Slot: 29C-4 Dec. 29, 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Panel: Texts and the Arts: The Broad Scope of
the Soviet Cultural Agenda
Chair: Eric R. Laursen, University of Utah
Title: Techniques of Survival: Artistic Devices
in the Feuilletons of Ilia Il′f
and Evgenii Petrov
Author: Anna Tumarkin, UW-Madison
In Soviet criticism, the feuilleton is
traditionally viewed as a critical response to certain negative phenomena
taking place in society. In his prescriptive work, How To Write a Feuilleton
(Kak napisat′
fel′eton), Mark
Vilenskii categorically states that at the core of every feuilleton there must
be a fact that creates a strong connection between the feuilleton and the
problems of contemporary society. Because of the strong reliance on fact and
the need to establish a connection to “here and now,” feuilletons were written to
be published primarily in periodicals, which, in turn, required that
feuilletons served their timely purpose without attempting to survive as
literary works. This often resulted in lack of depth and generalization, forced
out by the desire to fulfill the agenda of Communist propaganda. Nevertheless,
many feuilletons, especially those by Il′f and Petrov, outlived their newspaper issues and continued
to draw interest from readers for many years after the events depicted in them
had lost their immediate relevance.
In this paper I
explore those qualities of Il′f
and Petrov’s feuilletons that allowed them to survive beyond initial
publication. I argue that their longevity can be explained by two factors: Il′f and Petrov’s tendency to select
universal themes that transcend immediate concerns of Soviet existence and the
writers’ broad use of artistic devices characteristic for narrative prose
(i.e., exaggerations and caricature, extensive use of literary archetypes and
models, amplifications, mechanization of human personality, its reduction to
the most elementary instincts, black humor with ample use of farcical
situations, etc). I will analyze the main themes of Il′f and Petrov’s feuilletons and show how
the writers’ use of stylistic and narrative devices allows them to expose some
of the eternal follies of mankind while ridiculing the futility of certain
aspects of Soviet life.
References
Crooks, Carolyn S. The Soviet
Fel′eton: Form and Function.
Ph. D. Dissertation. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1985.
Shcheglov, Y. About The Novels “The
Twelve Chairs” and “The Golden Calf” by I. Il′f and E. Petrov. Moscow: Panorama, 1995.
Vilenskii, Mark. Kak napisat′ fel′eton.
Moscow: Mysl’, 1982.
Title: The Letter Meets the Dog: Texts and the
Suffering of Flesh in Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog
Author: Anna Dvigubski, Columbia University
In examining Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, I will focus on the ways in which it
addresses issues surrounding the Soviet literacy campaign of the 1920’s and the
attendant emergence of print as a potent political force. The new Bolshevik
trends of mass edification, of altering the orthography, lexicon and grammar of
the Russian language are portrayed in Bulgakov’s work through concentrated
thematic sequences of texts, reading, print and the printed document.
For Bulgakov,
printed texts aim to subdue and control the elements of culture associated with
living language, especially with the spoken word. Thus, he distinguishes
between, on the one hand, oral speech, which is associated with the physical
body, and, on the other hand, printed texts, which are devoid of flesh and
meaning.
I will focus on
the experience of the dog Sharik, the protagonist of the story. Bulgakov
establishes a strong causal connection between Sharik’s encounters with the
Bolshevik printed word (the signs and slogans that have proliferated in the
city around him) and his physical suffering (being scalded with hot
water, kicked, beaten with whips and electric wires).
For Bulgakov, then, Bolshevik texts have the power to literally wound
flesh and to threaten the natural life of the body.
Bulgakov
portrays Sharik as a displaced peasant, who can neither process nor accept the
new text culture of the city. But the new print is alien and meaningless not
only to Sharik, but also to the well-educated Preobrazhenskii. For all their
disparity in class, education, and species, these two figures unite to expose
the deficit of meaning that is inherent to the artificial linguistic structures
of political oppression.
Bulgakov uses the
dog’s perspective to highlight the violation and distortion of language brought
about by the Bolshevik régime, with its rabid focus on the printed word. Thus, for instance, Bulgakov shows the
store sign “Glavryba” (an example of the “stump compounds” that came to
characterize the new print) to be an especially invidious case of the Bolshevik
violation of the word. In my
paper, I will discuss this and other means Bulgakov uses to show Bolshevik
print culture to be an affront both to nature and to language.
Bulgakov, M. Iz luchshikh
proizvedenii: Grjadushchie perspektivy, Sobach′e serdtse, Belaia Gvardiia, Beg,
Velikii kantsler.
Moscow: IZOFAKS, 1993.
Title: Knowledge is Power: Images of the Book in
the Soviet Ideological Poster
Author: Elena Boudovskaia, UCLA
This paper concerns the images of books,
libraries, museums, and generally defined knowledge, or information, in Soviet
ideological posters (1917 – 1990). The Soviet ideological poster evokes
interest both from the point of view of the specificity of its art forms and
pictorial language, and from the point of view of the ideology reflected in it.
Books, libraries, and other objects pertaining to the area of education,
preservation and transmittion of knowledge have a specific place in Soviet
poster imagery, reflecting the place of the book in the eyes of official
propaganda, as well as the stance of the new Soviet government towards
literacy, learning and information. For scholars in the Western tradition, it
is not always easy to be aware of these attitudes, because the very words
“education,” “enlightenment,” and “knowledge” may mean something totally
different in the language of Soviet propaganda. However, the pictorial language
of posters may shed some additional light on the concepts of the book,
literacy, and information as they were understood in the Soviet period, and it
also reveals something different from what is stated in verbal sources.
References
Baburina, N. 1988. The Soviet
Political Poster: 1917-1980.
New York : Penguin Books.
Bonnell, V. E. 1997. Iconography of
Power: Soviet Political Poster under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley, CA : University of
California Press.
Thom, F. 1989. Newspeak: the Language
of Soviet Communism. London; Lexington, Georgia : Claridge.
White, S. 1988. The
Bolshevik Poster. New Haven :
Yale University Press.
Title: Unexpected Voices of Radio Moscow: Black
American Radio Propagandists in the USSR
Author: Romy Taylor, University of Arizona
In a war of ideas, one battle strategy
involves elevating token indigenous voices to hypervisibility in order to
propagate a certain message. While
the embodied carriers of these voices benefit in the short term, over the long
term they often meet an early or violent end. Thus, in the 1930s, two Black Americans were catapulted from
the bottom of the United States’ social and labor hierarchy to the top of the
Soviet Union’s discursive stratum as broadcasters for Radio Moscow.
It is clear how
authorities benefit from foregrounding token voices. African-Americanist Hortense Spillers writes, “the position of the speaker in discourse goes far to
decide the credibility of her report”: a Soviet broadcaster decrying Jim Crow
carries far less authority than a Black American. The Black American presents an additional advantage as a
native speaker of English: the USSR could carry English-language broadcasts to
London and its colonies, former colonies and protectorates, from Palestine to
India and Australia.
But the token
performer’s power is ephemeral: should an American on Radio Moscow stray, she
would find herself as disposable as any other Soviet citizen. Furthermore, according to performance
scholar Yan Haiping, those who cross cultures to perform may earn money and
fame, but “lose themselves” in the process. Drawing on performativity studies of token hypervisibility
and charismatic transnationals, I examine the cases of Williana Burroughs and
Lloyd Patterson, African-American Radio Moscow broadcasters in the 1930s and
1940s. Their early demise (both
dying before 1945) can be compared to the happier fate of Robert Williams, of
“Negroes with Guns” fame who later broadcast “Radio Free Dixie” from
Havana. Williams represents an
exception to the pattern described by Yan in that he “found himself” in his
transnational performances: after years in exile, he returned to join the
faculty of the University of Michigan.