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La fattualità del male: La Nonfiction Novel e le sue versioni sovietiche
No full textTwo books which appeared almost simultaneously on both sides of the Iron Curtain share similar, analytical and unusual, indications as to their genre: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: “The true account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences” (the author would usually refer to his text as “Non-fiction Novel”) and Lev Ginzburg’s The Abyss “A Narrative Based on Documents”.
A similarity can be traced on the thematic plan as well: In Cold Blood is centered on the murders’ story, while The Abyss is based on the records of a trial to collaborationists serving in the SS during the war and taking part in the mass murders of Soviet civilians, reporting for the first time in the Soviet Union about their personal histories: both authors undertake an inquiry on the nature of Evil – they are both, probably, written under the impression of Eichmann’s trial and possibly of Arendt’s book – and, in order to undertake this task, they both challenge traditional literary categories.
Is there a necessary connection between the thematic and the generic plans? A definitive answer can hardly be reached. A parallel reading of the American debate on Capote and the Soviet one – not on Ginzburg in particular, but about the blooming genre that at the time was beginning to be called “documentary literature” - can help shed some light.
Both Capote and Ginzburg aim at a narrative of reality clearly detached from novelist traditions, however different those were in their respective countries. In the United States, this meant setting oneself apart from a modernist tradition that had renounced to any pretense to depict society; in the Soviet Union, to set oneself free from the Socialist Realist canon, doubting of its capacity to give a meaningful depiction of the horrors of the Twentieth Century (a tradition which will develop up to Svetlana Aleksievich). In both cases, anyway, a criticism of the conventions of Realism was implied, clearly resounding, at a glance from today, the late avant-garde. In the Soviet debate of the Sixties, however, any reminding of it was significantly missing – the only mention of Sergei Tretyakov and the “literature of fact” are in quotations from an American review of Capote. The disappearing of Tretyakov from the Soviet debate has yet to be explained: was censorship the reading, or was his name totally unknown to the younger writers?
A renewed interest in the avant-garde can, anyway, be observed in the Soviet Union in the Sixties, clearly connected with the atmosphere of destalinization. A resurgence of avant-gard experimentation is characteristic for the Western world in the same era. Both Capote’s and Ginzburg’s texts are conceived in this atmosphere, and after the Eichmann trial, which is considered a milestone in the development of a new attitude towards the Shoah and its witnesses. On both sides of the divide, it seems – and as several further instances show - it was the attempt to “write poetry after Auschwitz” that caused to question novelistic conventions
Carrying the Red Man's Burden: Pavel Luknitskii, or Kipling in the Soviet Pamir
Full text linkKipling’s work in the Soviet Union was heavily criticized as an expression of imperialism; yet, it was widely read and translated – it was clearly more acceptable than that of Nikolai Gumilev, “the Kipling from Tsarskoe Selo”, a purported counter-revolutionary whose name itself was forbidden.
This explains the apparent contradictions in the image of Pavel Luknitskii – from one side, a scholar of Gumilev, from the other, an official Soviet writer. His novel Nisso (1946), based on his travels in the Pamir, is a classic of Soviet literature about the Asian republics.
The novel’s plot is built around a classic Colonial triangle, mixed with a typical Soviet collectivization story. The setting purportedly reconstructs the Shugnan region that the author described in his travelogues; many traits in the depiction, however, appear to be highly arguable and expose Luknitskii’s colonialist attitude. The border between Soviet Tajikistan and Afghanistan, carrying the novel’s fundamental symbolic weight, in particular, is nothing but the border between the respective spheres of influence the Russian and the British Empires agreed upon in 1895. The Soviet writers thus needed to construct the Shugnans as a nationality in order to find a place for them inside the Soviet family
I nomi dei militi ignoti. Letteratura di guerra sovietica e giornalismo, o verisimiglianza e verità: due casi
No full textVasilij Subbotin’s "We Stormed the Reichstag" is a typical specimen of the wave of non-fiction prose about World War II which sprang up in the wake of the 20th Congress. The search for the unjustly forgotten war hero, one of the major themes of this kind of literature, is represented here by the story of Pëtr Pjatnickij, a soldier who fell on the steps of the Reichstag entrance with a red flag in his hand and was then forgotten.
If, hypothetically, this story was false, it would echo the (probably false) story of the 28 ‘panfilovcy’ who purportedly fell at Dubosekovo during the battle for Moscow. In that case, Subbotin’s text would embody a characteristically literary device: giving a name to an anonymous character, the anonymous figure, for example, carrying the flag in Vladimir Bogatkin’s well-known painting, as a way to give life and credibility to the image. The Dubosekovo story, as developed by journalist Aleksandr Krivickij, appears to employ the same mechanism for achieving credibility. In this case the operation was twofold: Krivickij gave his heroes first a number, and only later names. The second move was the most hazardous. A story that pretends to be true must be verifiable in real life; this is where Krivickij failed and where Subbotin may have succeeded.
Stalinist culture fundamentally refused to separate fact from fiction. The non-fiction literature from the Thaw is exactly the opposite: an attempt at reinstating the separation
Recensione di D. Franzoni, La prosa sovietica nel contesto socio-culturale dell’epoca brežneviana, fup, Firenze 2020, pp. 170
No full textThe Soviet Spy Thriller. Writers, Power, and the Masses, 1938-2002
No full textIt is commonly held among scholars that in the Stalin years no specific mass literature existed in the Soviet Union; what do we do, then, with Lev Ovalov’s Major Pronin or with Lev Sheinin’s stories, which began to appear since the mid-Thirties? What about Nikolai Shpanov’s post-war million-sellers?
The Soviet authorities did not like to admit that they published low-quality
literature aimed at the uncultured masses; they valued, however, its propa-
ganda potential, hence this contradictory situation. Spy narratives, moreover, connected as they are with conspiracy theories, were of course welcomed in the atmosphere of the great purges. These works are no continuation of the “Red Pinkerton” tradition of the Twenties: the genre had to be invented anew along different lines, with a new seriousness and documentary pretensions.
The building of a new kind of spy-thriller also required a new enemy: “espi-
onage creates identity,” a scholar of the (western) genre wrote. Identities,
in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, were under construction as well, and in the history of the spy-thriller from the late Thirties to the early Fifties a shifting from the obsession with class to that with nationality can be easily observed.
The same identity discourse accomplished a 180° turn in the post-Stalin
years, when the Soviet agent underground in the enemy camp became a
metaphor for the Soviet Man’s double life. Conspiracy theories, at the same
time, were at the core of the thrillers from the Stalinist camp, a tradition continued in the post-Soviet years in the work of Aleksandr Prokhanov
Andrej Belyj v Sicilii: imaginativnaja geografija i orientalizirujuscij vzgljad - kogo i na cto?
No full textAndrei Belyi did not see Sicily (many factual mistakes can be pointed at): it was shielded by constantly open books. The author appears, in his travelogue, as a typical Orientalist. Characteristically enough, besides, he sought the Orient in a place a thousand kilometers west of Moscow.
It would be pointless to criticize him from the point of view of a “native in an English hat”; what is interesting is that his Orientalist gaze at Sicily is astonishingly similar to the Orientalist gaze at Russia itself typical of Russian intellectuals.
Alexander Etkind wrote about the “Internal Colonization” of Russia; in Italy a debate has begun about the “Internal Orientalism” of Northern Italians concerning the Southern part of the country – and as well that of Southern-born intellectuals writing about the South for the Northern public; for instance, the case of Giovanni Verga, finding the Orient in his native land, is enlightening.
In his mature work Verga overcomes the Orientalist gaze by moving the focus inside the Sicilian lower classes; we can trace a similar process in Belyi's writings on Russia, but not on Sicily
L’intreccio, il dettaglio e le cose: un apologo sulla fortuna sovietica di un termine dei formalisti
Full text linkThe term siuzhetnaia proza, or ‘plot-based prose’, is recurrent in Soviet literary debate. Its roots lie in the basic Formalist opposition: if plot is the main device of prose, everything which is not plot must be regarded as motivation. This opposition involves psychology, but also details, i.e. objects (bourgeoisie idols).
The term survived in Soviet debate as a euphemism for mass literature, called ‘plot-based literature’ by critics from a range of backgrounds. But is it possible to measure the space that plot occupies in a given work? And what about science fiction, a mass genre where the invention and the depiction of a world is fundamental
L’identità della spia: classe e nazione nello spy-thriller sovietico
No full textI territori di confine annessi dall'Unione Sovietica negli anni di guerra costituivano un doppio problema per le autorità: l'eredità del sistema capitalista era ancora viva, e l'identità nazionale dei loro abitanti poco chiara. Questi territori, d'altro canto, erano l'ambientazione ideale per i romanzi di spionaggio, ed alcuni tra questi, come ad esempio Sul Tibisco (1954) di Aleksandr Avdeenko, che si svolge nell'Ucraina transcarpatica, una terra dall'appartenenza a lungo contestata, o L'apprendista stregone (1956) di Nikolaj Španov, ambientato in Lettonia, ottennero un buon successo.
L'identità è la questione chiave nella narrativa di spionaggio; l'ossessione per l'identità, e per i doppi agenti che nascondono la loro reale natura, è d'altro canto una questione chiave per il governo sovietico fin dagli anni Venti. A quei tempi, però, era l'identità di classe ad essere in discussione; nel corso degli anni Trenta (dopo la proclamazione del socialismo raggiunto) l'attenzione si sposta verso la nazionalità (per sfociare nel dopoguerra nell'antisemitismo ufficiale). E' probabilmente per questo che le autorità sovietiche, che non ammettevano volentieri l'esistenza di una letteratura di massa nella terra del socialismo, non riuscivano a rinunciare al potenziale propagandistico di libri del genere.
Nei romanzi in discussione i concetti mobili di appartenenza di classe e di appartenenza nazionale possono essere osservati nella forma in cui erano diffusi a un pubblico di massa.The border countries the Soviet Union annexed in the World War II years presented the authorities with a double problem: the heritage of the Capitalist past was still to be felt; and the national belongings of their inhabitants were somehow blurred. These countries, on the other hand, was the ideal setting for spy-thrillers, and some of them – such as Aleksandr Avdeenko’s 1954 On the Tisza, is set in Trans-Carpathian Ukraine, a land whose national belonging had been long contested, or Nikolai Shpanov’s 1956 The Sorcerer’s Pupil, set in Latvia – became indeed very popular.
As in every spy-thriller, identity is the issue at stake. An obsession with identity, and with double-agents hiding their real self, was characteristic for the Soviet power since the Twenties; class, however, was the issue at that time: during the Thirties (after the goal of Socialism was proclaimed reached) the attention moved to nationality (to end up in official anti-Semitism in the post-war years). This is probably the main reason why, while the Soviet authorities would not admit the existence of mass-literature in the land of Socialism, they could not do without the propaganda potential of such works.
In the novels discussed here, the evolving notions of class and national belonging can be observed as they were disseminated to the mass audience
Which Language Does the Subaltern Speak? Leskov, Verga, and Internal Orientalism
No full textDuring the last few years, Edward Said’s conceptual frame has been used in peculiar ways in relation to both Italy and Russia. The differences are self-evident, but a look at the similarities can be useful as well: if in the Italian case, from a political point of view, a discussion of internal colonisation would be meaningless, from a cultural one the situation changes: the picture of an essentially backwards, ‘Oriental’ South is mainly the product of Southern intellectuals working in exile in Northern Italy after the failed revolution of 1848.
The parallel is thus a working one for what concerns the ‘Westernisers’ party; it could be useful to extend it to the ‘Slavophile’ (in the broadest meaning of the word) one. According to Alexander Etkind, thanks to Russia’s peculiar positioning as both ‘self’ and ‘other’, in Leskov’s work the subaltern becomes able to speak. Skaz should thus be the subaltern’s language for self-expression. Scholars of Giovanni Verga have argued that his major work is marked by a shift in the narrative voice, which is now located within the Southern masses themselves. In Verga’s case, maybe, Bakhtin’s understanding of skaz as writing from an other’s point of view could usefully apply
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