Utopian Visions: The Soviet Experience through the Arts Jan Plamper, Simon Huxtable

Week 14 Outline

Utopian Visions: Week 14 Underground literature:

Utopian Visions: Week 14 Underground literature: Samizdat and Tamizdat

Utopian Visions: Week 14 Underground literature: Samizdat and Tamizdat Poetry

Utopian Visions: Week 14 Underground literature: Samizdat and Tamizdat Poetry Prose

Utopian Visions: Week 14 Underground literature: Samizdat and Tamizdat Poetry Prose Beginnings of Postmodern, Postsoviet?

(1) Samizdat and Tamizdat Samizdat = (literally) ‘self-published’. Underground literature published in USSR. Tamizdat = (literally) ‘published there’ (not here, i.e. not in USSR)published in West and smuggled back into Soviet Union.

(1) Samizdat Hand-copied religious poetry by Glafira Kuldysheva, member of clandestine Russian Orthodox group and imprisoned 1971-1982. From Memorial Moscow Archive.

(1) Samizdat Vladimir Vysotsky songs and poems, 1980s.

(1) Audio Samizdat Record on x-ray, USSR, 1950s

(1) Samizdat-Tamizdat Photographed pages of tamizdat Paris version of George Orwell’s 1984. From 1970s. Archived at Memorial, Moscow.

(1) Tamizdat: Solzhenitsyn‘s Gulag Archipelago, YMCA-Press (Paris) original edition, 1973-1975

(2) Poetry Ex. Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996)

(2) Poetry Ex. Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) - quits school at 15

(2) Poetry Ex. Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) - quits school at 15 - 1961: enters Akhmatova circle

(2) Poetry Ex. Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) - quits school at 15 - 1961: enters Akhmatova circle - 1963 during ‘Freeze’ crackdown on underground Leningrad poets. Brodsky’s poetry called ‘pornographic and anti-Soviet’

(2) Poetry Ex. Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) - quits school at 15 - 1961: enters Akhmatova circle - 1963 during ‘Freeze’ crackdown on underground Leningrad poets. Brodsky’s poetry called ‘pornographic and anti-Soviet’ - 1964 trial in Leningrad; indicted on charge of ‘parasitism’ for failure to fulfill ‘constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland’. imprisonend in mental institution, then exiled to village in Far North

(2) Brodsky at his 1964 Trial Judge: And what is your profession in general? Brodsky: Poet translator. Judge: Who recognized you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets? Brodsky: No one. And who enrolled me in the ranks of humanity? Judge: Did you study this? Brodsky: This? Judge: To become a poet. You did not try to finish high school where they prepare, where they teach? Brodsky: I didn’t think you could get this from school. Judge: How then? Brodsky: I think that it . . . comes from God.

Brodsky’s 1964 trial in Leningrad Brodsky in Norenskaia exile, 1965.

(2) Brodsky Cont‘d

(2) Brodsky Cont‘d 1972: expelled from Soviet Union, emigration to US via Vienna; never returned to Russia, not even in post-Soviet times

(2) Brodsky Cont‘d 1972: expelled from Soviet Union, emigration to US via Vienna; never returned to Russia, not even in post-Soviet times 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature

(2) Brodsky Cont‘d 1972: expelled from Soviet Union, emigration to US via Vienna; never returned to Russia, not even in post-Soviet times 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature Divided his time between New York and Venice

(2) Susan Sontag about Brodsky Home was Russia. No longer Russia. Perhaps no decision he made in the later part of his life was as startling (to many), as emblematic of who he was, as his refusal, after the dismantling of the Soviet empire and in the face of countless worshipful solicitations, to go back even for the briefest visit. And so he lived most of his life elsewhere: here. And Russia, the source of everything that was most subtle and audacious and fertile and doctrinaire about his mind and gifts, became the great elsewhere, to which he could not, would not, out of pride, out of anger, out of anxiety, ever return.

Derek Walcott (Nobel Laureate 1992) reads Brodsky‘s Love Song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwQ3Br_OLvo

(2) Brodsky‘s Nobel Prize Speech, I If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness - thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous ‘I’. Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem by, say, Rainer Maria Rilke.

(2) Brodsky‘s Nobel Prize Speech, II That generation - the generation born precisely at the time when the Auschwitz crematoria were working full blast, when Stalin was at the zenith of his Godlike, absolute power, which seemed sponsored by Mother Nature herself - that generation came into the world, it appears, in order to continue what, theoretically, was supposed to be interrupted in those crematoria and in the anonymous common graves of Stalin's archipelago. The fact that not everything got interrupted, at least not in Russia, can be credited in no small degree to my generation, and I am no less proud of belonging to it than I am of standing here today. And the fact that I am standing here is a recognition of the services that generation has rendered to culture; recalling a phrase from Mandelstam, I would add, to world culture. Looking back, I can say again that we were beginning in an empty - indeed, a terrifyingly wasted - place, and that, intuitively rather than consciously, we aspired precisely to the recreation of the effect of culture's continuity, to the reconstruction of its forms and tropes, toward filling its few surviving, and often totally compromised, forms, with our own new, or appearing to us as new, contemporary content.

Brodsky reciting his poem Almost and Elegy (1968) in Russian http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkBAai34uO0

(2) Official vs. Unofficial Poetry? The case of Brodsky-Yevtushenko Brodsky about Yevtushenko: ‘He throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved’. Brodsky resigned from American Academy of Arts and Sciences when, in 1987, Yevtushenko was appointed an Honorary Member.

(2) Yevtushenko as Fig Leaf of Soviet Regime? Yevgeny Yevtushenko (born 1933) Yevtushenko reciting poem Babi Yar (1961) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJEGrgdGzPE

(2) Yevtushenko Reciting his Poetry in Moscow Sports Stadium, 1970s

(2) Time Magazine, 13 April 1962

(3) Prose Ex. Sergei Dovlatov (1941-1990), emigrated to US in 1978. Brodsky about Dovlatov: ‘The decisive thing is his tone, which every member of a democratic society can recognize: the individual who won’t let himself be cast in the role of a victim, who is not obsessed with what makes him different’.

(3) Art Group Mitki (and Dovlatov)

(3) Venedikt Yerofeev (1938-1990) Moscow – Petushki (or: Moscow Stations, or: Moscow to the End of the Line), tamizdat publication in Israeli journal in 1973, in Paris as book in 1977.

Shall I tell you what kind of individualized charts they were Shall I tell you what kind of individualized charts they were? Now, that’s simple: on elite vellum in black India ink I drew two axes, one horizontal, the other vertical. All the workdays of the previous month were indicated sequentially on the horizontal axis, the amount of alcohol consumed—calculated on the basis of degree of proof—on the vertical axis. Of course, only whatever was consumed on the job or before was tabulated, since the amount consumed in the evening remained relatively constant and was, therefore, of little interest to a serious researcher. […] Here, for you to admire, for instance, is the chart for Viktor Totoshkin, member of the Komsomol: And this is Aleksei Blindiaev, member of the Communist Party of The Soviet Union since 1936, a seedy old dork: And here we have your faithful servant, ex-head cable-fitter and author of the poem Moscow to the End of the Line:

all of this can be reduced to binaries of us vs. them, the people vs all of this can be reduced to binaries of us vs. them, the people vs. the state and…

Accommodation vs. Resistance

Resistance to regime =

Resistance to regime = thought

Resistance to regime = thought verbalised

Resistance to regime = thought verbalised acted upon

Resistance to regime = thought verbalised acted upon …and the rest is accommodation

Resistance to regime = thought verbalised acted upon …and the rest is accommodation  Enlightenment notion of autonomous subject

Historicise the subject?

Stalin-era subjectivity

Brezhnev-era subjectivity

Coda to Accommodation/Resistance

Viacheslav Dolinin (1946-)

Solovetsky Islands, annual Memorial expedition, Aug. 1993

Solovetsky Monastery

Solovetsky Gulag camp

Viktor Cherkesov (1950-)

Cherkesov and Putin in 1991

Cherkesov and Putin in 2004

(4) Beginnings of Postmodern, Post-Soviet? From: Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst, 1995). Among the diverse definitions of postmodernism, I would single out as most important the production of reality as a series of plausible copies, or what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard calls ‘simulation’. Other features of postmodernism, such as the waning of comprehensive theoretical metanarratives or the abolishment of oppositions between high and low, elitist and mass culture, seem to be derived from this phenomenon of hyperreality. Models of reality replace reality itself, which then becomes irrecoverable. Indeed, earlier predominant movements in twentieth-century Western culture, such as avant-gardism and modernism, tended to be elitist, in that they pitted themselves against the reality of mass society, either because of their alienation from it (in the case of modernism) or because they aspired to transform it to revolutionary ends (in the case of avant-gardism). As for metanarratives such as Marxism and Freudianism, their main aim was to unmask the illusions, or ideological perversions, of consciousness, in order to disclose the genuine reality of material production, in the case of the former, or libidinal energy, for the latter. Yet once the very concept of reality ceased to operate, these metanarratives, which appealed to reality, as well as the elitist arts, which opposed it, began to wane.

(4) Beginnings of Postmodern, Post-Soviet? Cont’d. To sum up: throughout the course of Russian history, reality has been subjected to a gradual process of disappearance. The entire reality of pagan Rus disappeared when Prince Vladimir ordered the introduction of Christianity and briskly baptized the whole nation. Similarly, all reality of Moscovite Rus vanished when Peter the Great ordered his citizens ‘to become civilized’ and shave their beards. All reality of ‘tsarist’ Russia dissolved when Lenin and the Bolsheviks transformed it into the launching pad for a communist experiment. Finally, all Soviet reality collapsed in a few years of Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin's rule, yielding to a new, still unknown system of ideas. Probably, the ideas of capitalist economy and free enterprise now have a good chance to prevail in Russia, though they remain, once again, pure conceptions against the background of a hungry and devastated society. Personally, I am confident that in the long run Yeltsin or another leader will manage to create a simulated market economy in Russia. Realities have always been produced in Russia from the minds of the ruling elite, but once produced, they were imposed with such force and determination that these ideological constructions became hyperrealities.

Concluding Questions Do we agree with Epstein’s claim that Russian culture since 988 was imitative, hyperreal, a simulation?

Concluding Questions Do we agree with Epstein’s claim that Russian culture since 988 was imitative, hyperreal, a simulation? And that this makes Russia the quintessential postmodern culture?

Concluding Questions How about the alternative explanation that the hypersincerity of the Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev periods was succeeded by the cynicism of the Brezhnev era, that is, that there was a break between Khrushchev and Brezhnev?

Concluding Questions How about the alternative explanation that the hypersincerity of the Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev periods was succeeded by the cynicism of the Brezhnev era, that is, that there was a break between Khrushchev and Brezhnev? And that only Brezhnev-era cultural producers (e.g. Yerofeev) were postmodernist, i.e. analogous to self-defined ‘postmodern’ cultural producers in the West?