temporal, spatial, and psychological contexts in which people were performing and consuming oral culture. The oral anekdot thrived especially well in an urban environment. Kurganov cited the genre’s signature formal features—its “dynamic, compact form” and its efficient “disregard of details, secondary episodes, and extraneous descriptions [in favor of] immediate presentation of the narrative nucleus”—as crucial factors in its big-city success.5 He...