Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History

Part III. Real and Symbolic Animals in the Soviet Project

113 these chapters show how attention to the animal might complicate common understandings of Soviet culture. To be sure, the broad brushstrokes that defined the Soviet project were those of modernization and of economic and social transformation inextricably linked to and often carried forward by ideology. The chapters here suggest that these impulses, summed up in slogans about the “class struggle,” “building socialism,” “overtaking capitalism,” and “the friendship of peoples,” were big tents for projects both more sophisticated and contradictory than simple phrases suggest. It is the interplay between the ideological and the actual, the political and practical, and the natural and the cultural that interests us here. By examining the passionate suffering of a famous poet, the extraordinary fortunes of a family circus, the multivalent appropriation of reindeer, and the shifting contours of gendered discourses about horses, both real and symbolic animals shed new light on the Soviet experience. Katherine Lahti examines the creative work and mystique of one of the revolution’s most celebrated and enigmatic poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930). While the Soviet regime lionized Mayakovsky for his support of the Bolshevik cause, his futuristic imaginings, and his scorn for the conF Part iii realandsymbolic Animalsinthe sovietProject costlow nelson text4.indd 113 6/23/10 8:40 AM 114————iiii H reAl And symBOliC AnimAls in the sOviet PrOJeCt ventions of bourgeois life, Lahti’s examination of “the animal Mayakovsky” reveals a more complex and much less idealistic creative personality. She considers the intense relationships he developed with particular animals (like a stray puppy), his self-identification with animals, and the significant role of animals—from carriage horses and dogs to ravens and deer—in his poetry and graphic art. The artist that emerges from this perspective is defined less by his iconoclasm and fervor for the revolution than by his intense , even passionate love and attentiveness to suffering. Returning to the significance of working relationships between animals and people, Ann Kleimola considers the career of legendary animal trainer Vladimir Durov (1863–1934), whose descendants still maintain an animal theater in downtown Moscow. Despite the privations of the early Soviet era and the hegemony of materialist perspectives in scientific research, Durov promoted and popularized a training regimen based on positive reinforcement and respect for the unique characteristics of different animal species. Durov’s success in the ideologically charged atmosphere of the twenties and thirties, his passion for telepathy, and his involvement with research in parapsychology raise interesting questions about the level of popular acceptance of the materialist kinds of scientific research (such as Pavlov’s) supported by the regime and official ideology. Andy Bruno considers the interaction between real animal and human populations and the ideological and economic imperatives of Soviet socialism. By charting the often conflicting impulses between the Sami’s “local knowledge” and cosmology and Marxist perspectives that regarded reindeer as economic resources and the Sami people who tended them as “backward” pastoralists, Bruno follows the transformation of the Sami— for them and their reindeer, this is a story of resistance, accommodation, and environmental degradation. We learn that for all of the state’s efforts to remodel Sami pastoralism along rational economic lines, reindeer remained central to fundamental assumptions about what made the Sami, Sami and reindeer, reindeer. The centrality of enduring symbolic connections between humans and animals across time and throughout major social transformation also informs Arja Rosenholm’s study of the relationship between men and horses in Soviet literature. Reaching back to the archetypes of the Scythian archers , Russia’s medieval knights (bogatyri) and legendary Cossack warriors, Rosenholm shows how the liaison between men and their horses informed the construction of masculinity over the short Soviet century and into the post-Soviet era. These chapters both demonstrate how the flexibility of symbolic associations works in tandem with the persistent quality of humananimal linkages. costlow nelson text4.indd 114 6/23/10 8:40 AM ii H reAl And symBOliC AnimAls in the sOviet PrOJeCt————115 Taken as a whole, the chapters in this part suggest that for humans and animals alike, the Soviet experience was one of contrasts and contradictions . The often unacknowledged interaction between humans and other animals profoundly influenced the symbolic and the real in ways that sometimes worked with, but often compromised, the hegemonic aspirations of the state and its official ideology. costlow nelson text4.indd 115 6/23/10 8:40 AM 116 costlow nelson text4.indd...