There is a list of abbreviations ... the working people that was just beginning to be captured by the emerging technol- ogy of radio. .... Pomona College. BabelÎ in ...
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Vynnychenko’s biography several of these forms of displacement are present simultaneously, and Soroka highlights their presence in Vynnychenko’s writing in diverse and illuminating ways. Soroka’s bold strategic step is actually a major contribution to the scholarly debate, and one regrets that the theoretical introduction to his book is tantalizingly brief, comprising only seven pages, although additional theoretical remarks are scattered throughout the remainder of the text and reemerge again with greater clarity in the conclusion. However, close readers will be richly rewarded, as his illuminating journey through the writer’s output during the two major periods of displacement in Vynnychenko’s life, 1907–14 and 1920–51, emerges as an exemplary work of literary scholarship that is theoretically engaged yet written in a lucid, inviting style. In the course of his analysis, Soroka provides an innovative and illuminating presentation of some of the writer’s most important works, from his early realist short stories to the dramas and novels that catapulted him to international attention in the 1910s; his bold experiment in writing a utopian novel with an adventure plot, The Solar Machine (1928), Ukraine’s biggest bestseller of the 1920s; and his struggles to articulate his alternative vision of society’s future, manifested in both his later philosophical novels and his nonfiction works. Thanks to Soroka’s study, readers now have a reliable and informative map of the writer’s complex aesthetic and intellectual evolution. Faces of Displacement is truly a labor of love, refreshingly free of typographical errors, supported by extensive research, and accompanied by reproductions of a selection from Vynnychenko’s paintings. One hopes that this volume finds a wide readership beyond the immediate circle of Ukrainian literature specialists and stimulates greater interest both in Vynnychenko’s literary output—of which, sadly, only a small fraction is currently available in English—and in rethinking our understanding of émigré and diasporic Slavic cultures in the twentieth century. Vitaly Chernetsky University of Kansas
Schrift und Macht: Zur sowjetischen Literatur der 1920er und 30er Jahre. Ed. Tomáš Lipták and Jurij Murašov. Osteuropa Medial, vol. 3. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2012. vi, 282 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Illustrations. Photographs. €34.90, hard bound. Böhlau is one of Germany’s oldest academic publishers, with a long tradition in the humanities, history, and the social sciences. The present volume is the third in their new German-language “Osteuropa Medial” series. It unites eleven articles, including Jurij Murašov’s tightly structured introduction, which provides the book’s intellectual and temporal framework. Among the group of international contributors, only three work at German universities, and only two articles were originally in German— nine are translations from Russian or English; the scholarship of most of the contributions is thus available even to American Slavists without reading knowledge of German. The volume is organized in three parts: “Technologies of Literary Production,” “Literature and Pedagogy,” and “Politics and Popular Culture.” There is a list of abbreviations and brief author biographies but no index or collated bibliography. The contributors to Schrift und Macht (Writing and Power) are familiar with each other’s work from previous collaborations, and they offer a coherent and multifaceted take on language and power in the historical transition from the revolutionary-Bolshevist 1920s to the statist-Soviet 1930s.
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Slavic Review
Murašov focuses the discussion firmly on the literary developments around the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 that launched the doctrine of socialist realism, and on Maksim Gor΄kii’s key roles during this period. Crucial for Murašov are the position of the writer in the medial bind of the written text—the Schrift of the volume’s title—with its irrepressible interpretability, and the authentic voice of the working people that was just beginning to be captured by the emerging technology of radio. This development was welcomed by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), the pisatel΄-udarnik movement, and the History of Factories and Enterprises (IFZ) project launched by Gor΄kii in 1931. Sergej Žuravlev analyzes the latter’s attempt to bring together workers and writers in a relatively open “first oral history” project in Russia (76). With his impeccable knowledge of the archival sources, Žuravlev paints a broad picture that shows why by 1938 the large-scale effort had accomplished little. Il΄ja Kalinin’s contribution on Viktor Shklovskii shows the avant-garde formalist artist striving to align his outlook with the changing concept of labor itself. Gor΄kii’s ubiquitous involvement during this formative period of Soviet literature is emphasized repeatedly. Hans Günther presents him as a key proponent of the new Soviet literary language, wherein formal expression, vocabulary, grammar, and literary registers came under increasing ideological scrutiny. Günther’s piece resonates well with Murašov’s initial contrast between written language and the idealized orality of radio. After the mid-1930s, with Iosif Stalin’s language upheld as a model of clarity, the emphasis of Soviet culture moved back to the written word. The acclamation of official administrative style as an ideal of literary language made clear that literature was losing its capacity, characteristic of free art, for countering automatisms of thought and perception—the very thing that had earlier nourished the hopes of Bolshevik thinkers. In the first essay of the “Literature and Pedagogy” section, Marina Balina positions Soviet children’s literature between the poles of aesthetics and ideology and laments that western Slavists analyze it predominantly under the second heading; consequently, children’s literature appears as a realm of literary freedom for Soviet authors under ideological pressure for their “adult” writing. She claims instead that there was never any such “holiday” from ideology, and children’s literature was firmly in the hands of the politico-ideological establishment. Catriona Kelly extends the discussion of ideology to the changing, and ambivalent, perception of foreign literature, whose foreignness shifted from being construed in national terms to backwardness and unenlightened class depictions. Thus, foreign literature could be “saved,” as could prerevolutionary domestic literature, if properly taught, most notably in the case of “classical” writers such as Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, or William Shakespeare. Tomáš Lipták’s discussion of the type of writer best suited to socialist realism adds to the topic of authors. His article unfolds from a questionnaire sent to writers in 1931 asking about their activism, particularly their involvement in industrial or agricultural labor. The new writer was a worker, it turns out—always na postu!—but in the early 1930s there still was some variety of views on whether it was a necessity for a writer to have concrete factory or farm work experience. Connecting well with Lipták’s contribution, Evgenij Dobrenko’s piece illustrates how the structure of Soviet writers’ organizations changed from the late 1920s to 1932, and how Stalin himself brought the unruly forces of RAPP under control in the newly formed Union of Writers by sidelining the idea of the pisatel΄-udarnik and professionalized writing. Dobrenko highlights Gor΄kii’s role in this restructuring process and Stalin’s concept of master and mastery, which meant less intellectual elitism than the ability to walk a fine line between writerly high quality and political unobtrusiveness. In Dobrenko’s view, Stalin ultimately also outmaneuvered Gork΄ii, who promoted the idea of excellence while Stalin surrounded him with lesser figures in the
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Union in order to profit from the quarrels that promptly ensued. Dobrenko’s piece is a Lehrstück on ideological management and cultural-political strategy that acknowledges Stalin’s talents as both political strategist and shrewd psychologist. Katerina Clark’s contribution, the first of the “Politics and Popular Culture” section, outlines a strong literary-architectural connection in the Moscow of the 1930s, a period of literalization in which the texture of written and writing culture intersected with state power and urban planning. The new Moscow reflected the consolidation of Soviet power and was supposed to model in stone what literature was required to produce as “master narratives” of Soviet heroism. Integrating music, text, and film with public debate and cultural-political shifts, Thomas Lahusen, Robin LaPasha, and Tracy McDonald extend Clark’s material-cultural approach to the intriguing “accordion debate.” It started in late 1926 with a poem by Aleksandr Zharov and posed the question of whether the instrument could still be used in a Bolshevist civilizing mission. Igor΄ Savchenko’s film Garmon΄, based on Zharov’s poem, praised the instrument; it arrived in the movie theaters in 1934 but was quickly removed. Within the decade the instrument came to be seen as (too) rural and backward, and Savchenko’s aesthetics had become obsolete. Finally, Konstantin Bogdanov broadens the popular culture theme to folklore in a big-picture approach. He emphasizes its central role in Soviet history, culture, politics, and ritual, even qua “fakelore,” in mapping both physical and symbolic violence onto a historical trajectory that today, from beyond the end of the system, seems slightly absurd. Overall, Schrift und Macht is a model of a closely coherent, sharply focused collection. It significantly deepens our understanding of the culture–power nexus at the time of its solidification into permanent Soviet structures. Hans J. Rindisbacher Pomona College
Babel΄ in Context: A Study in Cultural Identity. By Efraim Sicher. Borderlines: Russian and East European Jewish Studies. Brighton, Mass.: Academic Studies Press, 2012. 308 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Photographs. $80.00, hard bound. Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism. By Rebecca Jane Stanton. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012. xi, 205 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. $45.00, hard bound. The city of Odessa is mythical in part because so many find its culture mysterious. It is a historically multiethnic city that fell within the boundaries of the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the nineteenth century and, as Steven Zipperstein shows in his nowclassic The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (1985), became a site of Jewish acculturation. It is also viewed as “a city of rogues and schnorrers,” as Jarrod Tanny calls it in the title of his recent book (2011). Odessa’s myths enveloped Isaak Babel΄ in an aura of sunshine, apostasy, and roguishness. As he wrote in his 1918 essay “Odessa,” “the Literary Messiah, for whom they have waited for so long and so fruitlessly, will come from there—from the sunny steppes, washed by the sea.” Odessa was the stage for Babel΄’s larger-than-life Jewish gangsters and his lachrymose “Story of My Dovecote,” a story that poignantly details the clichéd coming-of-age of a young, overachieving Jewish protagonist who narrowly survives a pogrom. Through his stories, Babel΄ created the role of the Odessa Jew in the drama of revolutionary Russia.
