On soviet subjects and the scholars who make them

Russian Review

Volumn 60, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 307-315

  Naiman, Eric ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949445416     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0036-0341.00172     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki, f. 9457, op. 1, ed. khr. 83
2. See Halfin's From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000)
3. and Hellbeck's "Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931-1938," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 3 (1996): 344-73
4. The first issue of Kritika (2000) contained two articles that already take retrospective stock of subjectivity in Soviet studies: Hellbeck, "Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia," and Anna Krylova, "The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies." For approaches to subjectivity that differ substantially from Hellbeck's and Halfin's see Golfo Alexopoulos, "Portrait of a Con Artist as a Soviet Man," Slavic Review 57 (Winter 1998): 774-90
5. and Jeffrey Rossman, "Weaver of Rebellion and Poet of Resistance: Kapitan Klepikov (1880-1933) and Shop-Floor Opposition to Bolshevik Rule, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 3:374-408
6. As both Krylova's insightful survey and an earlier review by Halfin and Hellbeck attest, the recent interest in Soviet subjectivity was in large measure inspired - or, at the very least, provoked - by the work and polemical talents of Stephen Kotkin. See Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Los Angeles, 1995)
7. and Halfin and Hellbeck, "Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin's 'Magnetic Mountain' and the State of Soviet Historical Studies," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 3 (1996): 456-63
8. V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 23
9. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics," in Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), 84-258 (the quoted words are from the essay's opening sentence)
10. See also "The Problem of Speech Genres," in Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin, 1986), 237-80
11. and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, 1984), 202-3
12. For the substitution of terms compare Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Leningrad, 1929)
13. and Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1972)
14. "Socialist realism was a Stalinist mentalité, not just an artistic style. Ordinary citizens also developed the ability to see things as they were becoming and ought to be, rather than as they were" (Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times [New York, 1999])
15. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1985.)
16. The ultimate verbalist manifesto of the prerevolutionary decade is probably Andrei Belyi's "The Magic of Words," in Simvolizm kak miroponimanie (Moscow, 1994), 131-42
17. I. V. Stalin, "Golovokruzhenie ot uspekhov" [Dizzy from success], in his Sochineniia (Moscow, 1949), 12:191
18. In Stalin's attack on Bukharin at the party plenum in 1928, the latter's chief fault was his failure to grasp the Party's slogans; a major error of Bukharin and his followers was that they talk about the wrong things (Stalin, Sochineniia 12:10-11)
19. Laura Engelstein, "Paradigms, Pathologies, and other Clues to Russian Spiritual Culture: Some Post-Soviet Thoughts," Slavic Review 57 (Winter 1998): 864-77
20. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," in Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin, 1990)
21. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva, f. 631, op. 15, ed. khr. 74
22. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel" in The Dialogic Imagination, 35
23. Andrei Platonov, "Among Animals and Plants," in The Portable Platonov (Glas 20), trans. Robert Chandler (Moscow, n.d.), 176-216
24. (Russian text published in Rossiia, 1991, no. 1)
25. For a detailed exploration of this theme see Lilya Kaganovsky, "Bodily Remains: The 'Positive Hero' in Stalinist Fiction" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000)
26. Andrey Platonov, Happy Moscow, trans. Robert Chandler (London, 2001), 27
27. The significance of this image was initially highlighted by Keith Livers in "Scatology and Eschatology: The Recovery of the Flesh in Andrei Platonov's Happy Moscow," Slavic Review 59 (Spring 2000): 179
28. Cited in N. V. Kornienko, "...Na kraiu sobstvennogo bezmol viia," Novyi mir, 1991, no. 9:58-59
29. "Introduction," in Kiaer and Naiman, eds., Everyday Revolution: Subjects in Formation in Early Soviet Culture, currently under consideration at Indiana University Press
30. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, 1992)