The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The Soviet state had another carrot, however, which in the minds of many creative artists worked to offset the constant intimidation, control of culture by thugs and hacks, and silencing of the disobedient. This was the fact that the state and Party were committed to sponsoring serious art - and, at the same time, to ensuring that a large spectrum of artistic media and genres were considered “serious.” As part of the Leninist cultural revolution of the early 1920s, lavishly financed outreach programs in the popular arts reached mass audiences. Factory workers were organized into brigades and bussed to theatre performances; crews of writers and musicians were dispatched to factories to explain operatic plots and teach workers how to write poetry. Such aggressively proletarian programs were discontinued in the 1930s. By that time artists no longer explained their craft; their craft was explained to them by censorship and repertory boards. But traces of this cultural populism remained. Musical theatre and film were valued as moral education, not only as entertainment, and the nation’s most gifted artists produced magnificent scenarios, propaganda canvases, and musical scores on commission.

As state violence became more capricious and widespread in the upper ruling circles, public campaigns intensified for “culturedness” [kul'turnost'] at the local level. Culturedness drives, beginning in the mid-1920s, covered not only literary and visual education - the domain of writers and filmmakers -but also personal behavior, mental attitude, health and hygiene. Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya is on record saying that to persuade workers to wash their hands would be a revolutionary step forward. Much attention was paid to the proper use of sexual energy, where “spontaneity” could easily be unproductive unless harnessed for society’s benefit and regulated by the norms of kul'turnost'. Although the Party resisted laying down strict rules in this realm, Leninist pamphlets explained to Soviet youth the most seemly, efficient means

194 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

for dealing with the functional necessity of intercourse. A brisk public debate developed over the best ways to avoid sexual arousal (“Never drink alcohol . . . Upon waking, stand up at once . . . Urinate before going to bed . . . Flirtation, courtship and coquetry should not enter into sexual relations . . . There should be no jealousy”).2 In 1927–28, as part of this high-profile debate, Vsevolod Meyerhold defended to Party skeptics his staging of Sergei Tretyakov’s play I Want a Child, about the conception and production of a healthy Soviet child by a no-nonsense communist woman who refuses to endure the indignities of Dionysian libido. Meyerhold advocated turning its strange love-free plot into a public discussion, bringing the audience on stage for improvised dialogue in the spirit of commedia dell’arte.

With this agenda in the moral and physiological sphere, conflicts of state interest were inevitable. Some high-ranking Bolsheviks, who promoted a healthy and harmonious body for the New Soviet Man, advocated the prohibition of all alcohol – but in 1927 Stalin (following his tsarist predecessors) instituted a state monopoly on vodka, justifying it as an indispensable revenue source for Russia’s industrialization.3 These clean-living campaigns might strike us now as na¨ıvely high-minded, but such priorities appealed powerfully to many artists, as much for Tolstoyan reasons (subduing our “animal” side) as for political ones. Many took pride in the fact that in communist Russia, “healthy art for the people” was not obliged to cater to a Hollywood market mentality aimed at pleasing the crowd at any price, nor (at the other extreme) to an arrogantly isolated, incomprehensible avant-garde. Indeed if need be the tastes of both elite and mass audiences could be ignored, since the official success or failure of a work was judged “scientifically,” before its publication or performance, by Party committees. Serious art in Russia meant serious social engagement toward a positive goal, determined in a collectively “conscious” – not an independently “spontaneous” – manner. Consciousness, once achieved, was always unified, goal-directed, and stable: a second-order simplicity.