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6. Soviet literary theory in the 1930s
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109 In this chapter we explore the process of establishing a Soviet Marxist canon in aesthetics during the 1930s, the attending methodological polemics in left-leaning literary studies and cultural theory, as well as the trends that diverged from them. In the polemics of the 1930s genre became a foremost preoccupation; its role as a complex ideological instrument for conceptualizing reality and its significance as a battleground over the boundaries of modernity were highlighted in numerous discussions . We thus accord central attention to the debates on the novel, the epic, and the lyric and, therefore, to the authors around Literaturnyi kritik and the Institute of Philosophy , Literature, and History (IFLI), most notably György Lukács and Mikhail Lifshits. Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings on the novel and epic, including his book on François Rabelais, are similarly in the spotlight. We seek to give a general characteristic of Bakhtin’s evolution as a thinker and his style of theorizing and to determine his significance for literary theory and his legacy in later discussions on subjectivity. To place the most significant features of Bakhtin’s methodology in their proper synchronic context, we also undertake the first ever systematic examination of semantic paleontology, a noteworthy facet of the theoretical landscape of the 1930s, with particular reference to its impact on literary studies. soviet literary theory in the 1930s battles over genre and the boundaries of modernity katerina clark and galin tihanov 6 110 katerina clark and galin tihanov The Formation of the Canon of Marxist-Leninist Aesthetics The 1930s were the most decisive decade in the history of Soviet literary theory. During the 1920s the question of what literature might be appropriate for the new Soviet state was hotly debated, yet not resolved. But at the beginning of the thirties guidelines were provided in the “theory” of socialist realism, promulgated between 1932 and 1934 and outlined in two addresses to the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, by Andrei Zhdanov and Maxim Gorky, which became canonical sources. In many respects, however, in these speeches, especially Gorky’s, the guidelines were vague; socialist realism, as it emerged in practice, was highly conventionalized and both compositionally and thematically constricting. The direction it should take, the “theory” of socialist realism, and its place both in literary history and in contemporary world literature continued to be debated throughout the decade, though often in oblique ways. The more sophisticated versions of this debate focused on questions of genre. Looking from the perspective of today, Lukács and Bakhtin emerge as the major players, though Bakhtin, who was in internal exile for most of the decade and unable to publish, was not visible at the time. Following the dissolution of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and the formation of the Union of Soviet Writers, many critics and theorists sought to place socialist realism within a broader, leftist, internationalist literary tradition that would supersede the narrow purview of RAPP, restoring “aesthetics,” literary “quality,” and professionalism as criteria. Implicit in the new demands for literary quality and professionalism was a de-emphasis on the importance of class in literature. Central to the Stalinist literary platform of the 1930s was an attack on so-called vulgar sociology, particularly associated with Valerian Pereverzev and his school, that is, on approaches to literary history that insist there is a direct correlation between changes in the socioeconomic sphere and changes within literature. This went together with a rejection of the notion that only “proletarians,” or in some formulations writers with a Bolshevik orientation, could produce a literature that would be valid for the new society, a doctrine that at the height of RAPP’s power had given priority to campaigns to have the worker masses produce their own literature about their workday lives. In fact, in general the early 1930s saw a reaction against the largely pragmatic, utilitarian, and materialist approach to most fields of culture that had characterized the immediately preceding cultural revolution. Authoritative voices began to lament the fact that the cultural revolution’s obsession with technology, statistics, and immediate practical needs had crowded out the higher and more enduring value of beauty. Culture itself became a value, and not only for its instrumentalist potential but in its own right. Soviet Marxist theoreticians of the 1920s (Pereverzev, Aleksandr Voronskii, Vladimir Friche, Iurii Libedinskii, and Trotsky) had not generally used the word aesthetics (estetika)—except in commenting on Georgii Plekhanov’s theories, which were by now largely...