Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921–1938 by Cassio de Oliveira (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921–1938 by Cassio de Oliveira Mark Lipovetsky de Oliveira, Cassio. Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921–1938. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON, London and Chicago, IL, 2023. xiii + 290 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00: £55.00. Cassio de Oliveira's book is based on his Yale University doctoral dissertation, defended in 2014, and represents a detailed and vivid history of the Soviet picaresque from 1921 to 1938. The book's parts are structured chronologically and discuss the periods of the early 1920s, the NEP and the Stalinist 1930s. Writing Rogues presents a rich and original collection of texts representing the adventures of the Soviet rogue that includes such classics of this genre as Il´ia Erenburg's Julio Jurenito (1922) and The Stormy Life of Lazik Roitshvanets (1926), Babel´'s Odessa Tales (1926–33), as well as Il´ia Il´f and Evgenii Petrov's diptych about Ostap Bender (1928, 1931/33) and Aleksandr Kozachinskii's The Green Cart (1938). Writing Rogues significantly enriches the canon by treating as picaresque such less obvious texts as Shklovskii's Sentimental Journey, Ehrenburg's The Grabber (1927), Leonid Leonov's The Thief (1927), Veniamin Kaverin's The End of the Gang (1924), Veniamin Kataev's The Embezzlers (1926) and, most convincingly, Zoshchenko's 'Story of a Reforging' (1934), from the infamous volume, Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal imeni Stalina. Having reviewed the prehistory of the genre, de Oliveira arrives at a somewhat narrow definition of the picaresque as a genre focused on the marginal protagonist with a broad 'tour d'horizon' who seeks his place in a changing reality (p. 27 and passim). This definition obfuscates many other distinctive features of the picaresque — first and foremost, its comedic component. Following de Oliveira's definition, one could qualify as picaresque Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don or Gor´kii's The Life of Klim Samgin, for example, not to mention any adventure novel, like Kaverin's Two Captains. De Oliveira's research intuition is far more sensitive, however, and his book contains many brilliant ideas and observations. I am especially fond of the analysis of the (quasi)autobiographical picaresque narratives represented by Ehrenburg's Julio Jurenito and Sterne's A Sentimental Journey; or his discussion of the process, in the NEP-period novels, of 'the rogue becom[ing] an allegory for the persona of the writer, an expression of an author's aspirations and desires rather than an ostensible literal expression of who he really is' (p. 77); or the comparison between Hasek's Svejk and Ehrenburg's Lazik; or the conceptualization of the Odessa Tales through 'Benya as a character increasingly in control of time' (p. 99); or the interpretation of the finale of 'Story of a Reforging', in which an imprisoned Jewish rogue becomes the Stakhanovite, where de Oliveira detects 'a greater affinity of the picaresque with the mischievous concept of [End Page 547] (re)qualification than with the ostensible reforging that authors and the secret police alike wished to see in their heroes' life trajectories' (pp. 174–75). De Oliveira treats the Soviet rogue as the embodiment of an 'apparent contradistinction between a subversive, individualistic character and the collectivist impulse of the Soviet project' (p. 4). However, Writing Rogues is founded on the tacit implication that a collective identity is something that any character (or any person, for that matter) automatically strives to obtain, and that a Soviet novel without the glorification of the collective identity just cannot exist. The idea of resistance to collective identities seems to the author so hopelessly conservative that it does not receive any consideration. As a result, de Oliveira transforms picaro characters, who incessantly subvert Soviet models of community, into catalysts and even vehicles for new Soviet collective identities. To achieve this, he forgets that in all these texts, the picaro's attempts to lead any group — from Julio Jurenito's circle of disciples to Ostap Bender's little gangs — end with the leader's isolation and betrayal by his 'disciples'. The imagined community that these characters form mainly includes their readers — who...

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