A Case of Canonical Limbo: Idealist and Materialist Interplay in Marietta Shaginian’s Hydrocentral Jill Roese Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Jill Roese All rights reserved ABSTRACT A Case of Canonical Limbo: Idealist and Materialist Interplay in Marietta Shaginian’s Hydrocentral Jill Roese Marietta Shaginian’s Soviet production novel, Hydrocentral (Gidrotsentral’), represents a case of canonical limbo. Without exception, the novel is listed as a Soviet literary classic in reference works and compendia of Russian literature since the time of its publication in 1931 up to the present day, and yet its fame as an exemplary work of socialist realism (the officially mandated artistic and literary method established by the Soviet government in 1934) was extremely short-lived. This dissertation attempts to explain the reasons for the novel’s “in- between” status as a Soviet “classic” work of literature, but not an exemplar of socialist realism. Although Hydrocentral was published three years prior to the adoption of socialist realism, this dissertation argues that there is little doubt that Hydrocentral was one of a handful of Soviet literary works contributing to the formulation of its central tenets. Per the official definition, socialist realism “demands from the artist the truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time, truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideologically remolding and educating [the working people] in the spirit of socialism.” Shaginian’s novel did, in fact, fulfill all the official requirements of socialist realism: it is a concrete, historically-grounded portrayal of life in rural Armenia at the inception of the first Five-Year Plan (1928-1932) in which objective reality (bytie) is characterized as unceasing dialectical movement. As a paean to inspired, creative socialist labor, Hydrocentral was also written with the express purpose of inculcating a socialist work ethic in Soviet citizens. Part I of this dissertation offers a structural explanation of the novel’s limbo status by demonstrating how the principle of multiplicity undergirds the novel’s structure at every level. Shaginian uses two types of multiplicity, conventional, as in artistic, not true-to-life (uslovnaia) and real, everyday (bytovaia) multiplicity, combining them in a way that achieves Shaginian’s to achieve unique vision of objective reality (bytie) as unceasing dialectical development. Part II of the dissertation demonstrates how the nature of this objective reality (bytie) has its philosophical underpinnings in German Idealism as espoused by Hegel and Goethe, as well as in the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx. At the phenomenological level, Hydrocentral is, a Marxist, materialist philosophical overlay that conceals deeper Idealist – and even Modernist – epistemological undercurrents. TABLE OF CONTENTS Note on Translation and Transliteration iii Acknowledgments iv Dedication v Introduction: Hydrocentral: A Case of Canonical Limbo 1 PART I: SUPERSTRUCTURE 13 CHAPTER 1: “THE TRUTHFUL, HISTORICALLY CONCRETE PORTRAYAL OF REALITY” 14 “Real-Life” (bytovye) Origins of Hydrocentral 14 Shaginian, “Conventionality,” and “Everyday Life” 17 Shaginian, “Everyday Life” (byt) and “Objective Reality” (bytie) 20 Artistic Parallels with Belinskii’s Pathos 24 “Art and “Real Life” 26 CHAPTER 2: “CONVENTIONAL” TRUTHS: THE PROLIFERATION OF FICTIONAL GENRES 31 Fairy Tales 31 Hydrocentral as Detective Mystery 35 Love Stories: The “Eros of Labor” 41 Love Stories: Erotic Tales 51 CHAPTER 3: CONCRETE REALITY, ARTISTIC FORM: NON-FICTION AND THE REAL WORLD 57 The Ocherk: Lazutin’s House-Museum 57 Lesson Plans 59 The Architectural Debate: Concrete versus Tufa 65 Industrial Reports 68 i PART II: BASE 70 INTRODUCTION: IDEALISM AND MATERIALISM: CONFUSION OR CONFLATION? 71 CHAPTER 4: ARNO AND THE GERMAN WRITER: SOVIET INDUSTRY/GERMAN SOURCING 79 CHAPTER 5: THE CHIGDYM AFFAIR: CONSTRUCTION, RECONSTRUCTION, RECOLLECTION 89 CHAPTER 6: LAZUTIN’S GEOLOGY: EXPERT DILETTANTISM 106 CHAPTER 7: THE BRIDGE COLLAPSE: A NEGATION OF THE NEGATION 122 CHAPTER 8: THE CHIEF ENGINEER AND THE REDESIGN OF MIZINGES: 142 NON PLUS ULTRA... IN PROCESS CONCLUSION: HYDROCENTRAL: UNITY IN HETEROGENEITY 154 WORKS CITED 166 ii NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION I have used the Library of Congress transliteration system for all parenthetical Russian titles and for surnames of lesser known literary figures. For Russian figures well known in the West I have used the common English spellings of their surnames: for example, Gorky instead of Gor’kii, Tolstoy instead of Tolstoi, and so on. I have chosen to use the LC transliteration of Hydrocentral’s author’s surname for two reasons; it is, almost without exception, transliterated as Shaginian and not the more vernacular Shaginyan usually adopted for Armenian surnames, and because she is little known in the West. Translations of passages from the novel are mine, as are the translations of all Russian secondary sources. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge my sponsor Cathy Popkin, whose unceasing support and world-class mentorship made the writing of this dissertation possible and even, at times, enjoyable. I also wish to thank my second and third readers and committee members, Professors Irina Reyfman and Liza Knapp, for agreeing to serve on my committee, and who gave incredibly insightful and constructive feedback on my draft. I also wish to thank Professors Boris Gasparov and Edward Tyerman for their willingness to serve on my committee, for sharing their wide-ranging knowledge of Soviet culture of the 1920s and 1930s, and for their thoughtful suggestions for improving this dissertation. iv In memory of my father, John H. Roese, who made this dissertation possible v INTRODUCTION HYDROCENTRAL: A CASE OF CANONICAL LIMBO In the mid-1920s, the Soviet Communist Party called on its writers to portray the many capital construction projects germinating throughout the Soviet Union under the first Five-Year Plan (1928-1932). As the cornerstone of Joseph Stalin’s far-reaching plan to rapidly industrialize the USSR, the First Plan served to lay the foundation for the agrarian and war-torn country to “catch up and overtake” the capitalist West in all areas of the economy. The Party’s reason for involving the writers was to produce a new literature that reflected the new reality of Soviet life, one that would inculcate socialist values in its citizenry – a new society of people – who collectively would build the first socialist society in human history. One of the first to respond to the summons was Marietta Sergeevna Shaginian (1888- 1982), the daughter of Russified Armenian parents and an intellectual who achieved literary fame both as a journalist and Symbolist poet before 1917. Prior to the Bolshevik overthrow, she had been a deeply religious and mystical person, but soon after embraced Marxism-Leninism and became an ally of the Bolshevik cause.1 Shaginian spent a total of four years (1927-1931) recording and participating in the construction of the DzoraGES hydroelectric station in northern Armenia’s Lori Province, gathering the material that formed the basis for Hydrocentral (Gidrotsentral’, 1931), her epic narrative of socialist construction.2 This and other such novels were the earliest forays into a burgeoning genre of proletarian literature known ever since as 1 Marietta Shaginian, Chelovek i vremia. Istoriia chelovecheskogo stanovleniia in Sobranie sochinenii vol. 1 (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1986), 598. 2 The novel was first published serially in the monthly literary journal New World (Novyi mir) in 1930-31, and as a separate edition in 1931. All references are to the 1931 edition. 1 five-year plan production novels.3 The production novel was not a new phenomenon in Soviet belles-lettres when it was mandated in the mid to late 1920s; its most famous antecedent was Fedor Gladkov’s Cement (Tsement, 1925), a chronicle of the enormous sacrifices made by the builders of a cement factory following the economic devastation from three years of Civil War (1918-1921). Cement served as a literary template of sorts for production novelists in the coming years: Leonid Leonov’s The River Sot’ (Sot’, 1930) and Skutarevskii (1932), Valentin Kataev’s Time, Forward! (Vremia, vpered! 1932), Mikhail Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned (Podniataia tselina, 1931-1960), and Il’ia Erenburg’s Out of Chaos (Den’ vtoroi, 1933). Shaginian’s novel was written during the last years of relative artistic freedom for Soviet authors; on April 23, 1932, the Party’s Central Committee passed a resolution dissolving all Soviet literary and artistic associations and establishing centralized, party-controlled groupings.4 For literature, that organization was the Union of Soviet Writers (Soiuz sovetskikh pisatelei), which brought writers under its administrative and political control and signaled a change of literary methodology that, over the next two years, would develop into what came to be known as socialist realism. The first public mention of the term came only one month after the Central Committee’s decree, when Ivan Gronskii, editor of the newspaper Izvestiia, used the term to describe the “basic method of Soviet literature.” Gronskii exhorted writers to “write the truth, portray