Changing Landscapes: The Provincial Text in Russian-Soviet Culture. Introduction

Introduction to the monographic section “Changing Landscapes: the Provincial Text in Russian-Soviet Culture.”

The Impact of Deconstruction on the Lithuanian Literary Criticism

In the article I discuss how deconstruction (Jacques Derrida and other Yale School participants) came to Lithuanian literary criticism and how it changed habits of humanitarian thinking during the three decades after independence. The most unusual and radical deconstruction critique of essentialist metaphysical thinking, new terminology (inter-text, elimination of center, footprint, writing, difference, blinding, labyrinth narrative, guest / enemy, etc.) and new strategies for interpreting texts were very important for Lithuanian humanities liberated from Soviet ideology. Literary critics have noticed and discussed the undoubted connection between postmodernist literature and its deconstructive reading.We can find three tendencies in the deconstructive criticism of Lithuanian literature. The first tendency is the interpretation of general theoretical concepts of deconstruction, second tendency - searching the deconstructive features in literary works and the third tendency of criticism, expanding its own self-criticism and self-irony, is discussing chrestomathic and structuralist interpretations of the literary works or deconstructing icons of Soviet culture. We know very well, that many feminist, postcolonial, historiographic, anthropological, or interdisciplinary researches of literature cannot escape the effects of deconstruction.

The Voices of Samizdat and Magnitizdat

This chapter treats “samizdat” (self-publishing) and “magnitizdat” (audio tape self-publishing) in the late Soviet Union via the concept of the “voice.” Komaromi discusses a select set of examples including guitar poetry; Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Evgeniia Ginzburg’s camp memoirs; poetry at Maiakovskii Square; and the texts of Leningrad second culture. These examples facilitate exploration of the way samizdat and magnitizdat related to official culture, even as they expanded the range of late Soviet culture far beyond what was allowed in print. They also make it possible to analyze the way samizdat and magnitizdat voices mediated between silence and speech, matter and spirit, presence and absence, and the individual and the collective, creating new ways for Soviet citizens to express themselves and be heard by one another.

Decembrists in the cultural and historical mythology of the Soviet era. Literature experience of the 1920s–1960s

The relevance of the topic is determined by the interest of modern humanities to the myth-making aspects of the Soviet culture, including the interpretation of Decembrism. The purpose of the article is to review the main stages and patterns of the literary realization of Decembrism from the beginning of the Soviet era to the moment of the final separation of the two versions of the Decembrism myth (official and oppositional).

Subject-activity approach of S.L. Rubinstein: Neo-Kantianism and Marxism

Pages history Soviet psychology often contain gaps, which are due to incomplete or inaccessible sources as well as to ideological distortions реrception and interpretation events epoch totalitarianism. Historical-psychological reconstructions, inspired these days archival and revisionist turns, as well as methodology latent change, offer other interpretative models, on one hand, overcoming established mythologems, and on other, revealing а complex, contradictory and ambiguous picture development socio-humanitarian knowledge first half 20th сеntury. Under influence globalization and transnational research projects, contemporary Russian historiography in one way or another updates its methodological tools, turns to polyparadigmatics and transdisciplinarity, and shifts from linear interpretative schemes to constructions that include marginal and non-obvious narratives and discourses along with canonical ones. In light new interpretive model, which takes into асcount historio-graphical materials related sciences as well as hidden currents Soviet culture, three methodological milestones are singled for analysis in S.L. Rubinstein’s intellectual biography: neo-Kantian, Marxist, and anthropological (existential) реriods scientific work. It is emphasized that Soviet historiography left almost no doubts concerning Marxist foundations S.L. Rubinstein’s subjectivе-асtivity арproach, but other models interpretation not only immerse Russian psychology in context epistemological twists and turns in socio-humanitarian knowledge 20th сеntury, but also problematize established ideas and call them into question. Among such problematizations is а comprehension neo-Kantian and Marxist premises S.L. Rubinstein’s doctrine. It is stated that principle creative асtivity, notion self-development and individuation subject, problem ethics and values as internal guidelines human development represent latent neo-Kantianism in intellectual biography scientist.

Tamizdat as a Literary Practice and Political Institution

The article seeks to define tamizdat as a literary practice and political institution of the late Soviet era. Comprising manuscripts rejected, censored, or never submitted for publication at home but smuggled through various channels out of the country and printed elsewhere, with or without their authors’ knowledge or consent, tamizdat contributed to the formation of the twentieth-century Russian literary canon. Tamizdat thus mediated the relationships of authors in Russia with the Soviet literary establishment on the one hand and with the underground on the other, while the very prospect of having their works published abroad, let alone the consequences of such a transgression, affected these authors’ choices and ideological positions in regard to both fields. The article argues, along these lines, that tamizdat was as emblematic of the literary scene after Stalin as its more familiar and better researched domestic counterparts, samizdat and gosizdat, whereby the traditional notion of late Soviet culture as a binary opposition between the official and underground fields is reinvented, instead, as a transnationally dynamic three-dimensional model.

In Search of a Cultural Code

From the plethora of big and small achievements that the author celebrates in the book, my essay addresses such subjects as the continuity of cultural creativity in the 19th and 20th centuries, children’s literature, the sociology of reading, and the place of goodness in literature and life under Stalinism – all within the span of the 20th century. Sharing with the author my admiration of accomplishments of Russian and Soviet culture, I try here to historicize the themes and expand slightly on some of them, like perceptions of the cultural products.

Age of Genius or Century of Revolution? Russian Culture and Power Across the High-Low Divide, 1850–1950

This article discusses Jeffrey Brooks’ metaphor of an integrated ecosystem to describe Russian cultural history in the late imperial and early Soviet periods. Brooks’s Firebird and the Fox describes an interlocking cultural system marked by high-low interactions, as a rich Russian folkloric tradition based on fable and popular tales was reworked with remarkable creativity in what he calls an “age of genius.” In response, this article argues that this period of Russian cultural creativity can be seen as coinciding with the extended life-cycle of the Russian Revolution. The subversive, satirical humor and irony running through Brooks’s cultural “play-sphere” was complemented by another tradition: a didactic, instructional, enlightening “teach-sphere” that animated a wide range of intelligentsia and cultural forces shaping cultural evolution and cultural revolution. If the play-sphere highlights the rebellious distance between culture and power, the teach-sphere’s project of transforming the masses reveals their many commonalities. The essay reflects on how the intersections of culture and power shaped early Soviet culture, the avant-garde, and successive phases of Stalinist culture. While Socialist Realism promoted the theoretical declaration of a unified socialist culture, the persistence of differing elements of the cultural system raises the question of Soviet cultural syncretism.