The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture

Evgeny Dobrenko. The Making of State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture. Trans. Jesse Savage. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. 512pp. $75.00, cloth.In his previous work on Socialist Realism, The Making of State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford, 1997), Evgeny Dobrenko showed how Soviet State made masses not only into consumers of Soviet mainstream literature but also into its creators. The Making of State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture continues his study of literary process of and Soviet eras. He begins his investigation of social and aesthetic origins of Stalinist with question of why Soviet literature was occupied by graphomaniacs whose names were sometimes better known than their works. In posing this question, Dobrenko breaks away traditional interpretations of Soviet literature in ternis of social command (sotsial'nyi zakaz) and repression directed against those who did not want to toe Party line. He convincingly shows that Socialist Realism was as much a cultural revolution from below as from above: According to classical Stalinist definition, Soviet writers are 'engineers of human souls,' but they themselves are also product of social engineering (p. xviii). The Soviet reader contributed to creation of Socialist realist aesthetics by becoming Soviet writer (pp. xx-xxi).Dobrenko finds roots of Soviet ideological graphomania in attempts at creative writing by seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Russian serfs and workers. He shows how liberal intelligentsia of first half of 19th century promoted people (p. 5). Artistically inferior, this literature for village lackeys, as Belinskii described it (p. 11), was used to substantiate political agenda of intelligentsia. In second half of 19th century, raznochinets which Dobrenko situates between mass literature and high literature, developed themes that were later picked up by proletarian writers during Silver Age. These writers considered themselves followers of Nekrasov tradition in poetry (p. 71 ); in their works, they complained about the lot of poor and expressed masses' hatred for the rich ones (p. 69). After 1905 Revolution, hundreds of self-taught poets and writers of proletarian origin tried to emulate Gorky while making their way into politically engaged literature (p. 84). In decade preceding October Revolution, Pravda published poetry by autodidacts for propaganda purposes.With rise of Stalin, however, literature was increasingly used as a means of creating a dictatorial state. Dobrenko illuminates intricacies in development of Soviet literature to show how a new understanding of proletarian poetry was formed in 192Os and 193Os: Political which preserved an independent status for author (the absolute freedom of revolutionary culture) was separated Party-minded which no longer needed a poet who might challenge Party line. Dobrenko presents history of proletarian literature in 192Os as confrontation of political literature and Party-minded literature that was growing out of it. The Party-minded artist, a writer who condoned the absolute non-freedom ('necessity') of Soviet culture and became his own most severe censor (p. 102) appeared milieu of political poets and then replaced them. Dobrenko shows that same processes that shaped political and social life in country also defined development of literature. …

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