Table Of ContentLATE SOVIET CULTURE
From Perestroika to
Novostroika
Post-Contemporary Interventions
Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson
],_ATE SOVIET
( UL T UR E
From
Perestroika to Novostroika
Edited by Thomas Lahusen
with Gene Kuperman
Duke University Press 1993 Durham and London
© 1993 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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Designed by Cherie Westmoreland
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Late Soviet culture : from perestroika to novostroika / edited by Thomas Lahusen.
p. cm. - (Post-contemporary interventions)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-82.2.3-12.90-5 (alk. paper). - ISBN 0-82.2.3-132.4-3 (pbk.)
1. Soviet Union-Intellectual life. I. Lahusen, Thomas.
DK2.66,4,L38 1993
947.08-dc2.o
92.-2.8051
CIP
The text of this book originally was published without
the present introduction or index and without the
essays by Clark, Goscilo, Holquist, Lahusen, Leibin,
Raleigh, or Turovskaya as Volume 90, No. 2. of
the South Atlantic Quarterly.
Contents
Editor's Introduction 1
Mikhail Kuraev
Perestroika: The Restructuring of the Past
or the Invention of the Future? 13
Boris Kagarlitsky
A Step to the Left, a Step to the Right 2.1
Sidney Monas
Perestroika in Reverse Perspective: The Reforms
of the 1860s 35
Paul Debreczeny
"Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo": Pushkin's Elevation
to Sainthood in Soviet Culture 4 7
Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya
The Obstacle: The Human Being, or the Twentieth
Century in the Mirror of Dystopia 69
Maya Turovskaya
The Tastes of Soviet Moviegoers during
the 1930s 95
Evgeny Dobrenko
The Literature of the Zhdanov Era: Mentality,
Mythology, Lexicon 109
Thomas Lahusen
The Mystery of the River Adun: Reconstruction
of a Story 139
vi Contents
Michael Holquist
Dialogism and Aesthetics 155
Valery Leibin
Freudianism, or the "Trotskiite Contraband": Soviet
Psychoanalysis in the 192.os and 1930s 177
Valery Podoroga
The Eunuch of the Soul: Positions of Reading and the
World of Platonov 187
Helena Goscilo
Domostroika or Perestroika ? The Construction of
Womanhood in Soviet Culture under Glasnost 233
Mikhail Epstein
After the Future: On the New Consciousness in
Literature 2.57
Katerina Clark
Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture 2.89
Donald Raleigh
Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg: Some Reflections
on the August Revolution, Provincial Russia,
and Novostroika 307
Index 32.3
Contributors 335
Editor's Introduction
It appears today that positions, theories, and ideas become
=======
obsolete almost at the moment of their utterance. Whether
the cold war has been won or lost, what seems increasingly certain is
the breakdown of both the past and the future in favor of an advancing
present, where, simultaneously, euphoria and melancholy seem capable
of neutralizing all powers of explanation. Moreover, today it seems fair
to say that it is not only the Berlin Wall that has crumbled, but also the
ideologies that made its construction possible.
These introductory lines, written together with Gene Kuperman in
the fall of 1990 for a Soviet issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly
(Perestroika: Perspectives on Modernization, spring 1991, volume 90,
number 2.) still appear pertinent today, with the difference, perhaps,
that the "new world (dis)order" is increasingly haunted by old phan
toms as well as by portions of the past which our century started from,
and that the decrease of euphoria and melancholy has not been able
to stir up a certain numbness of the mind. The present collection of
essays is a considerably enlarged version of the South Atlantic Quar
terly issue. Seven new contributions have almost doubled the volume
of the journal version and have naturally changed its profile. First of
all, new themes have appeared: the history of aesthetics, of cinema,
psychoanalysis, and literature seen from a "gendered" perspective. The
completed version has also gained balance in regard to a certain ten
dency which seemed to prevail in the "Perestroika" issue, namely, an
inclination toward "catastrophic" thinking.
Indeed, some of the essays presented here have undoubtedly a flavor
of fin de siecle; but what is expressed is not so much "apocalypse now"
as the end of a history that is already behind us: gone is the Crystal
Palace, gone Utopia, gone Dystopia. Thus the effort to reperiodize Rus
sian culture-which we encounter, for example, in Mikhail Epstein's
essay-appears no less urgent than the need for what Renata Galtseva
and Irina Rodnyanskaya think of as the "unflinching analysis" of the
"landscape after the battle." And now gone also is the Soviet Union.
2 Late Soviet Culture
All the articles were written before the formal disintegration of the
USSR; one of them was conceived during the events of August 1991;
only the editor had the privilege of rewriting his introduction several
times. The reader will judge which one of the essays was the most-or
the least-prophetic. As to the very purpose of this book, I hope that
the variety of themes, of point of views, and of climates will contribute
to an understanding, beneath the inflation of facts, of the debates in
the late 1980s and early 1990s around what still and already may be
called "late Soviet culture."
The debate is opened by two contributions focusing, above all, on
the future. While for Boris Kagarlitsky, "A Step to the Left, a Step to
the Right," the analysis of the political situation at the end of the 1980s
is inseparable from maintaining the "ability to go against the current,"
for Mikhail Kuraev, "Perestroika: The Restructuring of the Past or the
Invention of the Future?," democracy is on its way, the past needs no
more restructuring, and the future needs no further invention. Kuraev
sees the nation's future returning to an "organic development" that
leads toward self-consciousness. Kagarlitsky, on the other hand, advo
cates revolutionary reforms. He comes to the conclusion that "left"
and "right" are terms that not only still have meaning, but also acquire
new meaning within the context of market Stalinism.
Persistence is the common denominator of the two following con
tributions. Shifting historical perspective, Sidney Monas, "Perestroika
in Reverse Perspective: The Reforms of the 1860s," explores analogues
between the present time and the Great Reforms of the latter half of
the nineteenth century, which modernized the Russian Empire, but
also led to its final collapse. The words of Piotr Chaadaev (quoted by
Monas), claiming that Russia "had no history" and "had contributed
nothing but the occupation of space," sound strangely actual in these
days of decay, affecting not only the Soviet Empire, but also a Soviet
identity from which even "Russia" seems to be anxious to escape.
Threatened identity calls for great figures, guides, pilots, or for
martyrs. Paul Debreczeny, "'Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo': Push
kin's Elevation to Sainthood in Soviet Culture," sees in the myth of
Pushkin's death and the development of his "martyrdom" from 1837
to the present time an archetype for national suffering and the anx
ious quest for national identity-a quest that may be ending with
Russian history entering its "McDonald's period" on Pushkin Square.
Debreczeny's anthropology of the death of "Aleksandr of Boldino"
sheds new light on the development of collective mentalites in Russia
a history that is living and that counts because it defines the present of
its actors.
Editor's Introduction 3
"The Obstacle: The Human Being, or the Twentieth Century in
the Mirror of Dystopia" by Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya
introduces a third series of essays that deal with the experiment of
"total culture." The "obstacle" reminds us of Kagarlitsky's "ability to
go against the current," but this time another point of view prevails:
not the one of the "masses" but the vantage point of the "chosen one,"
that is to say, the one who did not choose to live in one of the Brave New
Worlds of our century. Zamiatin's We, Platonov's Chevengur, Nabo
kov's Invitation to a Beheading, Orwell's Animal Farm and, of course,
his 1984, but also Grossman's Life and Fate and Shalamov's Kolyma
Tales all reveal the same "obstacle," resisting depersonalization, homo
geneity, sterility, and transparency. This is the "I," the ultimate "point
of hardness," encoded in human nature.
The following three contributions deal specifically with the cul
ture of the Stalin period: the "forgotten" literature of the post-World
War II era, Soviet film in the 1930s and 1940s, and the reconstruction
of a lost referent through the "careful reading" of a Stalinist literary
blockbuster. In the autistic and dislocated culture of late Stalinism, de
scribed in detail and with passion by Evgeny Dobrenko ("The Litera
ture of the Zhdanov Era: Mentality, Mythology, Lexicon"), the realm
of the "false order of things over past and future" in twentieth-century
dystopia has become a "second reality," has entered a "fundamental
lexicon" of timeless values, and, according to Lysenko's formula, no
longer gives birth to "people," but to "organisms." One could ven
ture the following conclusion: people die, organisms only decay. This
would explain why Dobrenko 's "lexicon" survived-and is still surviv
ing-the "death" of socialist realism. In any case, Dobrenko's analysis
demonstrates the urgency of reading the "unreadable."
In such conditions, the urge felt by Maya Turovskaya to search
for figures reflecting the preferences of moviegoers during the Stalin
period is all the more understandable; a task she compares to the
"mining of radium": "a yield in grams, a labor of years." Obviously,
"people" started to become scarce in the 1930s. The recovered fig
ures then serve to reconstitute the very fabric of Soviet film history,
the "natural-heterogeneous structure" of its development, disrupted
and homogenized-by state policy since the 1930s. The effects of this
disruption are felt until the present day. Strange flowers have been
growing in the homogenized garden of Stalin's culture: Turovskaya's
report tells us how the "generation of victors" was brought up on
the products of Nazi cinema, anonymously recycled by the Soviet film
industry between 1947 and 1949, because of a dramatic shortage of
"mass culture."
