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Religious Perspectives in Soviet Prose Fiction 1964-1988

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Religious Perspectives in Soviet Prose Fiction 1964-1988 RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES IN SOVIET PROSE FICTION 1964-1988 The Animist/Totemist Dichotomy Irena Wanda Maria Maryniak Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Slavonic and East European Studies University of London July 1991 1 ProQuest Number: U048190 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest U048190 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 ABSTRACT The thesis explores religious themes in selected examples of Soviet prose fiction published officially between 1964 and 1988. In Part I the threefold relationship between religion, literature and political ideology is considered. It is proposed that religious models applied by Soviet writers may be helpfully related to an anthropological debate on the nature and development of religion, based on the theories of Edward B. Tylor and Emile Durkheim. Briefly, it is shown how the animist/totemist dichotomy highlighted by this controversy may be applied to Russian religious thought before the 1917 Revolution and to the literature of the Soviet era. Part II points to animist elements in writings by Valentin Rasputin, Chabua Amiredzhibi and Daniil Granin. It draws attention to the connection between Rasputin's religious vision and traditional Siberian beliefs, particularly those of the Buryat. Chabua Amiredzhibi's novel Data Tutashkhia is analysed with reference to Zoroastrian thought. Daniil Granin's 'Kartina' ('The Picture') serves as an example of a work in which notions of art and beauty take on an animist quality. Part III pays attention to literature revealing a tension between the animist vision and the totemic 2 Abstract understanding of religion. It argues that early fiction by Chingiz Aitmatov reflects aspects of pre-Islamic Central Asian religious tradition. 'Komissiia' ('The Commission'), a novel by Sergei Zalygin, is treated as a work which asks how individual, spontaneous needs may be accommodated within a system of social and moral order. The writing of Vladimir Tendriakov offers a further example of a vision divided between an awareness of psychological dilemmas and loyalty to familiar sociological models. Part IV shows how Durkheim's theory of religion as an expression of collective self-consciousness may be related to ideas in works by the Russian nationalist writers: Iurii Bondarev, Sergei Alekseev and Vasilii Belov. It suggests that particular examples of fiction by Petr Proskurin, Chingiz Aitmatov and Vladimir Tendriakov indicate a renewed interest in the God-building ideas of Maksim Gor'kii and Anatolii Lunacharskii. In conclusion, the thesis argues that the alternative religious vision introduced by Soviet writers between the fall of Khrushchev and the Millennium of Christianity in Rus’ served as a model for society's subsequent reorientation and for new discourse under perestroika. 3 CONTENTS Note 5 Foreword 6 PART I : INTRODUCTION 1 The Religious Impulse and the Narrated Tale 8 2 Some Dilemmas of Russian Religious Thought in Retrospect 37 PART II: ANIMIST VISIONS 3 Valentin Rasputin 90 4 Chabua Amiredzhibi 139 5 Daniil Granin 163 PART III: PSYCHOLOGY OR SOCIOLOGY? 6 Chingiz Aitmatov 186 7 Sergei Zalygin 210 8 Vladimir Tendriakov 227 PART IV: TOTEMIC GODS 9 Religion and the Right 259 10 The New God-builders 284 Conclusion 313 Bibliography 325 4 Note In transliteration, I have followed conventions set by the Library of Congress with one small modification: the Russian letters - 3 , —e and -£ are all expressed by the English -e. I have retained the standard English spelling of names of Russian writers and academics who live and publish in the West (e.g. Brodsky, Pospielovsky, Yanov). References are given in footnotes at the end of each chapter. Titles of works consulted in journals or in collected volumes are cited in inverted commas. Sections of Chapters 3, 9 and 10 have been included in the following articles: Irena Maryniak, 'Truthseekers, Godbuilders or Culture Vultures? Some Supplementary Remarks on Religious Perspectives in Modern Soviet Literature', Religion in Communist Lands, vol. 16, No. 3 (1988) pp. 227-36. Irena Maryniak, 'Valentin Rasputin, die neue Rechte und das Religidse', Osteuropa, No. 3 (1990) pp. 210-18. Irena Maryniak, 'The New God-bui 1 ders' , in Richard Freeborn and Jane Grayson, eds, Ideology in Russian Literature (London, 1990) pp. 188- 204 . I am particularly grateful to Jane Grayson and Geoffrey Hosking for many hours of invaluable consultation, and to Michael Branch for bibliographical suggestions which decisively affected the shape of this thesis. Judith Vidal-Hall read and advised on the final version. The staff of Index on Censorship and Keston College offered patient support. My parents, Wanda and Andrzej Jeziorski, and above all my husband, Marek Maryniak, did everything to ensure that the essay was completed. 5 FOREWORD The present Foreword is also a health warning. It explains the purpose of this study, but does so, partly, to account for areas not covered in it. In exploring the significance of religious ideas and images in Soviet prose fiction published in the years following the fall of Khrushchev and before fflasnost' came fully into its own, I do not claim to offer a final interpretation of the texts. My purpose has not been literary 'theology'. Nor, for that matter, has it been analysis in the sense that modern literary theory tends to understand it. I have not sought to dismantle the structure of narratives, or to expose the pattern of constant relationships within them. Instead, I have tried to retrieve what may be an important, if at times hidden, level of meaning in each work, inviting the reader to consider its implications in the context of a coherent piece of literature. Some account has been taken of the 'intertextual' aspect of the works covered, their discourse with other writings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, this has been introduced only where it serves to exemplify religious perspectives in the novels or stories di scussed. In order to highlight what may be the most salient dilemma of philosophical and religious thought in Soviet 6 Foreword prose of the late 1960sf 1970s and early 1980s, the study has been framed by a long-standing anthropological controversy over the nature and origins of religion. The two schools of thought in question (represented by Edward B. Tylor and Emile Durkheim) differ over whether religion should be understood as a psychological or a sociological phenomenon. The divergence arises on the basis of dated, but none the less pertinent, studies carried out on ’primitive' religious cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the 1917 Revolution atheism was promulgated as official Soviet doctrine. Thereafter, authors seeking to touch upon religious issues had only their intuitions, oral tradition and scant available reading to fall back on. Religious teaching was illegal. Consequently, writers had to start from scratch; their experience of the religious impulse may display a quality that is more spontaneous (or 'primitive') than it does in societies where religious institutions remain firmly established. A comparison between the religious vision of Soviet writers and that reflected in undeveloped religious cults has, then, some degree of justification and may help to reveal tensions generically inherent in many, if not all, religious traditions. 7 PART I: INTRODUCTION Chapter 1. The Religious Impulse and the Narrated Tale ( i ) The spectacle of religious practice past and present is a puzzle and a humiliation for human intelligence, Henri Bergson remarked in The Two Sources of Morality and Reliffion C1935): Experience may indeed say 'that is false', and reasoning 'that is absurd'. Humanity only clings all the more to that absurdity and that error .... We find in the past, we could find to-day, human societies with neither science nor art nor philosophy. But there has never been a society without religion.1 Despite sporadically ruthless attempts in the Soviet Union, and other ideocratic societies, to stifle religious sentiment and superimpose ideological structures on religious ones, the substance of Bergson's observation still holds good. Recent history has confirmed that in ostensibly atheist social environments religious faith continues to flourish underground .2 In better developed, more 'open' societies, modernity and individualism may have undermined the moral influence of religious teaching, but it remains broadly true that religious institutions have maintained their role as inductors into the communi ty.3 Bergson formulated his explanation for the prevalence 8 1. Religious Impulse and Narrated Tale of the religious phenomenon by proposing that religion, being co-extensive with our species, must be inherent in our structure.* The urge to create religious forms is an aspect of an instinct, a vital impulse which, combined with intelligence, ensures man's survival and his evolutionary development. It does so by activating in man a defence mechanism which protects him from his own innate intelligence; from those egotistical initiatives which might endanger the social s t r u c t u r e . 5 Further, it shades him from the intellectual awareness of the inevitability of death, and from a realisation of the presence of forces outside his intelligence which can hinder the achievement of ends he sets himself.6 This instinctual defensive reaction preserves social unity, protects man from discouragement or fear, and is related to the faculty of imagination.
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