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.

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.

This provocative work takes issue with the idea that Socialist Realism was mainly the creation of party leaders and was imposed from above on the literati who lived and worked under the Soviet regime. Evgeny Dobrenko, a leading expert on Soviet literature, argues instead--and offers persuasive evidence--that the aesthetic theories underpinning Socialist Realism arose among the writers themselves, born of their proponents' desire for power in the realm of literary policymaking. Accordingly, Dobrenko closely considers the evolution of these theories, deciphering the power relations and social conditions that helped to shape them.
In chapters on Proletkult, RAPP, LEF, and Pereval, Dobrenko reexamines the theories generated by these major Marxist literary groupings of the early Soviet Union. He shows how each approached the problems of literature's response to the presumed social mandate of the young communist society, and how Socialist Realism emerged as a conglomerate of these earlier, revolutionary theories. With extensive and detailed reference to supporting testimony and documents, Dobrenko clearly demonstrates how Socialist Realism was created from within the revolutionary culture, and how this culture and its disciples fully participated in this creative process. His work represents a major breakthrough in our current understanding of the complex sources that contributed to early Soviet culture.