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The Rhetoric of Sincerity in Soviet Russian Literature, 1953-1970 Michael Gluck Submitted in Partial

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The Rhetoric of Sincerity in Soviet Russian Literature, 1953-1970 Michael Gluck Submitted in Partial “I Want to be Honest”: The Rhetoric of Sincerity in Soviet Russian Literature, 1953-1970 Michael Gluck Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2021 © 2021 Michael Gluck All Rights Reserved Abstract “I Want to be Honest”: The Rhetoric of Sincerity in Soviet Russian Literature 1953-1970 Michael Gluck This dissertation chronicles the discourse of sincerity in state published Soviet Russian literature and criticism from Stalin’s death in 1953 to 1970. It presents a means of reading sincerity as a literary device in fiction and poetry that corresponds to an understanding of sincerity as rhetoric. This view holds that sincerity is a socially determined effect of language and affect. As such, the dissertation begins by analyzing the valences of sincerity during the Thaw, exploring them in connection with writers of the Village Prose and Youth Prose movements as well as in the poetry of Evgenii Evtushenko. From this survey of different literary trends, a general framework of a shift from an essentialist to a performative conception of sincerity in Russian official literature is presented. This dissertation argues that there was a gradual process which saw authoritative discourse and a discourse of sincerity exist in tension with each other in the early Thaw before performativity seeped into sincerity rhetoric in the Youth Prose of the early ‘60s. An awareness of sincerity as rhetorical or performative language flourished in postmodernist literature and late Soviet underground art, creating a mode that was self-conscious of the impossibility of essential sincerity while still seeking a way to be sincere. Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………..ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………...iii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Awakening the “Russian Soul”: The Derevenshchiki and their Readers ..................... 32 1.1 The “Lyric Turn” in Village Prose...................................................................................... 47 1.2 Can the Peasant Speak?.......................................................................................................56 Chapter 2 Act Your Age: Evgenii Evtushenko and the Lyric Poetry Revival.............................. 74 2.1 The Rehabilitation of Lyric Poetry ..................................................................................... 81 2.2 Creating a Public…………………………………………………………………………..90 2.3 The Myth of the Russian National Poet………………………………………………….105 Chapter 3 An Ironic Phase: Youth Prose Grows Up................................................................... 115 3.1 Irony as a Way of Life ...................................................................................................... 118 3.2 Postmodernist Irony……………………………………………………………………...145 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 154 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 161 i Acknowledgments I would like to thank Valentina Izmirlieva for her consistent confidence in me, Boris Gasparov for his perceptive feedback, and Mark Lipovetsky for working exceptionally hard on my behalf and his ability to see my project clearly even when I could not. ii Dedication To my family – mom, dad, Rebecca, and Mina. iii Introduction: Sincerity Under Scrutiny Vladimir Voinovich’s short story “I Want to be Honest” (“Khochu byt’ chestnym”), published in 1963, relates an episode from the banal life of “comrade” Zhenia Samokhin. The supervisor for an important construction project, Samokhin faces two dilemmas, one immediate – the building whose completion will secure him a promotion is not up to his standards – and the other existential: he cannot remember what he is meant to do with his life. That is, Samokhin is dissatisfied with his current circumstances and vaguely aware of some unfulfilled purpose he might have pursued but has no idea what that could have been or might still be. With the passing of time his world has turned into a pseudo-world 1 that he moves through mechanically, and he suspects others of doing the same. Together with the crowd he crosses a busy street on his way to the cafeteria where he eats daily – the woman behind the counter, Zoia, beams at him and asks “’How are you – like always?’” (“’Вам – как всегда?’”), “’Like always’” (“как всегда’”), he responds.2 Perhaps, Samokhin reflects, she really does like him, but, he decides “her smile has a simpler explanation – I’m a frequent customer” (“её улыбка обясняется более просто – Я постоянный клиент.”) 3 As with Zoia, Samokhin refuses to disclose anything of himself to his boss, even to his romantic partner, Klava, to whom he lies when he says he loves her. 4 Finally, he manages to tell the truth about the building not being ready despite his impending promotion – an act of courage and character – but even after this apparent personal and professional breakthrough he remains clueless about his true desires, reiterating at the end of the story that his 1 Lev Anninskii, Iadro orekha: kriticheskie ocherki (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1965), 122. 2 Translations my own unless otherwise noted. 3 Vladimir Voinovich, Khochu bytʹ chestnym: povesti (Moskva: Moskovskii rabochii , 1989), 5. 4 Ibid., 38. 1 true purpose in life has escaped him. For Samokhin, honesty is a struggle, but sincerity and authenticity belong to a different realm entirely – a parallel universe where life is meaningful. Honesty, sincerity, and authenticity are notions that presuppose some truth outside or within the self. They fundamentally concern truth as a feature of introspection and interaction rather than, for example, scientific laws, which might be said to exist apart from human intervention. However, just as we rely on astrophysicists and bacteriologists to tell us (honestly and accurately) about phenomena that, without the proper training, would be mostly mysterious to us, we must trust others to tell us about their inner states – the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that are inaccessible to others except in external manifestation. Before disentangling and demarcating the overlapping categories of honesty, sincerity, and authenticity, it must be conceded that these are areas that, in practice, depend as much on interpersonal trust as they do personal or scientific truth. Honesty, sincerity, and authenticity are categories that cannot hope to be perfectly stable or accurate, instead, they are components of what the philosopher Bernard Williams calls “trustworthiness” – the quality that enables ourselves and others to be mutually intelligible. Williams observes: “we are all together in the social activity of mutually stabilizing our declarations and moods and impulses into...beliefs and relatively steady attitudes.” 5 As such, no matter how honest, sincere, or authentic we may believe ourselves to be, an interlocutor must believe that what we say about ourselves and the world is dependable, that it “has a future” as a reliable opinion or facet of one’s identity. A pattern of, if not consistent, then consistently intelligible interactions and behaviors helps form the impression of a self that may or may not have these three qualities. 5 Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 97, 193. 2 Voinovich’s story illustrates how honesty, sincerity, and authenticity – qualities that would seem to spring naturally from the self or empirical reality – are heavily reliant on others to help negotiate an agreeable version of the self. Ironically, given the Soviet Union’s purported collectivism, Samokhin lives in an atomized society that is only barely held together by the pseudo-world that its inhabitants share. When Samokhin tries to be honest, to avail himself of the measurable evidence, apparent to his colleagues as well as to him, they caution him against warning about the building. 6 Samokhin, whose name contains the Russian word for “oneself” (sam ), is isolated by telling the truth in a professional context, but his failure to tell Klava the truth – that he does not love her – about his emotions comes out of a fear of being alone that paradoxically reinforces his aloneness, even with a supposed intimate. Likewise, his suspicion of Zoia, the cafeteria worker, who really does seem to love him, is the result of a Sartrean “bad faith” over-identification with social roles that prevents him from seeing her humanity in relation to his own. Samokhin feels that others are not trustworthy sources about themselves or the world – he humors Klava’s love, which he believes to be as inauthentic as his own, finds Zoia insincere, and his colleagues dishonest. In the pseudo-world of Voinovich’s story, the process that Williams describes as lending steady beliefs and attitudes (i.e., a defined, perceived “true” self) cannot function due to a lack of social trust. Moreover, Samokhin does not even have a “true” private self to fall back on, he is entirely lost on his own – unable to find or recall his purpose even in moments of introspection. The social, relational aspect of honesty, sincerity, and authenticity in a way simplify their definitions,
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