Stalinist Cosmopolitanism Steven S

Criticism

Volume 58 | Issue 1 Article 9

2016 Stalinist Cosmopolitanism Steven S. Lee University of California, Berkeley, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Lee, Steven S. (2016) "Stalinist Cosmopolitanism," Criticism: Vol. 58 : Iss. 1 , Article 9. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol58/iss1/9 STALINIST It has long been common practice to see Western metropolises like COSMOPOLITANISM Paris and New York as compet- Steven S. Lee ing centers of global modernism, as capitals in the “world republic of let- Moscow, the Fourth Rome: ters.” Katerina Clark’s magisterial Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and Moscow, the Fourth Rome presents the Evolution of Soviet Culture, an alternate mapping of world cul- 1931–1941 by Katerina Clark. ture, with the Soviet Union emerg- Cambridge, MA: Harvard ing as another potential center, one University Press, 2011. Pp. 432. beyond capitalist bounds. This is a $38.50 cloth. formidable task, given Clark’s focus on the 1930s rather than the 1920s. Few would dispute Bolshevik claims to worldliness in the ear- lier decade—the topic of her 1995 Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution—which witnessed the heyday of the Soviet avant-garde and Third International. Not so with the 1930s, typically regarded as a time of terror and retreat— with avant-gardism giving way to socialist realism, and with dreams of international revolution over- shadowed by Stalinist realpolitik. By this dominant account, the 1930s marked Moscow’s abandonment of worldly, utopian aspirations—its turn inward in the name of “socialism in one country” amid heighten- ing Russian nationalism. Clark does not dispute that the 1930s marked various disillusion- ing retreats. Rather, her project is to “integrate a rather neglected international dimension into the overall interpretation of Stalinism” (6)—in short, to draw connections between Stalinist culture and the rest of the world, particularly Western

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Europe. One goal here, of course, state. Throughout the book, Clark is to correct the historical record— resolves this seeming contradiction to counter the simplified view of by emphasizing the ambiguity of Stalinist culture as merely autarkic cosmopolitanism—the fact that and totalitarian. Clark shows that, one could be “driven by a desire to as the Kremlin abandoned avant- interact with the cultures and intel- garde iconoclasm and centralized lectuals of the outside world” (5) but state power, Moscow remained “a do so from the vantage of a particu- center for a transnational intellec- lar nation. For instance, she shows tual milieu” (25). Socialist realism Tretiakov—the futurist writer who and Stalinist architecture emerged advocated the journalistic writing not simply from official decrees, but technique known as the literature from cultural currents circulating of fact—in 1930 Berlin, where he across East and West. I specify some was sent by an official organiza- of these currents below, but Clark’s tion to assist with propaganda connection between Moscow of efforts. However, he also used the the ’30s and the competing cul- opportunity to acquaint himself tural centers of Paris and Berlin with members of the German left- undergirds the broader, more pro- ist avant-garde—many of whom vocative takeaway from this study: (most prominently Bertolt Brecht) that lurking in current discourses he later hosted in Moscow. A more of transnationalism and cosmopoli- unexpected example of cosmopolitanism is a largely forgotten Soviet tan patriotism comes in the form legacy—tucked away in the now of Eisenstein’s exoticist embrace of underused, Comintern-inflected Chinese writing, which in 1935 he internationalism. Ultimately, this is described as “a unique model for a book not just about the Stalinist how, through emotional images ’30s, but an effort to bring the filled with proletarian wisdom and Soviet Union back into models of humanity, the great ideas of our our globalized, post-Soviet world. great land must be poured into the Clark goes about this task hearts and emotions of the millions partly by following the travels and of nations speaking different lan- trajectories of four Soviet intel- guages” (201). That is, Eisenstein lectual adventurers—filmmaker saw Chinese as a formula for the Sergei Eisenstein and writers Ilya advancement of Soviet cultural Erenberg, Mikhail Koltsov, and hegemony, and Clark describes Sergei Tretiakov. Clark calls these how he arrived at this view in part figures “cosmopolitan patriots,” by attending Chinese actor Mei who pushed for engagement with Lanfang’s 1935 performances and non-Soviet culture even as they lectures in Moscow—which also remained committed to the Soviet occasioned Brecht’s “first published

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formulation of his theory of alien- used to legitimate its postcapitalist, ation” (192)—as well as by his postreligious order. This is a city exposure to Lucien Lévy-Brühl’s where words were sacred, where La Mentalité Primitive (Primitive rulers were presented as writers, Mentality, 1923) and to Marcel and, as Clark demonstrates, writ- Granet’s La Pensée chinoise (Chinese ers around the world took notice. Thought, 1934). The latter book Most notably, a recurring presence was a birthday gift to Eisenstein in the book is Moscow’s colony of from the African American per- Germanophone writers and editors former Paul Robeson, who also who were in exile from Nazism. visited Moscow in 1935. Moscow, Prominent among these was the Fourth Rome is filled with such Georgy Lukács, and Clark traces exchanges among artists and intel- his active participation in Soviet lectuals across national and racial intellectual life and particularly in lines; taken together, they lend the development of socialist real- striking credence to the notion of a ism—according to him, bound to Soviet-centered world culture. both the ancient Greek epic and the Accordingly, Clark builds up “great bourgeois realist novel” (165) Moscow as a place that aspired to be of Western Europe. world class, as evidenced by efforts On the foundation of these con- to reconstruct it as a “higher order crete physical exchanges, as well place” (27) in the mold of ancient as explicit efforts to blur East and Athens and Rome. Describing West, Clark paints a more abstract, various plans for the building of at times impressionistic portrait of a “new Moscow,” she notes that the techniques, themes, and fash- the monumental, socialist realist ions joining Stalinist culture to architecture that predominated in the rest of the world. Dispelling the ’30s drew from classical and the notion that this culture simply Renaissance traditions, as well as reflected the whims of Stalin, Clark from contemporary Manhattan. Of presents a field of cultural options course, Moscow was not the only circulating across Europe, from city during the interwar years to which Soviet intellectuals and (in claim ancient Rome as a precedent, the final instance) officials picked but, in Clark’s presentation, what and chose. For instance, she sug- set it apart was a unique conver- gests that the appearance of frescos gence of art and politics. Moscow and mosaics on Soviet buildings emerged as a “lettered city”—able in the early ’30s can be related to to be read, through its architec- a simultaneous reaction against ture, as a text; and obsessed with Le Corbusier in France (109). the written word and, in particu- Likewise, she posits a transatlantic lar, literature, which the regime conservative turn in the late ’30s,

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as seen in the coincidence of the Friedrich Schiller’s formulation Soviet campaign against formalism, and “delightful horror” in Edmund Nazi attacks on degenerate art, and Burke’s—is likewise made to dove- the rise of Hollywood puritanism. tail with Stalinist repression; as To her credit, Clark does not press is the lyric, which Clark associ- such connections, nor does she go ates with the cult of Byron in late about the daunting task of explain- 1930s Moscow, a sudden emphasis ing their root causes. Rather, these on personal over politicized poetry, work as heuristic devices to open and the feverish introspection Stalinist culture to Western culture found in “purge discourse.” This is and vice versa. Stalinist culture at its most legible The result is disconcerting, for scholars of Western literature, particularly as Clark traces how but also at its most bloodstained Stalinist culture changed from the and terror-stricken. early to late ’30s—that is, to the In short, amid her efforts to peak of the Terror—for it is at this open our understanding of 1930s point that this culture becomes Moscow—to unseat such distinc- most familiar and, in many ways, tions as East versus West, socialist appealing. Clark argues that the realism versus modernism, dissi- period witnessed a pan-European dent versus stooge—Clark remains turn from classicism to romanti- keenly aware of the ever-tighten- cism, which in Soviet culture was ing grip of Stalinism. Two of her marked by emphases on interior- four cosmopolitan patriots per- ity, adventure, the sublime, and ished during the purges, the 1939 the lyric. After explaining inte- Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact repulsed riority through the writings of many from the Soviet orbit, and Konstantin Stanislavsky—who by cosmopolitan emerged in postwar the late ’30s had been enshrined Moscow as a code word for Jewish. by the Soviet state—she proceeds Indeed, Moscow’s failure to remain to connect his insistence on “emo- a nexus of world culture is sig- tional truth” (228) to the show naled in the book’s title. As Clark trials’ insistence on unmasking. explains in the opening pages, the Likewise, after tying Soviet adven- sixteenth-century monk Filofei of ture writing to the Spanish Civil Pskov declared Moscow the succes- War—comparing, for instance, sor to Rome and Constantinople: the works of Ernest Hemingway “Two Romes have fallen, and a and Koltsov—she notes how, third stands, and a fourth there in his own trial, Tretiakov was shall not be” (1). Thus, Clark’s forced to write a confession in the choice of “Fourth Rome” indicates mode of a romantic adventure tale. the emergence of Moscow as “the The sublime—“bold disorder” in capital of a different, post-Christian,

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belief system” (2, emphasis in the historian Michael David-Fox puts original), but also “the possibility it, the book serves as “a cautionary that the Soviet desire to make the tale for naïve talk about transcend- capital a world center was unreal- ing the national or failure to distin- izable” (28). In short, Clark pres- guish rigorously among different ents both the rise and fall of this forms and meanings of cross-bor- center—of this ideal of Soviet cos- der exchange.”1 On a more meth- mopolitanism that was arguably odological level, readers might also doomed from the start. be thrown by the book’s frequent The Cold War and such notions use of analogy to bridge East and as the Iron Curtain and Three West, as well as the unclear sense Worlds made it possible to for- of what determines the sweeping get this ideal. Now that Clark has cultural shifts it tracks. Ultimately, reminded us of it, the challenge now however, Clark’s project is to open is to remap the concept of world a whole new field of inquiry— culture so that it engages the previ- leaving it to others to follow her ously cordoned-off realms of really lead, fill in the gaps, and weigh the existing socialism. To be sure, many consequences for contemporary readers will find this challenge dis- cosmopolitanism. comfiting. In revisiting this 1930s moment, Clark not only broadens Steven S. Lee is an associate professor of the horizon of Stalinist culture, but English at the University of California, also hints at the uneasy convergence Berkeley, and the author of The Ethnic of Stalinism and Western modern- Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University ism—for instance, the fact that Press, 2015). Soviet-oriented critics sympathetic to the latter (e.g., James Joyce’s Ulysses [1922]) used the purges to NOTE advance their positions (162). In other words, Clark reveals the trou- 1. Michael David-Fox, “The Implications bled, Stalinist legacy of situating of Transnationalism,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian culture transnationally, of think- History 12, no. 4 (2011): 885–904, ing beyond the nation: As Soviet quotation on 897.

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