Post- Soviet” in Russian Studies?

What Comes after “Post- Soviet” in Russian Studies?

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Citation Buckler, Julie A. 2009. What comes after “Post-Soviet” in Russian studies? PMLA 124(1): 251-263.

Published Version doi:10.1632/pmla.2009.124.1.251

Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:4341694

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the changing profession

What Comes after “Post- Soviet” in Russian Studies? RUSSIAN STUDIES ARE STILL IN LOVE WITH THEIR FASCINATING AND UN- PREDICTABLE SUBJECT, DESPITE RADICALLY CHANGING GEOPOLITICAL ()*+, -. .)/0*,1 realities and shifts in the academic climate. We in the field have been through something resembling the free-market shock therapy prescribed for newly non- Soviet Russia, a major shake- up in intellectual orientation and logistics. Our methodologies, perspectives, and projects are always in this sense a re!ection of our present- day subject, but they are also a self- portrait, the latest in a series." Since the Russian Revolution of 1917, Western scholars of Russia have variously characterized the imperial era, but they have nearly always viewed the past as pre#guring the (Soviet or post- Soviet) present, casting the present moment as overdetermined. $e censorship and repression of the imperial period seemingly rendered inevitable the violations of human rights during the Soviet period. In the immediate a%ermath of 1991, Western specialists focused on the end of the imperial period, on nascent capitalism and commercial culture, #nding Russia to have been much more like us than we had imagined, our a&nity with it interrupted by seventy- plus years of Soviet rule and restored in the cultural climate of post- Soviet Russia. How do Russian studies make sense now, a%er the cold war, in the larger context of globalization? Does the discourse on postcolonialism apply in our case? Has the “ post- Soviet” moment come and gone?

Where Have We Been All These Years? Just as Soviet citizens were used to paying unchanging prices for basic items—a loaf of bread, a metro token—scholars of Russian literature and culture in the United States long relied on seeming con- JULIE A. BUCKLER, professor of Slavic lan- stants in their professional and intellectual lives. One disciplinary guages and literatures at Harvard Uni ver- sity, is the author of Mapping St. Pe ters burg: truism held that literature in repressive nineteenth- century Russia Imperial Text and Cityshape (Prince ton UP, compensated for the lack of a developed “public sphere” and pro- 2005). Her current project is titled “Cul- vided a forum for debating social and political issues.' $e tenets of tural Properties: The Afterlife of the Impe- socialist realism made literature no less central, casting state writers rial in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia.”

as “engineers of the human soul.”B $e much with the seeming nineteenth- century roman- mythologized dissenting Russian writer and tic quaintness of national language and litera- the idealized Russian- intelligentsia reader ture programs (Platt 209). But studying these were a matched pair, willing to risk life for the literatures, at least for American specialists, profession

sake of literature and its truth- telling mission was not simply a project of nationalist self- (Todd, “Russian Literature” 31–32). celebration, since our purpose arose from the $e “Aesopian language” of nineteenth- importance of literature, both demonstrated century Russian literature gradually evolved and perceived, in the sociopolitical environ- changing

into the complex intertextuality of the twen- ment of modern Russia. A%er 1991, it became tieth century, a code known to insiders and easier for scholars to obtain visas to Russia, the specialists. Literature was accorded special but the rising cost of books in the new Russia status as the only discourse sophisticated and (not to mention the lack of time to read them) elusive enough to convey dangerous essential made literature seem more a luxury than a meanings and preserve them for future gen- moral and spiritual necessity. $us, scholars erations. Products (by birth or training) of a exploring the rampant post- Soviet nostalgia cultural context that so elevated literature’s in Russia themselves harbor a complicated role, Russian- literature specialists in the mix of feelings toward the Soviet past. United States devoted themselves to studying, A newly skeptical awareness of litera- publishing, and translating endangered texts, ture’s function in the larger cultural contexts creating a canon counter to the o&cial literary of imperial, Soviet, and post- Soviet Russia has canon of the Soviet Union (Emerson, “Slavic overtaken us. Recent studies of readership ex- Studies” 450). It has been remarked more than amine the wishful aspects of the familiar my- once that the iron curtain separated us from thology: the reading public as a construct, a our counterparts in other American humani- fantasy created by the intelligentsia and the ties departments, but that selfsame curtain government in curious collaboration. When also drew us (literary specialists and histo- the government controlled publication, print rians in particular) into a vivid, multidisci- runs, and dissemination, books became a plinary area-studies constellation (Steiner; see permanently scarce commodity, even a fetish, also Clark, “Beyond the Wall”). objects of desire for Soviet readers, who av- By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had idly collected and displayed them (in pursuit dissolved and the former republics declared of “complete collected works” to adorn living their independence, the Russian republic room bookshelves [Lovell]). $e dominance among the #rst. For Russian specialists too, of state production as well as the valoriza- our reality became history, and it seemed tion of anything “uno&cial” made it di&cult that our present was comprehensible only as to identify readers’ tastes during the Soviet a%ermath. Area studies in general have suf- period, whereas in the post- Soviet era we are fered decline and downsizing, but Soviet and faced with an explosion of diverse reading post- Soviet studies were particularly hard-hit, matter and a proliferation of small private and the historical, geopolitical, and cultural publishers, a situation harking back in many Russo- centrism of what remains has been sub- respects to the late imperial years. jected to sharp internal critique by scholars of $e culturally privileged position of writ- Ukraine and Belarus, central and southeast- ers in Russia and across the former Soviet ern Europe, and central Asia. Russian—not bloc has succumbed to the changing literary to mention Polish, Czech, and Ukrainian— marketplace, and these present conditions literary studies in the twenty- first-century also provoke us to reevaluate the past (Wach- Anglo-American academy must now contend tel). Russian literary specialists have become 234.2 ] Julie A. Buckler CDF the more self- conscious about the construction the study of literature was a science, and the

and perpetuation of the giant-writer cults work of structuralist theorists such as Ro- changing (Pushkin, Tolstoy) so dominant in modern man Ja kob son pointed the way beyond our Russian cultural history.E $e practices gov- traditional philological and textological fo- erning the formation of o&cial and uno&cial cus toward discourse and cultural studies.

literary canons have come under increasing We now look to a more diverse set of theo- profession scrutiny, as has the pervasive presence of the retical and disciplinary frameworks, past political in the Russian literary sphere. Kath- our adored Russian formalists, Prague struc- leen Parthé examines the tradition of pro- turalists, Bakhtin circle, and Moscow- Tartu ducing and distributing texts outside o&cial cultural semioticians. channels as well as Russian readers’ compul- We are searching for new ways to under- sive search for subversive messages in artistic stand historical periods, social formations, and works. Parthé’s study urges a more nuanced artistic genres, beyond the boundedness of our approach to samizdat, or self- published lit- old paradigms. Jehanne Gheith, for example, erature (not always artistic or dangerous) addresses the absence of major nineteenth- and to o&cially published work (not always century prose- writing women in the Russian fully in support of state ideology or policy). literary canon. Why was there no Russian Jane She brings into relief ten historically power- Austen or Madame de Staël, no Russian Brontës, ful “beliefs” about literature in Russia, among George Sand, George Eliot, or Virginia Woolf? these that Russians read more than any other In a manner that bears directly on canon for- people and that literature formed national mation, Gheith investigates the politics of pro- identity in Russia. Related to these beliefs ducing scholarly editions, complete collected is the notion that censorship in Russia pro- works, and translations, as well as the lower duced a particularly sensitive and receptive prestige accorded literary forms, such as autobi- reader whose imagination was stimulated by ography and novella, that women writers chose the search for hidden meanings (Holquist 14). more o%en than the novel and short story. Simi- This complex of literature- centered beliefs, larly, in my book Mapping St. Petersburg I argue mythologies, and practices seems unlikely to that the vaunted and purportedly dominant survive in the post- Soviet cultural climate. “neoclassical style” of imperial Saint Petersburg Topics have been deheroicized; terms was an insistent fantasy that lingered from the are no longer absolute. In a 1998 survey of time of the Napoleonic wars through the Soviet the state of the field, William Mills Todd period. $is “neoclassical” orientation masked III notes a shi% from a centripetal model of a perverse blindness to the diversely eclectic literature—“whether this ‘center’ consists in architectural structures built during the #nal the agency of a heroic author, the seriousness century of the czarist era and to all they implied of the reading public, the malevolence of the about changing demographics and tastes. censor, the power of the canon, the impor- $is new attention to cultural blind spots tance of the questions this literature raises, and to creative forms of accommodation or the appropriation of literature by a central counterbalances the longstanding disease of government or ideology”—to a decentered binarism in Russian studies, possibly a func- and chaotic centrifugal one, in which the im- tion of the notorious and leveling thesis elab- portance literature seemed to have is in ques- orated by the semioticians Yury Lotman and tion and official literary institutions are in Boris Uspensky, according to which binarism disarray (“Russian Literature” 31–34). is one of the de#ning qualities of Russian cul- By the 1980s, we had to a great extent ture (31–33). But it is not easy to get beyond abandoned our disciplinary conviction that the crude and limiting contrasting notions of CDT What Comes after “Post-Soviet” in Russian Studies? [ PMLA

o&cial and dissident, Slavophile and West- itself against Western imperialism for centu- ernizer, art and politics, imperial and Soviet, ries, a powerful state that represented the only Soviet and post- Soviet. A true embrace of the non- Western path to modern society. middle ground would require us to give up Will we continue to subscribe to the old profession

many of these cherished dichotomies. myth of Russian exceptionalism or posit new a&nities? We might now see Russia as par- allel to America, in a revisionist account of Not Whither Russia, but Why Russia? the cold war or in broader historical terms

changing Why Russia? of emerging national consciousness. Some $e nineteenth- century poet Fyodor Tyutchev have compared the traditions of Russian the asserted that Russia cannot be grasped with and African American cultural national- the mind (“Умом Россию не понять”). ism, placing them in the context of a domi- Win ston Churchill termed Russia “a riddle nant Western narrative of world civilization wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” (403). that relegated Slavs and African Americans Is Russia ultimately, despite Western influ- to the status of nonhistorical peoples. Dale ences on an elite minority, an Eastern- style Peterson invokes W. E. B. DuBois’s notion culture, a representative of the antimodern of “ double- consciousness”—whereby an op- “Oriental despotism” (Malia 6), even in its pressed segment of society views itself simul- Soviet incarnation? Or is Russia’s purported taneously through its own eyes and through uniqueness a product of its identity as hybrid the internalized standards of a dominant cul- of East and West (Schenker)? Or is the Rus- ture—to explore the writings of Pyotr Chaa- sian case just one among many trajectories of dayev, Alexander Crummell, Dostoyevsky, modernization, an alternative passage through Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Chesnutt, Ivan industrial revolution, mass literacy, and secu- Turgenev, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, larization (Engelstein, “New $inking” 496)? Maksim Gorky, and Gloria Naylor. Susan Some scholars interrogate Russia’s assign- Buck- Morss sees the American and Soviet ment to the easternmost point of the West- East mass utopias as moved, respectively, by con- cultural gradient, arguing that the West con- sumerism and communism, linked by their structed its myth of Russia as a locus of ori- abuses of state power and by the common uto- ental despotism or a magni#cent “primitive” pian dream that mass sovereignty combined power (Malia). For others, the very conviction with mass production would create complete that Russia has an independent cultural and social harmony. From this perspective, the historical tradition sets it apart from the West end of the cold war was less a victory of one (McDaniel). Russian thinkers in the nine- side than the dissolution of two intertwined teenth and twentieth centuries, among them political imaginaries. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolay Berdyayev, $e projects of inventing, imagining, con- asserted that Russia’s destiny was to transform structing, and performing Russianness have human society into an Orthodox Christian been subjected to vigorous scrutiny. Indeed, community, countering the Western empha- the notion of Russianness is always already sis on science and the rule of law. One could fissured. As the proverb goes, referring to also contend, as Marshall Poe does, that real the Mongol invasion and subjugation of Ki- historical factors set Russia apart, such that evan Rus in the thirteenth century, “Scratch a Russia is best understood as “culturally sui ge- Russian, #nd a Tatar.” $is proverb could be neris and historically distinct” (xii). From this amended today as “Scratch a Russian, #nd a perspective, Russia is not an eternal failure but Balt, non- Russian eastern Slav, Jew. . . .” Gabri- rather the only non- Western power to defend ella Safran examines stories of Jewish assimi- 234.2 ] Julie A. Buckler CDD the lation and conversion by four writers of three litical and ethno- cultural boundaries coin-

ethnicities and religions, living in four parts cided neatly but a multiethnic, multilingual changing of the Russian Empire and writing in two lan- entity with a dominant Slavic population and guages, to uncover an assimilation discourse culture (Kappeler). Russian colonialism in caught between Enlightenment universalism central and eastern Europe, Siberia, the Cau-

and Romantic essentialism. In a revisionist casus, central Asia, and the Far East relied on profession approach to a nearly sacred subject, scholars contiguous expansion rather than overseas have explored the signi#cance of the Russian conquest (Thompson; see also Chernetsky, national poet Pushkin’s partially African heri- Condee, Ram, and Spivak). Russian colonial tage (Nepomnyashchy, Svobodny, and Trigos). rule tended, moreover, to be based on mili- If Russianness is not considered in ethnic tary might, not power and knowledge, and or linguistic or even national- cultural terms, lacked a philosophical stance to justify its it might be de#ned more broadly as a kind of conquests as civilizing missions. Finland, the attitude, a bold anticapitalist revolutionary Baltic provinces, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, avant-gardism that rejects dominant Western and Armenia (the nations on the western and paradigms (Marks). $is attitude can be seen southwestern edges of the Russian empire) in the inspirational in!uence of Russian artis- long felt more civilized than Russia, and the tic forms on the modern world or as a terrifying above- mentioned western white colonies saw antirational, anarchic- utopian nihilism, a trans- themselves as occupied rather than colonized. fer of the old sectarian paradigm (going out in Russian subjects were, moreover, deprived of a blaze of glory) to a secular and political land- the same rights denied to subalterns or to scape. Alternatively, we could follow Mikhail groups such as Jews and ethnic Germans liv- Epstein in seeing Russia as “the largest ordinary ing in Russia. All these factors help to explain place in the world” (“Transculture” 111). why the vast territory of the post- Soviet sphere Russian is still the lingua franca of the (now encompassing twenty- seven countries) former republics, and Russia is still at the has received so little attention in the Western center of historical narratives that cover a vast discourse of postcolonialism (Moore). territory. But Russia cannot stand “synech- How can an object of study be defined dochically . . . for the entire . . . heterogeneous without satisfactory terms? Sovietology is and pluricultural world of Slavs,” as Russia’s now “transitology” or “post- Sovietology.” We nineteenth- century Pan- Slavists wished (Ku- study the “territory formerly known as the jundzic 5). Similarly, Russia was (and still is) Soviet Union” or the “former Soviet Union” falsely con!ated with the Soviet Union and (FSU), the “Newly Independent States” (NIS), even the Soviet bloc, a view that reflects a or, more generally, the “postsocialist” or “post- super#cial knowledge of the diversity of cul- communist” world. Should we speak of eastern tures there and that unwittingly endorses the Europe, central Europe, or east- central Europe o&cial Soviet expectation of eventual cultural (WolW)? $e Balkans or southeastern Europe homogenization (von Hagen).U (Todorova)? Central Asia or the Middle East? Is it still possible to apply the discourse Conflating Russian and Slavic is a surefire of imperialism, in which Russia always mani- way to make enemies, but even Slavic doesn’t fests imperialist behavior, whether in its czar- begin to cover the territory (Clark, “Beyond ist, Soviet, or post- Soviet guises?V In fact, the Wall” 2; see also Verdery). Slavic includes the multiethnic dimensions of the territory Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Czech encompassed by Russian studies map poorly Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, onto more familiar Western models. Imperial Bulgaria, and Macedonia but does not ac- Russia was not a nation-state where geopo- count for Albania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithua nia, CD[ What Comes after “Post-Soviet” in Russian Studies? [ PMLA

Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Georgia, Ar- culture revealed the late czarist cultural land- menia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, scape to be gloriously plural, a heterogeneous Turkestan, and Uzbekistan. How about “Rus- space for diverse social interactions and mod- sian and Eurasian” or just “Eurasian”? ern patterns of living among the emerging ur- profession

Eurasia is one of the most common ban middle class.Z Even so- called mass culture emerging designations for the region, termed under Stalin—cultural production created, an antiparadigm and thus not to be confused promoted, financed, and distributed by the with xenophobic or neoimperialist Eurasianist Soviet state—can be seen as a form of popular changing

paradigms in contemporary or historical in- culture, since the Soviet public creatively con- carnations (von Hagen). $is newly conceived sumed it through a range of strategies. As it the Eurasia oWers an alternative to viewing histo- turns out, the Soviet monolith also gave rise ries of the region according to the nation- state to the popular stuW of everyday diversion, to model of modern western Europe and instead detective novels and science #ction, jokes and emphasizes the interactions among empires songs, #lms for the general audience, radio and (Mongolian, Byzantine, Iranian, Chinese, Ot- television, and the variety stage (Stites, Culture toman) in central Eurasia. Scholars are giving and Russian Popular Culture). new attention to the borderlands of empires, Contemporary post- Soviet Russia oWers where economic and cultural interchanges an irresistible #eld for popular culture stud- occur, as well as to regional histories and ies, with its mixture of prerevolutionary elite diasporas. The study of wars—Napoleonic, markers ( Empire- style home furnishings for Caucasian, Crimean, Russo- Turkish, Russo- wealthy “new Russians”), and Soviet artifacts Japanese, World War I, World War II—with (Communist kitsch [Barker]). $e post- Soviet their resultant mobility and mixing, has also moment recalls the late czarist moment, as been revitalized. Scholars seek now to incor- well as the Petrine era and its eighteenth- porate Eurasia into world history and to move century aftermath, all periods when West- away from separatist, exceptionalist accounts.X ern in!uences, fashions, and lexicons !owed But can there be a post- or antiparadigmatic rapidly and indiscriminately into the Rus- way of thinking and writing about Russia, a sian cultural sphere and were then adapted to baYing cultural space that seems to demand the local environment. Anthony Olcott thus recourse to such models while simultaneously sees the booming native subgenre of detec- resisting their imposition (Engelstein, “Para- tive #ction in the 1990s as re!ecting Russian digms” 876–77)? Perhaps shi%ing our scru- perceptions of law, crime, guilt, and justice tiny from political structures and perceived quite unlike those dominant in the West, a unities to cultural phenomena might provide response to the post- Soviet cultural climate. a more !exible basis for analysis. Western methodologies for cultural studies, however, have not been among those rapidly !owing in!uences, at least not until Increasingly Popular Culture recently. $e Anglo- American model of cul- The “fall” of the Soviet Union signaled the tural studies, with its revisionist Marxist ap- decline of Russian high culture as the unques- proach, explicit or implicit, was long intensely tioned object of hushed veneration and the uncongenial to Russian specialists, who, in concomitant slide of the imperial- era Russian contrast, sought to “depoliticize” the study of intelligentsia—politically and socially progres- literary texts (at least, that’s what we thought sive but in many ways culturally conservative— we were doing). $e terms and emphases of from its place as the sole arbiter of taste and Anglo- American cultural studies also seemed value. A wave of scholarly attention to popular wrong for Russia. How can the culture of the 234.2 ] Julie A. Buckler CD] the Communist world be studied in terms of cap- decentering spirit that encompasses the globe

italism and the nation- state, according to a include, to give only a few examples, the writ- changing paradigm that takes no account of command ing of younger bicultural and heritage speak- economies and party- states? (Condee 202). ers of Russian who do not live in Russia (Gary Or perhaps a more !exible model of cul- Shteyn gart, Lara Vapnyar, David Bezmogis)

ture itself is needed. Lotman’s notion of the and literature written in Russian by writers profession semiosphere, the semiotic environment in with allegiances to other cultures and lan- which communication occurs, provides a guages (Andrey Volos, Sukhbat Aflatuni). more appealing foundation for the local in- Russian poetry is !ourishing, as are Russian vestigations undertaken by Russian cultural poetry studies.\ $e Internet has had a genu- studies. Lotman’s semiosphere emphasizes inely democratizing eWect on the literary life shifting boundaries and hierarchies, com- of Russian poets; their blogs, postings, and plex interactions between the center and the recorded readings are available online to all. periphery, mediations and translations, and And because so many poets writing in Russian unity through diversity. His work offers its travel, translate, and reside outside Russia, the deepest commitment to re-creating the past paradigm of the national literary tradition is on its own terms as opposed to rendering a being transformed before our eyes, far more political critique of contemporary society than it was by the Russian modernist emigra- (Schönle and Shine 28). $is self- aware eWort tion in 1920s and 1930s Europe. to see with past eyes also sheds light on the Contemporary #lm studies too are thriv- ongoing life of the past in the present. ing, as best evidenced perhaps by the inter- Now we—like so many of our colleagues national profile of directors such as Nikita in fellow disciplines—work in broader tempo- Mi khal kov and Aleksey Balabanov and the ral arcs, looking at the intersections of histori- changing conditions of Russian cinematic pro- cal and cultural categories at various common duction (joint ventures and coproduction [Go- “sites,” struggles over symbolic capital, and scilo; see also Larsen, “National Identity”]). the imperial and Soviet and post- Soviet search Seventy- #%h-anniversary events celebrating for a “usable” past. $e post- Soviet period has Andrey Tarkovsky’s work are being staged inspired work on iconography and the de- around the world, and the contemporary di- ployment of o&cial symbolic systems across rectors Kira Muratova (!e As the nic Syndrome the centuries: from 1812 through the Stalin- [1990] and Two in One [2007]) and Alexander ist 1930s, World War II, and the 1990s. No Sokurov (Mother and Son [1996] and Russian scholar of culture can fail to be engrossed by Ark [2002]) continue to attract strong interest, the dramatic expression of imperial nostalgia as do documentary #lm makers such as Sergey in recent cultural production—the looming Loznitsa. $ere have been several important Tsereteli statue of Peter the Great on the Mos- post- Soviet #lms on Stalinism, notably Andrey cow River, the speedily re- created Church of Zvyagintsev’s !e Return (2003 [Strukov; see the Savior, the reburial of the last Romanovs, also Larsen, “Melodramatic Masculinity”]). A the costly conversion of the derelict Strelna Web- based journal of reviews called KinoKul- Palace into President Putin’s base for high- tura, run by Bir git Beumers and Vladimir level international retreats, and the painstak- Padunov, helps us all keep up. The forces of ingly reconstructed Amber Room (looted by distance, prohibition, and desire that formerly the Nazis and taken away in pieces in the af- shaped our approach to Russian culture have termath of war) at Tsarskoe Selo. . . . given way to opportunities for contact and Recent Russian literary and cultural de- engagement that rede#ne our view of the past velopments that inspire scholars to work in a and our relation to our subject. CD_ What Comes after “Post-Soviet” in Russian Studies? [ PMLA

New Perspectives on Old Times individuals to everyday lived experience, in- terior life, and ordinary practices. Jonathan Recent work on the revolutionary and early Bolton develops a Lotmanian conception of Soviet periods (1917–31) from the post- Soviet everyday life as a “boundary” zone “in which

profession perspective emphasizes processes of negotia- individual practices and habits come into tion and a&nity rather than stark oppositions conflict with the codes and systems that a of party and writer. These new studies treat dominant discourse of the ‘center’ seeks to power in a more Foucauldian spirit, not as ex- impose” (321). Bolton distinguishes Lotman’s

changing erting brute force from above on passive citi- view of everyday life from that of Foucault zens but as producing (rather than repressing) (for whom everyday life is part of what is the the Soviet people in complex and contradictory “disciplined”) and Certeau (for whom ev- ways (Kiaer and Naiman 18)."^ The relation eryday life is incapable of being captured in between intellectuals and o&cial Soviet power larger sign systems [330–33]). $e everyday is has also been revisioned as more ambiguous, thus a realm of circulation, translation, and even, in some cases, as symbiotic. Katerina contradiction, neither a site of resistance nor Clark proposed a more central role taken by one of intensi#ed manipulation. avant- garde intellectuals and a new account of Samizdat, or self- published texts, can the factors leading to Stalinism, charting com- now be read, in Serguei Oushakine’s words, plex a&nities as part of “the ecology of revo- “through the discursive web of Soviet society lution” and proposing a model of punctuated within which they were conceived (or caught?) evolution that includes periods of adaptation and whose traces they carried (“Terrifying and consolidation at least as important as the Mimicry” 192; see also Komaromi, “Material much documented cataclysms (Petersburg ix). Existence”). Analyzing the rhetoric of public Soviet totalitarian studies are joining the political dissent in the Soviet Union suggests larger history of identity formation in moder- that resistance is not located outside the #eld nity, oWering a trajectory diWerent from but re- of power (hidden underground), and that “the lated to that of the West. $e role of language oppositional discourse of the dissident move- and its relation to the physical body have as- ment in the Soviet Union . . . echoed and am- sumed a particular importance here. Michael pli#ed the rhetoric of the regime, rather than Gorham explores the Bolshevik’s creation of positioning itself outside of or underneath it” a chaotic blend of neologisms (newspeak), (192). From this perspective, samizdat emerges high-Marxist terms, bureaucratese, and slang, as hybrid text, constituted by authoritative as well as the reception of this discourse by discourse, but from a diWerent direction, and the semiliterate peasants that constituted its to mixed effect. Power constrains and pro- primary audience (21). Eric Naiman proposes duces the subject, and censorship limits yet an “ideological poetics” of the New Economic also activates the possibility of speech. Policy period (1921–28), a poetics in which Approaches to the Stalinist period (1932– ideological anxieties were projected onto a 53) have shi%ed dramatically. Studies of this discourse about sex and the body (menstrua- period, perhaps more than those of any other, tion, anorexia, castration). Eliot Borenstein used to be dominated by a moral stance, examines mythologies of an all- male utopian which documented the horrors of the Stalinist proletarian society that reject domesticity and terror and the seemingly unilateral doctrine the nineteenth- century-intelligentsia ideal of of socialist realism, “the truthful depiction strong moral femininity. of that which leads life toward socialism” Scholars have also turned their attention (Kemp-Welch 131; see also 120–32). Yet Karen from familiar notions of resistance and heroic Petrone #nds the discourse of Stalinist mass 234.2 ] Julie A. Buckler CD` the celebrations to be anything but totalizing, a ciples in an artistic experiment on an unprec-

#eld of #ssures, multiple meanings, alterna- edented scale (Total Art)."B Yet socialist realism changing tive and con!icting viewpoints, miscommu- now seems less a monolith than an aesthetic nications, and compromise. (Of course, one that extended across historical moments and might wonder at the seeming uniformity of geographic divides, to remote republics of the

our current preoccupation with uncovering former Soviet Union, to China, France, even profession multiplicity, but it can certainly be taken as the United States, taking shape in diverse a sign that this methodology has quickly met genres and causing a range of critical dis- with broad acceptance in our discipline.) courses to spring up in response to it (Lahusen $e mid- 1930s have generally been seen and Dobrenko). Ev geny Do brenko asserts that as constituting a sharp break with the radi- socialist realism was not simply invented and cal experiments and cultural pluralism of the handed down by the cultural and political au- preceding period, a turn back to more con- thorities but created collaboratively, as a hy- ventional cultural norms and a sacralization brid, through a negotiation between those in of the state evident above all in the cult of power and the masses (“Disaster”). And despite Stalin."" Recent scholarship emphasizes con- socialist realism’s purported unity of method, tinuities as well as abrupt reversals, looking at scholars now #nd in the aesthetic a diversity of the ways in which Stalinist policies continued styles, fragments of the multiple defunct proj- the revolutionary project of creating a new ects from the revolutionary era, now seeing Soviet person who lived by socialist values. socialist realism as a synthetic doctrine. Groys $ese studies examine norms governing mo- characterizes socialist realism as a “style and a rality, family, education, leisure, and hygiene half,” a proto postmodernism that appropriated and investigate collective cultural sites such forms such as folk art and mass culture but was as the Soviet- era communal apartment, but akin to modernism in its claims to autonomy they also consider what Svetlana Boym calls from commercial culture (“Style”). Interest “everyday aesthetic experiences and alterna- in Soviet style has also extended to the Soviet tive spaces carved between the lines and on “grand style” and to “sots art” (late Soviet pop the margins of the o&cial discourses” (5; see art), the latter making playful or ironic use also Fitzpatrick). Alexei Yurchak argues that of Soviet ideological clichés. Totalitarianism “living” socialism—a system of human val- commodified culture and ideas no less than ues and an everyday reality of life—carried did Western political systems, it turns out. personal meanings quite diWerent from o&- cial state rhetoric, meanings related to ethics, Late Soviet, Post- Soviet, and friendships, and creative altruism (8). In part, Postmodernist Soviet post- Soviet nostalgia connects with a sense of loss around these values, re!ecting the am- Is it possible to speak of postmodernism in bivalent ways in which former Soviet citizens Russia, and if so, how do the terms of en- view their collective past. gagement shi% when the situation is not late Even socialist realism has become more capitalist? Mikhail Epstein has characterized interesting."' Boris Groys argues provocatively post- Soviet Russia as “postfuturis[t],” since that Stalinist art and literature corresponded “the ‘communist future’ has become a thing in many respects to the earlier project of the of the past, while the feudal and bourgeois Russian avant- garde, that Stalinism actually ‘past’ approaches us from the direction where continued the avant- garde project in a spirit of we had expected to meet the future” (After even greater radicalism, seeking to transform the Future xi). Although the discourse of society according to aesthetico- political prin- postmodernism originated in the West in the C[d What Comes after “Post-Soviet” in Russian Studies? [ PMLA

early 1970s and in Russia not until the early with better service [Oushakine, “Quantity”].) 1990s, Russia is “innately” postmodern, per- In this sense, post- Soviet studies can still be haps even the true “birthplace” of postmod- considered studies of the Soviet Union, since ernism, if postmodernism means the absence so many old habits of thought and terms of profession

of any reality other than the reality of ideas engagement have persisted, both in our ob- (Epstein, “Postmodernism” 28). jects of study and in our research practices. The late Soviet period (from Brezhnev The afterlife of the Soviet period is not just onward, 1960s– 80s) seems perhaps ripest for something we study—it is a part of us. changing

revisioning, especially the years of “stagna- Cultural anthropology has in many re- tion” (Застой), a term applied retrospectively spects led the way for all disciplines engaged the during perestroika. Alexei Yurchak declares with the postsocialist sphere, encouraging us to the fall of the Soviet Union to have been both think in terms of hybrid societies rather than unimaginable and unsurprising, tracing the polar extremes, in terms of the microworld of moment of change back to the 1950s, when everyday life rather than the macrostructures the “external metadiscourse on ideology” of state and economy (Burawoy and Verdery). disappeared, resulting in a “hypernormaliza- Unintended consequences occur locally as a tion” of ideological discourse: “the performa- result of political and cultural contestation in- tive reproduction of the form of rituals and tertwined with economic struggles. Responses speech acts actually enabled the emergence of to new situations use language and symbols diverse, multiple, and unpredictable mean- adapted from previous orders; familiar forms ings in everyday life, including those that did are used with new meanings and to new ends. not correspond to the constative meanings Cultural anthropology offers us models for of authoritative discourse” (25). Perestroika studying local languages and discourses, began as a deconstruction of authoritative markets, contested memories and histories of Soviet discourse and then reintroduced the trauma, and coping strategies (Ries). lost element of public metacommentary on Russian studies today offer a field of authoritative discourse."E decentering, unraveling, plural projects. We $ere has also been a great deal of inter- have a sense of many overlapping topics in est in describing the unique sociocultural sit- the layering of premodern, imperial, Soviet, uation of the #rst postsocialist generation in and post- Soviet cultural spaces. We exam- Russia, whose immediate environment nev- ine contradictory trajectories of renaming ertheless bears signi#cant traces of Soviet life. and reclaiming, looting and restoration. $is “ Post- Soviet aphasia” refers to a discourse in larger project is not Pan- Slavic—a nineteenth- which complex usage of older symbolic forms century notion whereby Russia thought to compensates for the lack of new creative sym- decide what was best for all the Slavs—but bolic production; this discourse is symptom- Trans- Slavic, not merely in moving across atic of inadequate post- Soviet interpellation. formerly separate #elds in the course of our The post- Soviet was perceived as an empty investigations but in rising up into the heady space, a nonexistence, a culture of symbolic atmosphere of a larger cultural and historical shortages (Oushakine, “In the State”). And the perspective than ever before, coming at the behavior of the Soviet consumer, rooted in the old maps from new angles, working simulta- economy of shortages, continues to shape the neously in multiple contexts. Our discipline post- Soviet understanding of consumption. comes by these more capacious perspectives ($is behavior has been described as #lling naturally. Russia still fascinates us as the up imagined new grocery bags with the same vivid, maddeningly maximalist place it has old sausage, perhaps in a better wrapping, always been. Whatever may have changed, 234.2 ] Julie A. Buckler C[e the Western specialists still revel in the pleasures 11. For a close and critical examination of this turn

back to the imperial past, see Platt and Brandenberger. of studying this cultural space, marked by changing wild ideas that were taken seriously, excesses, 12. Katerina Clark’s !e Soviet Novel (1981) was the #rst piece of Western scholarship to take up the virtually chaos, and freakishly brilliant achievements. taboo topic of socialist realism. 13. This approach represented a shift from that of

Vla di mir Paperny’s Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Cul- profession ture Two (1985), which viewed socialist realism (“culture two”) as the polar opposite of 1920 avant-garde (“culture NOTES one”) and as transforming the latter’s horizontal, plural spatial organization into a vertical, centralized model. My thanks go to those who read dra%s of this essay and 14. For a recent account of uno&cial culture and dis- helped me shape it—Jonathan Bolton, Julia Bekman Cha- sident social activity during the post- Stalin period, see daga, Lisa Rodensky, Stephanie Sandler, and Justin Weir. Komaromi, “Uno&cial Field.” 1. Engelstein writes, “In the 1990s, when historians turned their attention to the nature of the judicial reforms and the operation of Imperial legal institutions, they echoed the interests of post- Soviet Russian society, concerned with WORKS CONSULTED establishing a viable legal order as the basis for democratic government and a market economy” (“New $inking” 491). Barker, Adele Marie, ed. Consuming Russia: Popular Cul- 2. In Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s famous phrasing, ture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev. Durham: Duke from his 1968 novel !e First Circle, literature constituted UP, 1999. Print. a “second government” in Russia, exerting its moral force Beissinger, Mark R. “$e Persistence of Empire in Eur- on citizens and public o&cials alike (415). asia.” NewsNet 48.1 (2008): 1–8. Print. 3. Stalin took up this phrase in preparation for the im- Berry, Ellen E., and Mikhail N. Epstein. Transcultural Ex- minent adoption of socialist realism as the literary doctrine periments: Russian and American Models of Creative mandated by the state and for the #rst congress of the Union Communication. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. Print. of Soviet Writers, in 1934. $e phrase was used prominently Bolton, Jonathan. “Writing in a Polluted Semiosphere: in speeches at this congress (Kemp-Welch 131). Everyday Life in Lotman, Foucault, and de Certeau.” 4. See, for example, Sandler, Commemorating Push- Schonle 320–44. kin. See also Kelly, who constructs a picture of modern Borenstein, Eliot. Men without Women: Masculinity and Russian literature out of central notions unpacked from Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929. Durham: a single short lyric by Pushkin. Duke UP, 2000. 5. On questions of homogenization and multiple na- Boym, Svetlana. Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday tionalisms, see Slezkine. Life in Russia. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. Print. 6. The answer seems to be a decided yes. See Beis- Brooks, JeWrey. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy singer; Bugajski; Hirsch. and Popular Culture, 1861–1917. Princeton: Princeton 7. Note Ram’s critique of Eurasia as “an indeterminate UP, 1985. Print. category with an uneven history of discursive elabora- Buckler, Julie. Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and tion” and a paradoxical concept (832–33). Cityshape. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Print. 8. JeWrey Brooks’s, When Russia Learned to Read: Lit- Buck- Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: !e eracy and Popular Culture, 1861–1917 (1985) was a pio- Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: neering study in this regard. For more recent scholarship, MIT P, 2000. Print. see McReynolds. Bugajski, Janusz. Cold Peace: Russia’s New Imperialism. 9. In 2007, the American Association of Teachers of Westport: Praeger, 2004. Print. Slavic and East European Languages awarded its Liter- ary and Cultural Studies Book Prize to a poetry study: Burawoy, Michael, and Katherine Verdery. Uncertain Cathy Ciepiela’s !e Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Tran si tion: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocial- Marina Tsvetaeva. For another excellent recent study, see ist World. Lanham: Rowman, 1999. Print. MacKay. Sandler provides a good overview of changing Chernetsky, Vitaly, Nancy Condee, Harsha Ram, and paradigms (Introduction). Ga ya tri Chakravorty Spivak. “Are We Postcolonial? 10. See also Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Post- Soviet Space.” “Forum: Conference Debates.” Stalinism as a Civilization, the #rst Western monograph PMLA 121.3 (2006): 828–36. Print. to provide a social history of the Stalinist period whose Churchill, Winston S. The Gathering Storm. Boston: author had full access to local archives. Other important Hough ton, 1985. Vol. 1 of The Second World War. sources on this topic include Hal#n; Hellbeck. Goo gle Book Search. Web. 13 Feb. 2009. C[C What Comes after “Post-Soviet” in Russian Studies? [ PMLA

Ciepiela, Cathy. !e Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and ———. !e Total Art of Stalinism: Avant- Garde, Aesthetic Marina Tsvetaeva. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. Print. Dictatorship, and Beyond. Trans. Charles Rougle. Clark, Katerina. “Beyond the Wall, and All $at: AAASS Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Print. Moves toward the Twenty- First Century.” NewsNet Hal#n, Igal. Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiogra- 40.1 (2000): 1–8. Print. phies on Trial. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. Print. profession ———. Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution. Cam- Hanson, Stephen E., and Blair A. Ruble. “Rebuilding bridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Print. Russian Studies.” Problems of Post- communism 52.3 ———. !e Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: U of (2005): 49–57. Print. Chicago P, 1981. Print. Hellbeck, Jochen. Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary

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