The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

What should the new Soviet person strive to see? This person should not dwell on the dark or perverse sides of human nature. Those are “survivals,” relics, reality not in its “revolutionary development” but reality stuck motionless somewhere far back on the path. Access to the “truthful, historically concrete representation of reality” depends on one’s Party-disciplined eye picking out the proper details on which to focus, and ascertaining where, on the ladderto the future, they belong. Truth in this context might be compared to an energy field surrounding and infusing the subject; immersed in the proper class or collective milieu, any person could become “conscious” and begin to see. Under the new regime, literature was no longer primarily a record of self-expression, and not even “a form of passive ideological reflection, but an active, ‘healthy,’ controlled ideological instrument, not a mirror any more but a weapon.”7 History could be hastened along by attitude alone, an energy resource that never runs out -even when a population is devastated by every conceivable type of war, famine, economic collapse, personal loss, and grief.

Four socialist realist principles eventually governed what a conscious subject, inside and outside the fictional text, is privileged to see.8 Partiinost', “party-mindedness,” decrees that every artistic act is also a political act. The source of all authoritative knowledge is the Party. Ideinost', “idea-mindedness,” is specifically topical: the “idea” of the artwork should embody the current high-priority party slogan (reconstructing a ruined factory, abolishing drunkenness, building the Moscow metro, destroying the fascist enemy). Klassovost', “class-mindedness,” both acknowledges the social-class origin of art and obliges it to further the struggle of the proletariat. Narodnost', “people- or folk-mindedness,” requires art to be accessible and appealing to the masses by drawing on their traditions, language, melodies, rhythms, and values. Since the Soviet Union was a multinational state, narodnost''authorized considerable

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cultural diversity (within, of course, a framework of ideological uniformity). In practice this meant that folk songs, legends, colorful costumes and superstitions, local peasant and tribal rituals were allowed their own expression, even their own national language, and could coexist alongside the more “consciously” proletarian plots of hydroelectric dams, cement factories, and metros.But likehistorical factsinsideapatriotichistoryplayduring theRoman-tic era, “authenticity” here was ornamental, sentimental, pre-packaged, and essentially powerless.

The third principle in this quartet, class-mindedness, became less important after 1936, when the new Soviet Constitution declared that the USSR had become a classless society and thus all class antagonism was officially ended. Such conflictlessness made it difficult for fiction writers to find, from within the domestic population, villains, rogues, or any negative principles out of which to construct plots. A new genre appeared: the “optimistic tragedy.” This manic optimism affected writers personally as well as creatively. Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895–1958), perhaps the greatest prose satirist of the 1920s and like so many comics and clowns a clinical depressive, wondered why, if reality could be manipulated and human bodies and natures reforged through attitude alone, he was such a failure at it. In the 1930s, Zoshchenko began writing deeply auto-therapeutic texts, such as Youth Restored (1933), in which he attempted to “engineer” his own physical and psychic health.9 In 1943, in a strange work of “literary research” titled Before Sunrise, this troubled writer attempted to reason himself out of his phobias using a combination of Pavlovian reflexology and Sigmund Freud. Although the choice of Zoshchenko as one scapegoat for the post-war crackdown on writers in 1946 certainly exemplified proizvol, the punishment was probably not without justification in Zoshchenko’s own guilt-ridden mind.