Aesthetics of Alienation: Reassessment of Early Soviet Cultural Theories

Introduction

Introduction xiii This book arose at the crossroads of two interconnected projects examining the sociology of the literary process in Soviet Russia: a history of the shaping of the Soviet reader1 and a history of the birth of the Soviet writer.2 In the attempt to understand the social origins of Stalinist culture and to discover the social dimension of Socialist Realism, I immersed myself (in the book about the reader) in the world of the operations of Soviet libraries, schools, and publishing—the enormous institutional mechanism for producing and promoting books in Soviet Russia; and (in the book about the writer) I delved deeply into the world of the “subcultural” creative activity of self-taught writers, literary “circles” and studios, of the “mass literary movement” and the “call of shock workers into literature,” and of “literary training” in the 1920s and 1930s—institutions created and measures taken by the new authorities to create a “new type of writer.” But this also required me to immerse myself in the world of the aesthetic polemics in which these years, so formative for Soviet culture, abounded. Just as there is a sociology of reading and a sociology of the writing, so is there a sociology of literary theories, or a sociology of criticism—which the language of the 1920s and 1930s would call the sociology of ideological constructs. Analysis of the social dimension of the self-reXection or introspection of culture (I use this term in the traditionally restricted sense of artistic and literary culture)—of cultural theories (including literary theories )—can be regarded as a sort of apex of the sociological analysis of aesthetic phenomena. Without it, the sociology of literature cannot be considered complete: between the writer and the reader exists a most signiWcant cultural institution, which under Soviet conditions had its own speciWcs. In fact, the idea for this book was born out of the necessity to determine the social parameters of the aesthetic debates. The problematics of this book (although it almost exclusively discusses theories) are far from being purely academic. On the contrary, the attitude toward revolutionary culture and the Stalinist culture that grew out of it are absolutely the most ideologically explosive points in Russian literary history of the twentieth century. Debates about the fate of the “silver age,” about the avant-garde, formalism, proletarian culture, the Marxist approach to culture , and about tradition—in the perspective of Soviet experience—continued to seethe, dispersing the debating parties to different sides of the barricades . Today, these debates seem even more unresolved than they did in the past because the answers that took shape over many decades to the key questions—about political control, Party pressure, “Werce censorship,” and the like—have been revealed as inadequate. Historical reality turns out to be much more complex than the familiar black and white picture. In the book about the Soviet reader, I attempted to show, for example, that pressure was exerted not only from above but from below as well (and it is difWcult to say which was more decisive—the “horizon of expectations” of yesterday’s still-illiterate reader or the Party’s directives, which in fact only gave shape to the demands placed by the masses on literature being created in the Soviet Union). In the book about the Soviet writer, I tried to demonstrate that the problem of Soviet culture was not political control and Werce censorship (though of course no one would deny the existence of either), but rather the creation of a new type of author who would need no control and no censor, that the history of the formation of the Soviet writer was that of transforming the writer into his own censor. In a word, many of the traditional postulates that earlier seemed unshakable truths have in the postSoviet era shown themselves in need of, if not replacement, then at least rethinking and reappraisal. This applies not only in the sphere of reception and literary practice, but also in the sphere of literary criticism and cultural theory . A number of mechanisms that hinder adequate understanding and appraisal of one or another aesthetic theory continue to operate. First, the attitude toward early Soviet cultural theories can least of all be called historical and academically neutral. From the very beginning, this attitude has been purely estimative—and it remains so to this day. For some, the 1920s are the bright era of the avant-garde, after which the somber reign of Socialist Realism arrived (in...