Slot: 30A-3 Dec. 30, 8:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Panel: Hero, History and Story
Chair: Sharon Lubkemann Allen, State University
of New York-Brockport
Title: Conflicting Identities: The Soviet
Historical Novel in the 1960-1980s
Author: Volodymyr Chumachenko, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
One recent study characterizes the
historical novel as a “literary dimension of nationalism” (Sethi, 1).
Historical fiction actively participates in the process of shaping national and
cultural identities representing the past through various ideological,
political, and cultural perspectives. Although the problem of the relationship
between literature and individual or group identities may seem more a
sociological than a literary question, the unique literary dimension of the
historical novel makes it an important element in the process of identity
construction. This is especially true about Soviet literature and ideology. My
analysis of the Soviet (Russian and Ukrainian) historical novel from 1960 to
1980 will help to answer one important question: why Soviet literature as a
particular aesthetic and ideological system failed to fulfill its self-assigned
historical task in helping to create a new type of a man – a man of the
“communist future.”
Benedict
Anderson emphasizes the role of the novel and the newspaper as “the technical
means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind
of imagined community that is the nation” (Anderson, 25). Slightly modifying
this statement one can see the nation as “the kind of imagined community” with an “imagined
past.” According to Anderson, “fiction seeps quietly and continuously into
reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is
the hallmark of modern nations” (Anderson, 36).
The specificity
of Soviet totalitarian society requires special attention to the political and
ideological implications with regard to the function of cultural production and
particularly, literature in that society. Eric Hobsbawm’s emphasis on the
danger of historians’ involvement as myth-makers in identity politics may also
be well applied to writers of historical fiction (Hobsbawm, 10).
One of the major
reasons why the Soviet system ultimately collapsed was a complete failure of
communist ideology and cultural policies in dealing with the past of the Soviet
multi-ethnic society. As a result of this failure, national literatures (in our
case – Russian and Ukrainian) were portraying the pre-revolutionary past
relying on the traditions of national historiographies – imperialistic and
nationalistic respectively. Novels by Dmitry Balashov, Valentin Pikul, Roman
Ivanychuk, Raisa Ivanchenko can serve here as convincing examples. In spite of
significant efforts by the political regime to erase cultural differences among
the Soviet nationalities, national literatures in the Soviet Union were
creating alternative discourses that undermined the rhetoric of “socialist
internationalism.” Official policy
in support of the myth about “friendship and cooperation” could not prevent the
creation of literary “mirages” – a problem “raised by the distorted view which
one national group obtains of another through the influence of writers”
(Escarpit, 5). National literatures in the Soviet Union ultimately succeeded in
the creation of their “imagined communities” with “imagined pasts” within the
tradition of “socialist realism.”
References
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: 1991.
Escarpit, Robert. Sociology of Literature. Translated by Ernest Pick. Painesville,
Ohio: 1965.
Hobsbawm, Eric. On History. London: 1998
Sethi, Rumina. Myths of the Nation:
National Identity and Literary Representation. Oxford: 1999.
Title: Ne boltai!: Gossip and History in the Works of
Liudmila Ulitskaia
Author: Jenne Powers, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill
The works of Liudmila Ulitskaia (b.1943)
are characterized by a light tone and gentle treatment of their subject matter.
This tone is created by a closeness – but not identity – between narrator and
character. Her narrators present themselves as all knowing, possessing a
particular kind of non-objective omniscience and typical human unreliability of
judgment characteristic of a neighborhood gossip. Gossip becomes a vehicle for
writing history by identifying the vicissitudes of an individual’s life to the
bigger picture of national upheavals and the spreading of unsubstantiated rumor
to the writing of history.
Gossip is
usually perceived as trivial, and Ulitskaia’s narratives maintain this attitude
toward events. Typical is Medeia i ee deti (1997), in which Stalin’s death is
overshadowed for the protagonist by the discovery of her late husband’s
infidelity. The events themselves, familiar to her readers, take on a new
meaning through this unusual parallel between biography and history. Gossip
functions as ostranenie
in these works. Ulitskaia’s first published volume of stories, Bednye
rodstvenniki, may be
read as a cycle based on gossip narrated by a neighbor who watches carefully
but never gets involved – other than to convey the stories to the reader. One
of her most successful povesti,
Skvoznaia liniia,
actually consists of five short stories united by the theme of women’s lies and
the narrative motivation of gossip. Using gossip as narrative motivation
creates an ironic commentary on the morality of individuals and the times in
which they live. In many cases the divulging of personal information about
others amounts to divulging the truth of the past, and in spreading news and
rumors which may or may not be substantiated Ulitskaia’s fiction comments on
the mixture of truth and lies in the writing of Soviet history.
In Russian
criticism, Ulitskaia is consistently treated as a writer of zhenskaia proza and the question of gender dominates her
interviews and public conversations. This use of gossip as narrative device may
be one of the reasons she is perceived as a woman’s writer, but it is also a
tongue in cheek response to that attitude. With the light, trivializing touch
of gossip, Ulitskaia writes weighty fiction about the history of the Soviet era
with a fresh view that invigorates a familiar topic.
Title: The End of the Typical Hero:
Aleksei Batalov in the films of Iosif Kheifits
Author: Marina Madorskaya, University of Michigan
In 1954 Soviet film community welcomed a
new hero personified by Aleksei Batalov in Iosif Kheifits’ film The Big
Family. Batalov’s boy
next door offered a fresh alternative to the monumental superman and the schematic
everyman of Stalinist cinema. But under the soft exterior the hero retained the
steel core of his predecessors – the un-reflexive loyalty to the Soviet cause
however it was packaged at the moment. The actor managed to temporarily ease
the progressive ailment of Soviet culture diagnosed by Katerina Clark as the
modal schizophrenia of Socialist Realism: the necessity to represent life at
once as it is and as it ought to be (Clark 2000: 36-45). Batalov gave the
country its last typical
hero, defined no less paradoxically as someone highly exceptional representing
something extremely widespread. My paper will examine the evolution of this
hero in six Kheifits films that star Batalov, from The Big Family (1954) to In the Town of S (1966). The paper will situate these
films and their protagonist within the broader framework of post-Stalinist
cinema, and provide an analysis of the narrative and character structures of
Kheifits’ films.
With the gradual
reintroduction of private life as a legitimate theme, Thaw filmmakers had to
negotiate it within the framework of the dominant theme of social life. The
goal was to represent “the big in the small,” the private as a manifestation of
the public. To put it broadly, this problem was solved in two major ways. On the
one hand, the filmmakers turned to extreme situations, in which the hero had to
subjugate the “natural” side of his personality to the “ideological” one. But,
as Vitalii Troianovskii convincingly shows in his pioneering essay “The Man of
the Thaw: The 1950s,” such films presented their heroes as martyrs. Although
such films as Pavel Korchagin or
The Forty First may
be credited with the introduction of the fatal split within the hero, audiences
could not relate to the hero or his problem. The other kind of film, which was
much more popular, presented social duty as a natural need of good Soviet
people. Kheifits’ films may be situated between these two tendencies. Devoted
to contemporary themes, Kheifits did not seek extreme situations. Yet, even
though Batalov’s hero in his films always makes the right choice never doubting
his faith in the social cause, from film to film this choice is increasingly
harder to make, until it is displaced altogether along with the hero who makes
it. This peculiarity is largely due to Kheifits’ attempt to follow the latest
vogue while firmly holding on to his hero. The increasing complexity of the siuzhet entered into a conflict with the highly
conventional fabula
of his films. The diachronic progression of Batalov’s hero through Kheifits’
films uncovers some of the practical mechanisms leading to the ultimate
replacement of Stalinist typical hero with the “superfluous man,” dominant in
Soviet cinema from 1966 to Perestroika.
Writer.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance
Self-fashioning.
Andrei Siniavskii, 127 pisem o liubvi (Vols. 1-3).
Abram Tertz, A Voice From the Chorus, and other works by Sinyavsky and Tertz.