373 Petre M. Petrov Automatic for the Masses Examines the Theoretical

Book Reviews 373

Petre M. Petrov Automatic for the Masses: The Death of the Author and the Birth of Socialist Realism, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 328 pp., $56.25 (hb), isbn 9781442648425.

Automatic for the Masses examines the theoretical-philosophical trope of the death of the author as early Soviet literary and artistic theories and Stalinist culture articulated it. Part One analyzes how practitioners of five theoretical and artistic platforms of the first post-revolutionary decade enacted the death of the author and theorized the effects of the author’s demise on the status of art and the subject. Among the theoretical positions of the 1920s Petrov chooses for his argument Russian Formalism, the sociological method of Vale- rian Pereverzev, the science of tektology by Aleksandr Bogdanov, Constructiv- ism, and the Onguardist movement. Part Two analyzes Stalinism as a mode of representation where “the desire implicit in the symbolic death of the author that modernist culture enacted”—the desire to belong to a supra-individual entity—has been “fulfilled” (p. 30). An important point of departure for Petrov’s monograph is Astradur Eysteinsson’s claim that artistic modernism combines practices celebrating the individual self with those suppressing subjectivity. For Petrov these two features of modernist art are not mutually exclusive; rather, they both are aesthetic and philosophical reactions to modernity. Petrov is also in dialogue with Boris Groys’s The Total Art of Stalinism, which places the cultural gestures celebrating the artistic self in Russian avant-garde and Stalinism within a modernist framework. In his turn, Petrov examines the cultural gestures of depersonalization and claims that both modernism and socialist realism “feature symbolic rituals in which artistic practice is presented as driven by imperative objectivity” (p. 31). Specifically, he argues that every discursive formation employs the act of creation and the place of the author in such an act. From this point of view, Petrov’s study is a metahistory of the death of the author, a study of “figures of thought” (p. 45) of Russian modernism of the 1920s and socialist realism. He does not discuss modernist and Stalinist culture’s claims about the world, instead focusing on early Soviet modernist and Stalinist cultures’ claims about “the status of knowledge and genesis of consciousness” under Soviet modernity (p. 32). Petrov opens his gallery of aesthetic and theoretical platforms of the 1920s with the story of Russian Formalists’ quest for supra-personal agency that would bring the sum of the elements into a textual whole. For the Formalists, Petrov contends, the discussion of the literary device and the dominanta as the

374 Book Reviews constructive forces beyond an author’s control leads them to the understanding of the writer as the mere “operator of the device” (p. 41). Chapter 2 examines Valerian Pereverzev and his followers’ search for the forces outside the individual author that shape poetic phenomena. If for the Formalists these forces were about the governing constructive principles of the literary form, for the Pereverzev sociological school the “objective social content” (p. 63) performed a similar function of supra-personal force, instru- mental in the formation of literary texts. In Chapter 3, Petrov discusses Bogdanov’s science of tektology as a theoretical project anticipating structuralist critiques of the subject to be found in the writings of Claude Levi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and early Michel Foucault. Petrov even uses Foucault’s term “episteme” to describe Bogdanov’s vision of human history as a series of major epochs of tektological developments, each with its own distinct configuration of knowledge. Within this system of social practice, the individual thinks within the social organization to which he belongs. Or, as Petrov puts it, “when he thinks, it is the social organization that ‘thinks’ him” (87). A key distinction for Petrov is between Bogdanov’s tektology and a structuralist analysis of subjectivity: Bogdanov’s subject lives in history (88). Petrov’s next chapter addresses Soviet avant-garde implementations of the cultural practices intended to replace traditional art. He looks at a variety of such projects, including “objectism,” production art, biography of the object, literature of fact, and constructivist cinema of the Kinoks. These experimen- tal practices, he contends, shun the label “aesthetic” (90) and emphasize making (delanie), “letting the essential being of ‘this’ [the material reality ap] … emerge from latency” (98). According to the practitioners of Constructivism and production art, material itself is an active agency, while the author yields his active role to the constructor, machinist, organizer, engineer—or, better, to the machine itself—as in the Kinoks’ cinematic manifesto, Man with a Movie Camera. Dziga Vertov is relegated to the position on behalf of, or rather “as the movie camera” (104). Petrov concludes his discussion of 1920s’ theorists by examining the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (rapp), specifically rapp’s understanding of authorial agency. If Constructivists in the process of ‘making the material’ revealed its “social tectonic,” rapp literary critics contended that in the new society proletarian authors revealed the agency of their consciousness when they became aware of their class nature and the political imperatives that such a social position imposed on the writer. Proletarian writers’ creative freedom was, above all, about the social commission, which the author accepted volun- tarily because he had fully comprehended his political and literary function within the great whole of society.

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The opening chapter of Part Two focuses on the kinship and key differences between modernist and socialist realist artistic practices. The author claims that both cultural imaginations “feature symbolic rituals in which artistic practice is presented as driven by imperative objectivity” (31). For modernists such objectivity meant the project of bringing out of concealment either a governing constructive principle or true class consciousness and the simultaneous dissolution of individual agency as an accessory to the forces revealed. For Stalinist socialist realism, contends Petrov, the futuristic temporality of Soviet modernists is irrelevant because socialism has already arrived and the modernist subject, the author, is replaced with the social position of the scribe belonging to the socialist community and re-confirming the presence of the new world in its essential reality. Chapter 7 expands on the formation of the Stalinist subject and the temporality of the culture producing such a new subject. Petrov specifically discusses Stalinist culture’s obsession with ahead-of-the-schedule completion of its projects and contends that this new discursive formation favors a perfective sense of time over the futuristic time of Soviet culture of the 1920s (31). Since socialist life and its grand style have already arrived, the subject does not see and describe, but rather exists as the one “in whom the self-knowing of the world, its being-foreseen, would be confirmed” (31). The individual exists as a vehicle for the realization of world-historical experience, which has already reached its fruition in the collective life of Soviet society. In Chapter 8, “Ideology as Authentication,” Petrov examines how socialist realism reproduces itself as culture and gives the socialist subject (and by extension the author) representations to live in. Taking his inspiration from Louis Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Petrov examines socialist realism not so much as a method for retransmitting political dog- mas into aesthetic forms, but as ideology synonymous with culture itself (32). Stalinism, Petrov claims, developed its own mode of symbolic performance, a counterpart to modernist performance of the death of the author, which Petrov calls “authentication.” Socialist realist authors, he contends, “act as if in their artistic practice they were acted [upon ap] by the socio-economic organism to which they belong” (193). These acts of authentication share with modernist performances of the author’s death a belief that subjectivity is shaped by forces beyond its control. The fundamental difference between modernist depersonalization and socialist realist “authentication” is in the nature of the power shaping one’s subjectivity. In the case of Stalinist ideology, the authentication was a state-inspired day-to-day acting out of authors’ belief in Marxism-Leninism and the production of these beliefs as if they were born from the immanent logic of the new socio-economic infrastructure of Soviet

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376 Book Reviews life. While I agree with Petrov’s argument, I wish he had provided for the reader who does not consume Stalinist texts on an everyday basis more historical context, specifically, the fact that most of the inspiration provided by the Stalinist state for its subjects came out of the ubiquitous atmosphere of fear and mass political terror, a factor less important in the culture of the 1920s. Chapter 9 provides some of this context and zooms in on the First Congress of Soviet Writers as a case study to analyze the Soviet writer as Stalinist quasi-agent of representation. Analyzing the ideology and rhetoric of speech- es and events at the Congress, Petrov singles out the recurring Russian verb proniknut’sia, used by participants of the Congress to describe their sense of belonging to the new culture, which makes them socialist realist writers. Proniknut’sia, notes Petrov, means “through one’s own activity to render one- self penetrable, to bring one’s own permeation with something initially exter- nal” (207). The author lets ideology penetrate him/her, rendering him/her “the site of seeing” (217), rather than the subject capable of generating an individual picture of the world. When the Stalinist writer experiences a sense of belonging to Soviet life, a life guiding the writer as an agency far bigger than his individual will, the writer acquires the ability to be a realist, to be sincere in the Stalinist sense of the word, to interact with the raw reality of Stalinist culture. This agency is bestowed upon the author not unlike grace (31). Unavoidably, Petrov arrives at the quasi-religious character of representation under Stalinism, and his own references to Stalinist texts’ parallels with hagiographic writings (220, 224, 227) and the evidence from other studies of Stalinist literature, film, and art confirm his diagnosis. The monograph concludes with an examination of Mikhail Chiaureli’s 1946 film The Vow as a case study of ideal Stalinist subjecthood. Petrov contends that in Stalinist texts characters do not act but rather become surprised by what happens to them. Drawing examples from Chiaureli’s film, he argues that the socialist realist hero neither acts to acquire new consciousness nor even exists in a state of that consciousness. Instead, the logic of the Vow is akin to premodern narratives, such as fate-driven ancient tragedies or hagiographic writings of the Middle Ages where consciousness is subsequent to the fate “to be found in the predetermined path that led the righteous to their true Father” (227). This is definitely an important qualification that one has to keep in mind when one reads, for example, Katerina Clark’s examination of the dia- lectics of spontaneity and consciousness in the socialist realist narrative as it applies to late Stalinist culture. Most likely the construction of Stalinist subjecthood as proposed by Petrov can be observed in the theoretical claims and artistic production of proponents of the theory of conflictlessness. I wonder, however, whether Stalinist culture is as homogeneous as Part Two of Petrov’s

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Book Reviews 377 study presents it to be and it strikes me that the principle of several artistic and theoretical platforms, which Petrov uses in his discussion of intellectual modernism in Part One, can be used in Part Two as well. The author claims that his focus is literary and artistic theory (26), but in my view the scope of his project is much broader because of the nature of the material he examines. More precisely, he analyzes what constitutes artistic theory and practice for early Soviet modernists and Stalin’s engineers of human souls: visual works of Constructivists, such as the Kinoks’ Man with a Movie Camera? (103–107), and late Stalinist cinema, Chiaureli’s The Vow in particular (220–234). He also analyzes the practices of recruitment and subjection in such events as Moscow show trials of 1936–38, formative for Stalinist culture. The choice of event for analysis is brilliant because the show trials functioned as Stalinist culture’s aesthetic and political workshops, where the “objective mechanisms that shape lives of individuals” could find expression (194). A reader will find somewhat unusual Petrov’s understanding of modernism “in a deliberately broad sense that encompasses now-canonized figures [such as]… Khlebnikov and Bely, Zamiatin and Pilniak … and more radical impulses of experimentation traditionally grouped under the term ‘avantgarde’” (235). Petrov deliberately blurs “the sharp line of separation between ‘modernism’ and ‘avant-gardism’” (235). Such a claim might work for his argument, but most of the examples of what Petrov claims to be theoretical and artistic modernism come arguably from the avant-garde texts of the 1920s. I would love to see the sequel to this volume focusing on what Petrov calls “the modernist canon.” The author chooses an innovative and insightful way for analyzing modernist and Stalinist texts dealing with the dispersal of the subject/author. He contends that artistic modernism and Stalinism share a similar concern with the status of the text as a token that materialized acts of depersonalization (27). These texts-tokens can be interpreted adequately only within the framework of rituals of communication constructed by various modernist theoretical platforms and Stalin-era cultural institutions and rituals, such as show trials, creative workers’ congresses, or fictional presentations of ideal Soviet subjecthood. An interpretation focusing not so much on what is conveyed in the text but what is conveyed by means of the text within the protocols of the channels of communication established by various ideological platforms presents a certain challenge for an implied reader of Petrov’s monograph. A graduate student or a scholar needs to know the texts, theories, and rituals of early Soviet modernism and Stalinism fairly well prior to opening the first page of Petrov’s metahistory of ideological gestures enacting authors’ and subjects’ demise in Soviet culture of the 1920s, 1930s, and late 1940s.

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Keeping in mind these necessary prerequisites, this provocative monograph, with its thorough scholarship, original argument, and witty writing, should appeal to students of European and Soviet modernism as well as specialists in cultural history and theory. The volume’s striking steampunk dust cover design will catch the eye of the art connoisseur, and the title, evoking r.e.m.’s 1992 album, might attract the more general public interested in European and Russian cultural history.

Alexander Prokhorov College of William and Mary [email protected]

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