Constructing the Stalinist Body: Fictional Representations of Corporeality in the Stalinist 1930s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Keith A. Livers. Constructing the Stalinist Body: Fictional Representations of Corporeality in the Stalinist 1930s. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2004. vii, 267 pp. Bibliography. Index. $70.00, cloth.Keith A. Livers 's book deserves our attention. Constructing the Stalinist Body: Fictional Representations of Corporeality in the Stalinist 1930s is an excellent example of a careful close reading that also makes visible the larger theoretical and critical stakes of literary analysis. Arguing persuasively that Stalinism, ideology and physiology are two sides of the same coin (p. 95), this book addresses one of the key issues understanding Soviet culture in the 1930s: the ideological and rhetorical construction of the in Stalinist discourse. Livers's work is one in a series of studies - along with Eric Naiman's Sex in Public, Eliot Borenstein'sMe« Without Women - that places the questions of gender and sexuality firmly at the heart of any discussion of Soviet culture; and which, with Rolf Hellebust's Flesh to Metal, shows how Stalinist bodies - actual, fictional, or metaphoric - come to constitute the Soviet body politic.The book is divided into four chapters that focus on subjects at once central and marginal to Stalinist discourse: Andrei Platonov's lesser-known novels of the 1930s, Dzhan and Happy Moscow; Mikhail Zoshchenko's self-healing short stories and diaries (Youth Restored, The Sky-Blue Book, Before Sunrise); Lev Kassif's novel for adolescents, The Goalkeeper of the Republic; and accounts of the building of the Moscow metro, including Kassil s Miracle Beneath Moscow, the short history of the Moscow metro (The First Soviet Metro), and the commemorative volume, How We Built the Metro, among others. What these chapters have in common is the notion of construction: the physical body, the psychic mind, and the natural world are all part of the Plan Great Works of Stalinism, the Utopian dream of reforging the earth and engineering the human soul. Though somewhat uneven in their treatment of each subject (Chapters One and Two comprise the bulk of the book, with the Platonov chapter easily twice the length of the Kassil' chapter), each chapter is structured by a nuanced close reading tied to a larger critical and theoretical framework. If there is a weakness here, it comes from not engaging with theory as systematically or as consistently as the close readings warrant, and a reluctance to follow through on the implications of certain rhetorical constructs.The first chapter is probably the strongest in the book, centring on Platonov's great texts from the 1930s: Reka Potudan', Dzhan, and the unfinished Happy Moscow. As Livers's readings make clear, Platonov attempts to reconcile the Utopian project of the transformation of the world with the reality and limitations of the physical body. If Stalinist utopia sought nothing less than to purge human nature of its ontological underbelly, Livers writes, then Platonov's Happy Moscow suggests rather that the can never be entirely free of the things it (r)ejects or renders abject (p. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".