The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The weirdly abstract nature of that definition was first explicated for a Western audience in 1959, by an insider, Andrei Sinyavsky – that same writer who, as an e´migre´ two decades later, would publish his Sorbonne lectures on Ivan the Fool. In his essay “What Is Socialist Realism,” published under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, Sinyavsky explained that the doctrine seems odd to outsiders because the concept of “revolutionary development” has nothing to do with any visible or palpable reality. The “socialist realist” writer is neither realist in the old way – he does not attempt to describe “what exists,” as did Tolstoy or Chekhov – nor is he socialist in an overtly political fashion, oriented toward today’s struggles. This new type of writer hardly sees the present. What is seen, Sinyavsky remarks with some irony, is “Purpose with a capital P.”5 Focus steadfastly on this Purpose, and your consciousness will be transformed. However fleetingly, you will see the future goal manifest in the messy and mediocre present. Skeptics laugh at these ardent true believers, Sinyavsky admits, just as the urbane pagan Romans laughed at (and crucified) the early Christians. But the nineteenth century, with its doubts and quests – “soft, shriveled, feminine, melancholy” – was a disaster from the perspective of Purpose. Sinyavsky concludes his essay by suggesting that twentieth-century socialist realism is actually closer to neoclassicism, a favored carrier for the ideological certainty and patronage art of the eighteenth century.

Sinyavsky’s tone in this 1959 essay is caustically provocative, as befits a Purpose that had grown decrepit and cynical over a quarter century. But Sinyavsky faithfully repeats many of the points Gorky made in 1934, even though Gorky uses the phrase “socialist realist” only once. For its time and place, Gorky’s speech was astonishingly cosmopolitan. Much of it is devoted to the history of world literature, and how Soviet Russia might enrich that history by overhauling its repertory of heroes and plots. We consider only two of his most influential positions: his blistering critique of “bourgeois literature,” and his hopes for a new Russian alternative to it.

Throughout his 1934 speech, after the manner of so many Russian critics from Belinsky to Bakhtin, Gorky projects onto the world at large what are essentially native Russian values: traditional folk worldviews, prejudices against mercantile activity, Russified Marxist truisms. He begins by confirming that labor, the spoken word (incantations, spells), and a “materialist mode of thought” lay at the base of all primitive cultures.6 He then insists that “when

200 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

the history of culture is written by Marxists, we shall see that the bourgeoisie’s role in the process of cultural creativity has been grossly exaggerated” (p. 233, Gorky’s emphasis). Especially repellant to Gorky is the fact that the heroes of bourgeois literature are all “swindlers, thieves, murderers, and detectives” - the detective novel being an idle game between propertied capitalists, the “favorite spiritual repast of satiated people in Europe” (p. 238) - devoid of plots that could engage or inspire the working class that actually produces the wealth. In addition to crooks and the detective who stalks them, the nineteenth century showcased the “superfluous person.” This empty and Purposeless individual had been featured in both lines of progressive European literature familiar in Russia: “critical realism” and its softer, more ecstatic precursor, “revolutionary romanticism.” The former “-ism” saw clearly the ills of society but offered no constructive alternative to them; the latter did not see at all.