The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Dialectical materialism might be laid out simply as follows. All reality, in its essence, is material. Matter is objective and primary. But matter is not dead; Marx insisted that motion is an essential quality of all matter, and by this he meant not mere mechanical motion but a vital impulse, a tension inherent in the material world. Since the psyche that receives this vital material is initially blank and has no independent existence, reality is fully knowable. The knowing subject must act on matter so as to release the energy in it. In this sense, subjects are both born into their world and become the responsible makers of it. But a subject is not authorized to act or think in a wholly autonomous way, as in Romantic or Idealist theories of cognition, because the material world, to a large extent, determines the subject. This circular conditioning takes place through “social being,” of which the subject can be more or less aware. In this imported “Western” doctrine of dialectical materialism we already glimpse certain tenets compatible with Russian folk and Orthodox views of the world: a reverence for matter and its transfiguration, the primacy of the communal whole over the individual specimen. Not by chance did many great twentieth-century Russian religious philosophers experience in their youth a passionate Marxist phase.

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Dialectical materialism has other aspects less compatible with a religious worldview, however. Although all material nature forms an interconnected whole, there is nothing absolute or eternal in that whole. Development is not the result of a uniform evolutionary process but is punctuated with periods of cataclysm: qualitatively different, revolutionary change. All change is the result of a conflict between opposing tendencies, which in principle can be resolved temporarily in a new synthesis. During the Stalinist years, what it means to know, act, and succeed within the confines of such a doctrine had a profound effect on the psychological motivation of literary heroes, as well as on the shape of the plot in which they moved.

What was socialist realism?

In April 1932, by official decree, all independent writers’ organizations were dissolved and replaced by a single Union of Soviet Writers. The word “union” [soyuz] in the Soviet context has nothing in common with employees’ “unions” in the West (trade unions and the like), which exist to defend the rights of worker-clients against employers. In the USSR, no such rights formally existed; also, there were no private employers, nor were there neutral courts to adjudicate conflicting claims. “Creative unions” were conduits for social commands. Novels, poems, poster art, and symphonies were perceived as cultural products that could be put to work for the good of socialist society, just as pig iron, an industrial product, was put to work. This does not mean that the unions were monolithic or unmindful of the needs of their respective artistic disciplines. But only in its bosom could one live professionally by one’s art.

Stalin called Soviet writers “engineers of the soul.” To be recognized as a writer – and thus to be officially employed (a non-trivial obligation in a state with anti-parasite laws) – one had to do more than write and submit one’s work. One had to be a member of the Union. Since the Writers’ Union had a financial division (Litfund) in addition to an organizational bureaucracy (Orgbyuro), it functioned both as literary agent and as ideological monitor. In reward for compliance and high productivity, the Union provided its members with royalties, commissions, access to vacation resorts operated by cultural agencies, quality living quarters, forums for discussion of their work, and foreign travel (under certain conditions: that the writer be engaged in an approved study of a foreign culture, be willing to serve as propagandist for Soviet art, be available to file reports for the security police, and have family members who could be left behind as hostages). Soon after its founding, the Writers’ Union, in collaboration with the Communist Party’s Central Committee, worked out its

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literary policy, a vital part of Stalin’s second Five-Year Plan (1933–37) that was to enact Soviet Russia’s official transition to a classless society. The ideological charge to writers was “socialist realism,” defined in the statutes as “demanding of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development.”