Slot: 28D-2 Dec. 28, 3:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m.

Panel: The New Soviet Man in a New Soviet World

Chair: Edith Clowes, University of Kansas

Title: Disorganizing the Human Psyche: Literature and Transformation in Bogdanov’s Red Star and Zamiatin’s We

Author: Eric R. Laursen, University of Utah

Harry Weber and Kathleen Lewis have linked a series of symbols and images in Bogdanov’s Red Star and Zamiatin’s We. Indeed, both novels depict futuristic communist societies that bear many similarities. This essay will argue, however, that in We Zamiatin attacks something deeper than Bogdanov’s style, tone, and recurring images. We subverts two elements that were integral to Bogdanov and to proletarian groups of the 1920s: the transformation of the individual and the view of literature as a tool in effecting that transformation by "organizing the human psyche."

In Red Star Bogdanov applies the "universal law of life" to the social development of Martian children: as they mature, they pass through all the stages of Marxist history. In the Martian children’s colony, we see this illustrated in one little boy’s desire to own private property and in another child’s act of violence. They must be guided by more mature Martian mentors to move beyond these atavistic tendencies. Throughout the novel, earthlings are compared by Martians to young children who need similar guidance. In the eyes of the Martians, earthlings are not yet "human beings"; they need to be guided to an "adult" stage of human development, communism. The earthling Leonid understands the theories of Communism when he arrives on Mars, but he needs to mature so that he feels them and acts naturally according to their principles. Because of this, he initially has trouble understanding Martian art, society, and even certain grammatical peculiarities of the Martian language. Unable to process Martian culture, Leonid reacts like the Martian children, experiencing romantic jealousy and committing an act of violence. He is then returned to a psychiatric hospital on earth, where he is cured, not by the earth psychiatrist but by the act of writing about his experiences: "In the process of setting these memoirs to paper, the past gradually became clear to me. Chaos yielded to order, and I began to understand." As Bogdanov and the proletarians argued, art "organizes the human psyche." Leonid now begins to view his fellow earthlings as children, and, with the help of the journal and his conscious Martian lover, Leonid is able to leave the hospital and resume his revolutionary efforts.

In We Zamiatin reverses this paradigm of maturation. His central character, instead of maturing into sanity / consciousness, becomes preoccupied with his childhood, and begins a return to a childlike state. Explicit use of birth imagery accompanies his journey, and, when he physically leaves the communist utopia for the first time, he is, like Leonid on Mars, both child and alien, filled with the question marks that disqualify him as human being in the eyes of the One State. Unlike Bogdanov, Zamiatin views the child not as a regressive echo of early, individualist societal leanings but rather as the highest form of humanity, an intellect that has not yet become stagnant. The child asks the questions that are beneficially threatening to societal order. Rather than "organizing" the psyche, Zamiatin presents literature as a disorganizing, fragmenting force; in a reverse of Leonid’s experience, as D-503 writes his own journal, order yields to chaos and he becomes "insane." In the end he is, like Bogdanov’s hero, cured and returned to society. In Red Star, however, insanity is cured by the organizing power of art, whereas in We insanity is caused by art, and cured only by removing its source: imagination.

Title: Идея «нового человека» и судьба кинопьесы Юрия Олеши Строгий юноша

Author: Irina Panchenko, Independent Scholar

Задача данного исследования заключается в прослеживании связи кинопьесы Ю.Олеши Строгий юноша с концепцией «нового человека», которая корнями уходит в русскую мессианскую утопию о путях к царству социальной правды и справедливости.

Подвергнутая деформации, освобождённая от религии, эта идея вновь ожила в контексте (по определению А. Синявского) «осуществлённой в России марксистской утопии».

В идею «нового человека» в ту пору вкладывался смысл глобальной и скорой переделки и перековки человеческой природы научными методами. Надежды радикально мыслящих большевиков в 1920-х гг. возлагались на психоанализ, соединение фрейдистских открытий с большевистской идеологией. По мнению современного историка культуры А.Эткинда, политическим лидером этого нового в большевизме пути был Л.Троцкий.

Романтическая утопия Олеши Строгий юноша была опубликована в 1934 г., когда внутренняя политика в советской России ужесточилась, однако утопическая идея переделки обычных людей в людей «новой породы» сохранилась.

В 1931-1934 гг. был введен Физкультурный комплекс ГТО («Готов к труду и обороне СССР») – система нормативов по физическому развитию населения.

Олеша попытался внести собственную лепту в дело воспитания «нового человека». Живя в стране, отказавшейся от христианских заповедей, писатель, ощущая ограниченность комплекса ГТО, составил перечень моральных свойств, необходимых для «новых людей».

В кинопьесе Строгий юноша писатель создал образ идеального героя Гриши Фокина, комсомольца, студента и спортсмена, который дополняет комплекс ГТО сводом высоких нравственных качеств, необходимых «новому человеку»: великодушие, щедрость, сентиментальность и т.п. Олеша устами героя предложил эти моральные заповеди задолго до принятия казенного «Морального кодекса строителя коммунизма» (1961).

Пресса 1934-1935 гг. в целом доброжелательно откликнулась на новое произведение Олеши. Состоялось обсуждение пьесы в Доме советских писателей, в котором приняли участие В. Мейерхольд, А. Роом, А. Фадеев, А. Сурков, Д. Мирский, В. Кирпотин. Собравшиеся отметили «мужественную попытку» Олеши создать «утопию ближайшего будущего» (Литературная газета от 6 июля 1934 г).

Похвально отозвались о кинопьесе Строгий юноша на I Всесоюзном съезде советских писателей (август 1934). В 1936 г. режиссёр Абрам Роом завершил съемки одноименного фильма.

Однако на экран фильм не вышел. После статьи в Правде «Сумбур вместо музыки» его запретили 10 июня 1936 г. с огульными обвинениями в «идейно-художественной порочности» и «формализме».

Проект «нового человека», воплощенный Олешей в не лишенной компромиссов кинопьесе Строгий юноша, не мог быть востребованным жестоким временем.

Премьера кинофильма Строгий юноша состоялась лишь в 1974 г.

Title: Embodying the New Man: Andrei Platonov as Literary Critic

Author: Keith Livers, The University of Texas at Austin

While the promulgation of socialist realism in the Soviet Union of the 1930s forced an end to the period of artistic and literary ferment that had electrified much of the preceding decade—turning utopian dreamers into more pragmatic engineers of human souls—its effects in the ancillary discipline of literary criticism were no less dramatic or destructive. Thus if the socialist realist writer was called upon to mold the consciousness of the masses, then the literary critic had to act as a kind of “quality control” for those whose task it was to sculpt the New Man.

Andrei Platonov, whose career as a professional literary critic extends from 1936 through the 1940s, used his essays and book reviews both to defend his own artistic practice and as a means of polemicizing with the increasing politicization of belles lettres under Stalin. Building on the relatively small body of scholarship that deals with Platonov’s larger essays (such as those on Pushkin, Lermontov and others), this paper analyzes the writer’s attempt to influence literary debates about the nature of the New Man or the relationship between utopian present and pre-Revolutionary past, in addition to examining Platonov’s consistent championing of dialogism in art.

Thus in the seminal essay “Obraz budushchego cheloveka” (1936) Platonov cautions the would-be writer against portraying socialism’s New Man as a futuristic, omnipotent technocrat, preferring instead to locate the anthropological elite within the Orthodox kenotic ideal of long-suffering as exemplified by Ostrovsky’s Korchagin and others. This leads, both in Platonov’s fiction of the period and in his essays and book reviews, to what Hans Günther has described as the author’s promotion of a kind of “minus-corporeality,” which is to say, a body that strives not for self-gratification or satisfaction but toward maximal openness vis-à-vis the Other. Thus in his review of Panferov’s Bruski, Platonov chides the author of the four-volume epic of collectivization for his portrayal of Kiril Zhdarkin as an unrepentant champion of animal pleasures. What holds for the individual body is that much more important when applied to the larger body politic, which, according to Platonov, should reflect the ideal of all-inclusiveness or vseedinstvo preached by Dostoevsky and Solov’ev. Thus in his review of Lev Kassil′s 1939 novel about soccer Vratar′ respubliki, Platonov takes issue with the Stalinist celebration of a sanitized body social that is predicated on the exclusion of declassee and “unclean” elements.

Finally, a number of Platonov’s essays and reviews employ the imagery of incarnation (the Word become flesh) as a metaphor for verbal art and—more broadly—for the creative act. And like his contemporary Bakhtin, Platonov presents this model as an alternative to the rarified abstractions that were the norm within socialist realism. Though Platonov’s book reviews are not without the occasional false note—such as his praise for the “revolutionary” ideas of Michurin and Lysenko in a review of V. Safonov’s Vlast′ nad zemlei—taken as a whole they constitute a valiant attempt to present a viable alternative to the stultifying artistic doctrine of socialist realism.

References

Hans Günther, “K estetike tela u Platonova (1930-e gody),” in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, eds. Hans Günther, Evgenii Dobrenko. St. Petersburg. Akademicheskii proekt. 1999.

Petr Pavlenko, Literaturnaia gazeta, Feb. 14, 1948.