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Detki V Kletke: the Childlike Aesthetic in Soviet Children's Literature and Unofficial Poetry

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Detki V Kletke: the Childlike Aesthetic in Soviet Children's Literature and Unofficial Poetry Detki v kletke: The Childlike Aesthetic in Soviet Children's Literature and Unofficial Poetry The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Morse, Ainsley. 2016. Detki v kletke: The Childlike Aesthetic in Soviet Children's Literature and Unofficial Poetry. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493521 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Detki v kletke: The Childlike Aesthetic in Soviet Children’s Literature and Unofficial Poetry A dissertation presented by Ainsley Elizabeth Morse to The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Slavic Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2016 © 2016 – Ainsley Elizabeth Morse. All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Stephanie Sandler Ainsley Elizabeth Morse Detki v kletke: The Childlike Aesthetic in Soviet Children’s Literature and Unofficial Poetry Abstract Since its inception in 1918, Soviet children’s literature was acclaimed as innovative and exciting, often in contrast to other official Soviet literary production. Indeed, avant-garde artists worked in this genre for the entire Soviet period, although they had fallen out of official favor by the 1930s. This dissertation explores the relationship between the childlike aesthetic as expressed in Soviet children’s literature, the early Russian avant-garde and later post-war unofficial poetry. Even as ‘childlike’ devices were exploited in different ways in different contexts, in the post-war period the characteristic features of this aesthetic had come to be a marker for unofficial art. The introduction presents the notion of the childlike aesthetic, tracing its recent history from Russian modernism and the avant-garde. Chapter One, “Detki v kletke: The Underground Goes into Children’s Literature,” traces the early development of Soviet children’s literature and introduces the work of the OBERIU poets, the “first underground” to be driven by circumstance to write for children. Chapter Two, “‘Playing with Words’: Experimental Unofficial Poetry and Children’s Literature in the Post-war Period,” fast-forwards to the late 1950s-70s, describing the emergence of a more substantial unofficial literary scene alongside still-rigid boundaries within official literature, including children’s. The final two chapters present detailed comparative studies of the work of two post-war unofficial poets from each of the Soviet ‘capitals,’ Moscow and Leningrad: Igor Kholin and Vsevolod Nekrasov, and Leonid Aronzon and iii Oleg Grigoriev. All of these poets worked in children’s literature and experimented with the childlike aesthetic in their unofficial work. With its roots in folklore, nonsense poetry and nursery rhymes, the childlike aesthetic challenges established notions of logic, propriety and order. Through childlike form and content, unofficial poetry could distinguish itself starkly from its official counterpart. Furthermore, unofficial writers who worked in children’s literature could demonstratively ignore the strict generic boundaries of official literature by blurring them through their own, openly childlike poetry. This dissertation attests to the expressive power, resilience and ongoing relevance of the childlike aesthetic in art, while showing the curious intermingling of literary experiment and children’s literature in Soviet literary history. iv Table of Contents Introduction: The Childlike Aesthetic in Soviet-era Unofficial Poetry Chapter One: Detki v kletke: The Underground Goes into Children’s Literature Chapter Two: “Playing with Words”: Experimental Unofficial Poetry and Children’s Literature in the Post-war Period Chapter Three: Moscow Unofficial Poets Igor Kholin Vsevolod Nekrasov Chapter Four: Leningrad Unofficial Poets Leonid Aronzon Oleg Grigoriev Conclusion Bibliography v Acknowledgements My wonderful committee: tireless and warmly supportive advisor, Stephanie Sandler; Svetlana Boym, Gerald Janecek and William Mills Todd, III My readers and supporters: Carl Mautner, Maria Vassileva, Phil Redko, Vera Koshkina, Bela Shayevich, Aleksey Berg My babysitters: Alexis Thomas, Amanda Bates, Roza Bekker, Mollie Traver, the Mautner and Morse grandparents My many sources and inspirations, including: Polina Barskova, Vladimir Erl’, Dina Gatina, Pjotr Kazarnovskij, Maria Klassen, Ilja Kukuj, Ilya Kukulin, Tatiana Nikol’skaia, Eugene Ostashevsky, Stas Savitsky, Sergei Sokolovsky, Mikhail Sukhotin, Matvei Yankelevich THANK YOU! vi For Ruth, avkors vii INTRODUCTION The Childlike Aesthetic in Soviet-era Unofficial Poetry !"#$ !"%&' (!"#$%&' 1 ()*"): (#& $ )&*+ ,-./.#0. 1 )&*+ #&20-& 3#&-456+70 ,&&685#0.1 There is a famous story of Nikolai Khardzhiev’s about taking the OBERIU poet Alexander Vvedensky to meet Aleksey Kruchënykh in 1936. Upon hearing Vvedensky read one of his poems, Kruchënykh read a poem “written by a five or six year old girl” and asserted that her work was much better. When they left, Vvedensky, ordinarily known for a total lack of personal and professional modesty, sighed sadly to Khardzhiev: “Her poem really is better than mine…” Khardzhiev concludes his account by noting that “you had to know Vvedensky’s arrogance” to understand the significance of this reaction.2 What could have so impressed these talented and critical representatives of Russia’s brilliant and provocative early and late avant-garde? What made a poem written by a child seem better than Vvedensky’s rigorously inquisitive and provocative adult poetry? Like most early twentieth-century modernisms, the pre-revolutionary Russian modernist and avant-garde movements were fascinated by the artistic and philosophical possibilities represented by the child’s viewpoint. After the 1917 revolution, these 1 From the play “Elka u Ivanovykh.” Aleksandr Vvedenskii, Polnoe sobranie proizvedenii (Moscow: Gileia, 1993), vol.2, 61. 2 N. Khardzhiev, Stat’i ob avangarde (Moscow: RA, 1997), vol.1, 380. possibilities acquired a political dimension as well. In a 1923 essay, “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Things,” Evgeny Zamiatin wrote: Right now literature needs enormous, mast-height, airplane-level philosophical horizons, it needs the very latest, the most terrifying and fearless “why?” and “what's next?” These are the kind of questions children ask. But children are, after all, the boldest philosophers. They come into life naked, uncovered by a single leaf of dogma, absolute or faith. This is why their questions are all absurdly naive and so frighteningly complex.3 Zamiatin’s praise of naïvely fearless, ingenuously complex “children’s questions” reflects this widespread trend, the roots of which certainly transcend both the avant-garde and the Russian context.4 But the implicitly youthful, utopian impulse shared by the avant-garde and the Bolshevik revolution made the 1920s a time extremely receptive to the childlike aesthetic in art and literature. Not unrelatedly, this period also saw the birth of Soviet children’s literature. In poetry, the primary genre for my study, the childlike aesthetic manifests in elements like formal simplicity, lexical inventiveness, loose or nonexistent logic, silliness, naïveté (and its plainer sibling, ignorance) and verbal and philosophical nonsense. The epithet “childlike” is suggested as a unifying term by the fact that many of these features and devices are directly associated with work written for (and sometimes 3 From the article “O literature, revoliutsii, entropii i o prochem” (1923). Evgenii Zamiatin, Ia boius': literaturnaia kritika, publitsistika, vospominaniia (Moscow: Nasledie, 1999), 97. Here and elsewhere translation is mine unless otherwise noted – AM. 4 While concentrating on the particular interest in the infantile (“overdetermined focus”) of early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde and modernist movements, Sara Pankenier Weld also acknowledges the importance of the child as subject and object for twentieth century developments in art and psychology worldwide. See her Voiceless Vanguard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2014), 12-16. Also see Andrew Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 1990) and Catriona Kelly, Children’s World (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007) for the importance of child/childhood in the earlier Russian tradition. 2 by) children. The phrase “childlike aesthetic,” meanwhile, points to the more complicated relationship between the “original” (the child and its way of thinking and using language) and the poetry here to be discussed, which uses childlike features as a rhetorical device. Rarely seeking to actually impersonate a real child, the childlike aesthetic gestures rhetorically in the direction of the child or the forms of children’s literature. The childlike aesthetic always involves some kind of stylization.5 For some avant-garde artists, the child was essentially a synonym for the primitive, while others were expressly interested in specifically infantile modes of visual expression and language. In any event, the fundamental and ongoing value of the childlike aesthetic lies in the freedom it offers from linguistic,
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