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Reviewed by:
  • Petrified Utopia. Happiness Soviet Style ed. by Marina Balina, Evgeny Dobrenko
  • Sonja Fritzsche
Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds. Petrified Utopia. Happiness Soviet Style. Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. London: Anthem Press, 2009. xxiv + 307 pp. Cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1843313106.

Life has become better, life has become merrier.

—Stalin’s 1935 slogan

For those Soviet science fiction buffs out there, the title of Balina and Dobrenko’s groundbreaking book, Petrified Utopia, might bring Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian masterpiece We (1921) to mind. Indeed Zamyatin used One State’s attempt to bring about “mathematically infallible happiness” to critique policies implemented by Lenin’s Communist Party after the revolution. Yet it is precisely this focus on the Party as the determiner of Soviet happiness that the book singles out as reductive. Certainly Party ideology mediated most of Soviet life, including the search for happiness. As the introduction states, Marxism had itself come about as a result of the failure of bourgeois revolution to bring happiness to the working class. But focusing on the Party reveals only imaginings of happiness on the level of the collective. This is the location of utopian dreaming, where the “pursuit of happiness” was promised and prescribed via socialist models.

Balina and Dobrenko point out that happiness is, of course, also deeply personal. It is D-503’s private longing for I-330, after all, that leads to his awareness of One State’s sexual regulations as boundaries. It is that space between the public and the private spheres that Petrified Utopia targets, where “slippages” in meaning occur (xvii). It is important to recognize that the term slippage is not used as a synonym for subversive. This difference brings us to yet another primary aim of the book. For too long in studies of countries of the [End Page 371] former Eastern bloc, the search for the subversive has remained the scholarly modus operandi. This methodology is a relic of Cold War politics. The implied political dichotomy (either with or against the Party) has kept many academics from seeing the complexity of interactions that determined everyday life both within and beyond the utopian totality of Marxism-Leninism. This slippage occurs between what the editors identify as the modal and spatial aspects of utopia and their reverse sides in reality: “As a social Utopia, happiness has for its reverse side the reality of living societal and personal experience, which at the same time is also the experience of consuming the ideological constructs of happiness” (xvii). That reality is also a function of history, whether during the postrevolutionary period, during Stalinism, or post-Stalin. The result is a dynamic relationship that can be viewed in the locations where the private, the public, and the ideological meet and change over time.

The chapters in this anthology identify representations and realizations of happiness in literature, visual culture, and popular culture. They are broken up into three sections: “Utopics,” “Realities,” and “Locations.” Ironically, the first essay in the “Utopics” section, “A Joyful Soviet Childhood: Licensed Happiness for Little Ones” by Catriona Kelly, addresses the self-perception of Russians as “a people who suffer” (4). Kelly focuses on the countertrope of the “happy Russian childhood” and its adapted ideological narrative in the Soviet Union (5). Interestingly, her interviews with Russians about their childhood demonstrate a desire to remember past happiness despite the glaring difficulties of lived experience. Evgeny Dobrenko’s essay “Utopian Naturalism: The Epic Poem of Kolkhoz Happiness” focuses on the genre of kolkhoz poetry, particularly the lubok. Dobrenko describes how this contradictory combination of socialist modernization and feudal folklore provided the newly urbanized former peasant class with a nostalgic utopian future. Pure aesthetics replaced the tragic reality that was Soviet-forced collectivization. The next two chapters focus on consumption, particularly of the culinary sort. Helena Goscilo looks at the promise of plenty and portrayal of the feast in Soviet art and advertising. “Luxuriating in Lack: Plentitude and Consuming Happiness in Soviet Paintings and Posters, 1930s–1953” points to the fantasy of happiness via consumption that never materialized for most Soviet citizens. Gian Piero Piretto’s “Tasty and Healthy: Soviet Happiness in One Book” analyzes...

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