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For decades Stalinist literature, film, and art was almost
exclusively deemed political propaganda imposed from on high,
devoid of any aesthetic significance. In this book, Evgeny Dobrenko
suggests an entirely new view: socialism did not produce Socialist
Realism to "prettify reality"; rather, Socialist Realism itself
produced socialism by elevating socialism to reality status, giving
it material form. Without art, socialism could not have
materialized. Bringing together the Soviet historical experience
and Stalin-era art-novels, films, poems, songs, painting,
photography, architecture, and advertising-Dobrenko examines
Stalinism's representational strategies and demonstrates how real
socialism was begotten of Socialist Realism. Socialist Realism, he
concludes, was Stalinism's most effective sociopolitical
institution.
In Soviet culture, the reader was never a "consumer of books" in
the Western sense. According to the aesthetic doctrine at the heart
of Socialist Realism, the reader was a subject of education, to be
reforged and molded. Because of this, Soviet culture cannot be
examined properly without taking into account the reading masses.
This book is a history of the shaping of the reader of Soviet
literature, a history of the "State appropriation of the reader."
The entire history of the formation and transformation of the
institution of literature in the revolutionary and Soviet eras
bears witness to the fact that literature was called upon to
perform substantive political and ideological functions in the
authorities' overall system (which included the publishing
business, the book trade, libraries, and schools) aimed at
ultimately creating a new Soviet person. This book shows how people
from various social classes, in a dynamic unknown in pre-Soviet
history, not only consumed the products of a new culture but in
fact created that culture.
On its own, the sociology of reading is scarcely capable of
uncovering the variety, dynamism, and multilayered structure of the
process of reading, for the reader is a composite figure. Soviet
society in the Stalin era was not only a State-hierarchy system,
but also a mosaic that was always divided into definite cultural
strata, each of which consumed its own culture, which performed a
host of familiar functions--escapist, socializing, compensating,
informative, recreational, prestige-enhancing, aesthetic, and
emotional--in addition to the specifically Soviet tastes connected
with propaganda and mobilization.
If we superimpose on this spectrum the diverse characteristics of
individual readers, the resulting picture is extraordinarily
variegated. At the same time, there is a certain cultural space in
which these factors intersect--the space the author defines as the
"situation of reading." In this book, he focuses on the basic lines
of force that were at work in the Soviet reading space.
This book completes the author's study of the sociology of the
literary process in Soviet Russia, begun in "The Making of the
State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of
Soviet Literature" (Stanford, 1997). The history of the literary
process of the Soviet era, understood as the living process of the
clash of political and ideological aspirations and the interests
and psychology of cultural elites, allows one to understand the
social origins and cultural aims of Stalinist art in an entirely
new way.
Previous scholarship has concentrated largely on Sovietological
answers to the basic problems of Stalinist aesthetics--such as
"political control," "repressions," and "pressure from the regime."
However, the author demonstrates that Socialist Realism is not so
much directed as it is self-directed; it is not a matter of control
but of self-control. The transformation of the author into his own
censor is the true history of Soviet literature.
Socialist Realism is cultural revolution not only from above but
from below as well. The state simply took into account, and
accurately discerned, the demands of the masses, and Soviet
literature became the reader's answer to these demands. The reader
not only shaped Socialist Realist aesthetics down to his own
expectations, but in fact created it. The Soviet writer was
yesterday's Soviet reader who had learned how to write books.
The Soviet writer can be called the product of authority only to
the extent that this authority recognized and institutionalized
what Lenin called the "lively creativity of the masses." On the
other hand, the author shows, the Soviet writer is the radical
realization and embodiment of the nineteenth-century Russian
populist utopia of enlightenment of the people.
How the last years of Stalin's rule led to the formation ofan
imperial Soviet consciousness In this nuanced historical analysis
of late Stalinism organized chronologically around the main events
of the period-beginning with Victory in May 1945 and concluding
with the death of Stalin in March 1953-Evgeny Dobrenko analyzes key
cultural texts to trace the emergence of an imperial Soviet
consciousness that, he argues, still defines the political and
cultural profile of modern Russia.
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