Slot: 30C–3 Dec.
30, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Title: Crime and Consumption: The
Construction of the Soviet Self
Chair: TBA
Title: Crimes of Omission: Censorship and
Self-Fashioning
Author: Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy,
Barnard-Columbia
Self-fashioning is generally construed as
an active, performative process of staging the self for the outside world. What happens, however, when we
re-imagine self-fashioning as being constituted by silence, by what is “left
out.” In this paper, I will argue
that textual omissions were key to the construction and self-presentation of
the Soviet writer. Of course,
tracking voluntary textual exclusions (self-censorship), as opposed to
rewritings mandated by “social command” or institutions of censorship, is a
tricky business to say the least.
I will therefore take as my paradigmatic example one of the most
intriguing and trackable case studies of the Soviet period: the case of Sinyavsky-Tertz. I will take as my starting point the
contention that we see Andrei Sinyavsky’s writings published in the Soviet
Union in a fruitful new light when we think of the writings he published abroad
under the pseudonym Abram Tertz specifically as omissions from his Soviet
corpus. The level of anger that
greeted Sinyavsky’s unmasking as Abram Tertz testifies to the level of
investment the cultural system perceived itself as having in Sinyavsky’s
omission of Tertz from his public Soviet persona. It is therefore precisely revelation that turns omission
into crime. To add a further level
of complexity, I will consider in this context the recent posthumous
publication of Sinyavsky’s personal correspondence with his wife while
incarcerated in a labor camp against his earlier published “epistolary” camp
memoir, A Voice from the Chorus,
a work that explicitly addresses the incorporation of silence and omission into
the literary text as an invitation to transgression.
References
Anatoly Gladilin, The Making and
Unmaking of the Soviet 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.
Title: A Cosmopolitan Apparatchik: Global
Exchanges of Late Socialism in Siberia
Author: Serguei Oushakine, Princeton University
The lives of Communist apparatchiks did little to inspire: dull,
predictable, and narrow-minded.
Yet, the public perception of these people was rarely indifferent. Envy,
mockery, or hostility were the main framing contexts within which jokes,
rumors, and underground literature endowed the Soviet party elite with
identities. Based on archival
materials and publications, collected in Barnaul (Siberia, Russia), I explore a
particular case-study of such identity construction. The paper is focused on a “personal case” (lichnoe delo) of a local party secretary who was
accused in the late 1980s of misusing his authority to gain access through a
local state-owned restaurant to what was perceived then as ultimate luxury
items: Czech beer, canned instant coffee from India, tins of Baltic sprats,
etc. When local newspapers published several articles about the apparatchik,
the regional committee of Party Control was flooded with letters from ordinary
people, demanding an investigation. Following the uproar, local authorities
conducted a string of meetings, after which the apparatchik was fired.
Despite the
case’s banality, minutes of meetings, letters to regional party committees, and
newspaper publications helpfully outline several important vectors through
which late Soviet identity was constructed and contested. As in many other
societies, the socio-political hierarchy here was also perceived as a hierarchy
of consumption (Bourdieu 1984). However, to produce the desired effect of
distinction, this late Soviet
hierarchy of tastes had to undermine itself by creating within the closed field
of the Soviet planned economy an area of quasi-cosmopolitan, non-Soviet life-styles (Yurchak 2006). By
drawing parallels with such groups as styliagi (Slavkin 1996) and dissidents (Tertz 1960), who also structured their
practices of distinction by deploying non-Soviet material objects and/or
artistic practices, in the paper, I trace closely how material exchanges
empowered by the Party’s authority produced an unusual Soviet identity of the
cosmopolitan apparatchik (Erofeev 2004).
References
Bourdieu, P. Distinction : A Social
Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
Erofeev, V. Khoroshii Stalin. Moscow, 2004.
Slavkin, V. Pamiatnik neizvestnomy
stiliage. Moscow, 1996.
Tertz, A. On socialist realism. New York, 1960.
Yurchak, A. Everything Was Forever,
Until It Was No More.
Princeton UP, 2006.
Title: Constructing the Soviet Criminal and
His/Her Spectator in the Early Thirties
Author: Cristina Vatulescu, New York University
This paper explores the image of the
criminal put forth in the most famous 1930s Soviet representation of the camps:
the Belomor project. My analysis will draw attention to the previously ignored
role of cinema in this multimedia project; furthermore, we will consider
cinema’s position vis-à-vis other means of representation employed to exhibit
the Soviet criminal, such as photography, painting, and literature. Next to a
documentary film by Alexander Lemberg, we will focus on the seemingly
incongruous inclusion of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s “The Story of a Reforging” in the
official eulogy to the camps co-edited by Maksim Gorkii and GPU camp commander
Simion Firin, Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal imeni Stalina, as well as on the lavish illustrations
that accompany the volume. I will trace the ways in which the
official representation of the criminal, and in particular the representation
of the woman criminal was defined against 1920s Soviet renderings of deviance.
Last, I will interrogate the role assigned to the audience in these criminal
spectacles.
References
Bertillon, Alphonse. Identification
anthropométrique: instructions signalétiques. Melun: Typographie-lithographie
administrative, 1885.
Clark, Katerina. The
Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Gorky, Maksim. "V.
Solovki." In Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 201-32. Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1952.
Gorky, Maksim, L. Averbakh,
and S. G. Firin. Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal imeni Stalina: istoriia
stroitel′stva. Moscow: Gos. izd-vo "Istoriia fabrik i zavodov", 1934.
Gorky, Maksim, L. Averbakh,
S. G. Firin, and Annabel Williams-Ellis. Belomor: An Account of the
Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea. New York: H. Smith and R.
Haas, 1935.
Phéline, Christian.
"L'image accusatrice." Les Cahiers de la Photographie 17 (1985): 1-169.
Piatakov, G. USSR in
Construction.
English ed. Vol. 12. Moscow: State Publishing House of the RSFSR, 1933.
Poliakov, Iu. , and S.
Drobashenko. Sovetskaya kinokhronika: 1918-1925. Vol. 1. Moscow: Tsentral'nyi
arkhiv fotodokumentov, 1965.
Ruder, Cynthia Ann. Making
History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 1998.
Tolczyk, Dariusz. "The
Glory of the Gulag: Stalin's Camps as Social Medicine." In See No Evil:
Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience, 93-184. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999.
Zhdanov, A. A. Essays on
Literature, Philosophy, and Music. Translated by Eleanor Fox, Stella Jackson and Harold C. Feldt.
London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1950.
Zorich, A. "From
Volkhovstroi." In Dnieprostroi: The Biggest Dam in the World, edited by D. Saslavsky.
Moscow: International Press, 1932.
Zoshchenko, Mikhail.
"Istoriia odnoi perekovki." In Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal imeni
Stalina: istoriia stroitel'stva, edited by Maksim Gorky, L. Averbakh and S. G. Firin. Moscow:
Gos. izd-vo "Istoriia fabrik i zavodov", 1934. 323-44.
Filmography
Belomorskoe-Baltiiskii
vodnyi put’
(The Belomor-Baltic Canal), A. Lemberg, 1932.
Belomorkanal (The White Sea Canal), A. Lemberg, 1936(?).
Belomorstroi raportuet (Belomorstroi Reports), A. Lemberg, 1933.