Point of Departure

This article zooms in on what can be call`ed the laboratory of the notion of Soviet literature: the debates of the journal Literaturnyi kritik, in which the programmatic debate at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934) was prepared, articulated, and further elaborated. Mikhail Lifshits, one of the most prominent art, literary, and cultural critics at the time, decades later described that period as a “zazor,” a creviceFootnote ¹ in and from which great things evolved.Footnote ² A vibrant moment when RAPP, the formerly most powerful party organization of “Proletarian writers” (Rossiiskaia assosiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei, 1925–32), was just dissolved and the Writers’ Union as the only remaining state organization just founded. Nothing was finalized yet, but the future course of action was set.Footnote ³ Objectives and dogmas (“Soviet literature,” “socialist realism”) were worked out and implemented in institutions and organizations for the first time, yet these years also saw Soviet internationalism and the announced “socialism in one country,” that is, the (multi)national isolation of the Soviet Union, still keeping each other in balance.

From its foundation in 1933 until the end of the decade, the journal Literaturnyi kritik was the preeminent organ of the literary-critical debate and served as THE platform for questions of aesthetic theory. Translations of parts of G. W. F. Hegel's Aesthetics as well as essays on Immanuel Kant and Henri Bergson formed a central a part of the publication program, as did the critical reception of modernist tendencies in western literatures. In this context, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway figured as major names, and translations of Georg Lukács's critique of expressionism (1933) and—from 1935 onward—his reflections on Problems of the Novel, which definitely contributed to theoretically consolidating anti-modernist (socialist) realism as the one and only literary norm. In essays on Vissarion Belinskii, Nikolai Chernyshevskii, and Nikolai Dobroliubov, a new “national” approach was elaborated and the foundations for the so-called “real criticism” were laid. At the same time, the journal published essays by authors like Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii and Andrei Platonov,Footnote ⁴ as well as two short stories by Platonov that hardly could otherwise be placed with his works.Footnote ⁵ In its later years, the journal played a major role in the discussion on “political poetry”Footnote ⁶ and defended Mikhail Sholokhov's “Tikhii Don.”

Research has hitherto particularly focused on the journal as the arena of polemics between the so called “voprekisty” and “blagodaristy” and on George Lukács's role in the development of the journal's theoretical positions. Lukács's contributions on realism, which countered “irrational” National Socialism with a rational Marxist approach, were at the core of the journal's “world literature orientation” and supported its anti-fascist positioning as an international and internationalist literature platform.Footnote ⁷

This article considers the publications in Literaturnyi kritik in their variety as a laboratory and the formation of a literary-theoretical program, focusing on one of its key concepts: “the critical appropriation of heritage.” Departing from Evgeny Dobrenko's diagnosis that the worldview of Stalinism in general was characterized by an “awareness of heritage and a synthesis that includes everything conceiving of itself as ‘heir’ that removes all contradictions of previous epochs,”Footnote ⁸ it will focus on a controversial debate on the pages of Literaturnyi kritik. This debate was based on a threefold agreement: to lay claim to the artistic and literary heritage of the world, in order to safeguard it from fascism; the demand to critically appropriate the heritage of realism in order to bring forward a high-quality socialist realism; and the effort to establish a new, Soviet literature as a multinational concept. The controversy to by analyzed arose around the questions of first, how to define the heritage, what should be part of it and what not, and second, how to “critically appropriate” the heritage.

“Critical Appropriation of Heritage”: The Way to Mastership

Founded in 1933, in the run-up to the First All-Union Congress, Literaturnyi kritik served as the arena where crucial concepts and norms that were established at the congress by the status of the Writers Union as a standard binding on all still could be negotiated. First of all, this was the definition of socialist realism as the aesthetic norm for every text and work of art to be composed in its relation to previous versions of realism. In contrast to earlier forms of realism, socialist realism was determined not solely to analyze or diagnose the reality depicted, but to create and shape a new reality. A “truthful depiction of the reality” (pravdivost΄) should guarantee to “ideologically remake and educate the workers in the spirit of socialism.”Footnote ⁹ Or, as Stalin said, writers had to be “engineers of the human soul.” The debate flared up over whether historical masterpieces of nineteenth-century realism should serve as models for socialist realism, even though their authors, from the perspective of Marxism-Leninism, had written them from a politically incorrect point of view. The debate that was fought out on its pages has come to be known as the controversy between the so-called voprekisty against the blagodaristy, between those who held the view that the aesthetic value of a work fundamentally depended on the political views of its author (“blagodarists” and “sociologists” like V. F. Pereverzev, who also took part in the journal's debate) and those who argued that valuable realism may be produced in spite of the author's (wrong) political position. After M.M. Rozental's programmatic article “Worldview (political position) and method (poetics) in literary writing,” the majority of the journal's authors—among them the editor-in-chief, Pavel Iudin, as well as some of its pre-eminent voices, Mikhail Lifshits,Footnote ¹⁰ Elena Usievich and Georg Lukács, but also Il΄ia Erenburg—tended to value the mastership of canonized authors of world literature as a resource for present and future ways of writing and to defend the works of those contemporary authors who were exposed to criticism. Accordingly, the debate in the journal focused on questions of style and aesthetics especially in relation to the literature of the prerevolutionary bourgeois past, but also to the development of literary modernism. It can be said that the agenda of the journal was generally directed against both, the ultra-pragmatic and maximal party loyal approach represented by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) that, before it was shut down in 1932 and replaced by the Writers’ Union, had suggested what they called a “proletarian realism”—a simplified version of psychological realism—and also against the circle surrounding Pereverzev, who had been criticized by the RAPP, declared “men΄shevist” and excluded from it in 1930.Footnote ¹¹ In its early years Pereverzev himself and members of his circle also contributed to the journal, but the majority of its authors promoted an aesthetically sophisticated understanding of literature that started from the premise that aesthetic mastery and literature's effectiveness as an instrument of education condition each other.Footnote ¹² However, looking at the details, their positions and also the strategies of their argumentation clearly diverged among themselves: there were different notions of heritage and realism and opinions particularly differed between the defenders of modernist/avant-garde tendencies—such as among others Sergei Tret΄iakov—and their critics.

The editors of the journal, M.M. Rosental΄ and P.F. Iudin (also the director of the Philosophical Institute of the Academy of Sciences and the head of the organization of the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers), proclaimed the tasks of the journal in the programmatic editorial (“Nashi zadachi,” Our Goals) of the first issue in Summer 1933. Among the main goals was the “creation of a socialist and the appropriation of classical aesthetics” (sozdanie sotsialisticheskoi i osvoenie klassicheskoi estetiki), and establishing an understanding of Soviet literature as a new world literature (osmyslenie sovetskoi literatury kak novoi literatury mira). The question of how to reach these goals was directly touched upon by these very formulations: through the “appropriation of classical aesthetics.”Footnote ¹³

The debate evolved around questions such as “who is the heir to world literature,” “what should be valued as heritage,” “how to legitimate learning from or even imitating classics, when they evolved from a political context that proletarian culture and socialism claims to have overcome,” and “how to appropriate heritage.” The only premise shared by everyone except the “sociologists” and a few representatives of older avant-garde positions was the importance of appropriating the literary heritage of world literature in order to further develop literature as the most powerful instrument to effectively educate the masses, because literature should not be just for pleasure, but the most powerful means to affect, influence, and educate millions of people.Footnote ¹⁴ This premise—at least in its general idea—was completely in line with ideological statements by Lenin and Stalin.

Lenin had already addressed the problem of heritage long before the revolution, pleading for an active understanding of heritage as an act of conscious selection, and suggesting to understand “preservation” not in the “antiquarian” sense of the word (not in opposition to future-oriented innovation), but rather in harmony with it. In his essay from 1897, “Ot kakogo nasledstva my otkazyvaemsia?” (Which Heritage Do We Reject?), Lenin stated: “To preserve the heritage does not mean to content oneself with it” (Khranit΄ nasledstvo—vovse ne znachit eshche ogranichivat΄sia nasledstvom).Footnote ¹⁵ To inherit is already clearly understood as an act of taking up and of making use of past accomplishments for the present day. In the years after the revolution, when Maksim Gor΄kii was already in the process of realizing his publication project “World Literature,” which was also based on a—still inexplicit—concept of heritage, Lenin stressed the urgency of appropriating “old society” achievements in the field of knowledge and expertise (including art) for communism in a speech at the Congress of the Komsomol.Footnote ¹⁶ In the years before and after the October revolution, cultural heritage was continuously defined as an indispensable resource that can inspire and help to prevent dilettantism among the creative communist youth.Footnote ¹⁷

It was not until the beginning of the 1930s that the notion of literature as heritage became the centerpiece of a comprehensive literary-political program. In an article “Lenin and Literary Studies,” A. V. Lunacharskii made this reference explicit when he wrote: “In the foreground is the very fact of the class struggle; the new class assimilates what is useful from the inheritance of the bourgeois world in order to direct it immediately as a weapon against capitalism itself. The hygiene of everyday life, certain data and certain methods of the sciences and arts can be assimilated, and yet everyday life itself must acquire a character far removed from the Western bourgeoisie.”Footnote ¹⁸ This program was implemented by means of canonization through literary history writing as well as programs and norms for new Soviet literary writing, but also included editorial projects and research.

In this context, one of the flagship-projects was the famous archival edition series Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Literary Inheritance) founded by RAPP and the Institute of Literature and Language (ILIIA, Institut literatury i iazyka) of the “Communist Academy of Sciences” (1918–36) in 1931. The editors’ preface to the first volume also refers to the already quoted pre-revolution essay by Lenin, “Which Heritage Do We Reject?”Footnote ¹⁹ Lenin wrote:

The following paragraph quotes Lenin's “Project on a Resolution on Proletarian Culture,” which he had presented as the fourth point of this resolution at the First Congress of the Proletkul΄t. Here, Lenin refers to Marx himself as the precursor of the strategy “to appropriate all valuable inheritance of 2000 years of human thought and culture.”Footnote ²¹

Accordingly, the editorial board of Literary Inheritance formulated the goal of the series “to critically record the artistic heritage that the proletariat inherits from world literature” and thus “to take up the Bolshevist struggle for the revaluation of classical literary heritage, first and foremost the literature of the peoples of the USSR.”Footnote ²² Symptomatic for the literary politics of those years, world literature and the literature of the peoples of the USSR are mentioned in one breath because the literatures of the peoples of the USSR are understood as integral parts of world literature.Footnote ²³

It has to do with Marx and Engels's importance for this concept that the first and second volume of Literary Inheritance was dedicated to their correspondence.Footnote ²⁴ Exactly in these years—the early 1930s—Mikhail Lifshits wrote his monograph On the Question of Marx’ Views on Art, where he took up the same Lenin quote in order to underline the significance of Marx's emphasis on the importance of the classical heritage.Footnote ²⁵ He co-edited the anthology Marx and Engels on Art and Literature and, a few years later, an anthology with Lenin's statements on questions of aesthetics.Footnote ²⁶ Both anthologies ultimately served to authorize and normatively substantiate the understanding of world literature as the heritage of the proletariat and as the ultimate resource for all future creativity.

Finally, in those same years at the beginning of the 1930s, Stalin himself, referring to Lenin's concepts of heritage, resolved the seemingly contradictory claim by revealing its “dialectic”:

In accordance with this, the motto of the journal Literaturnyi kritik was “to capture one's craft,” but the question of which would be the right way to execute the appropriation was still at stake in the first half of the 1930s.Footnote ²⁸

The “Only Heir” and the “World”

In complete agreement with the opening speech of Andrei A. Zhdanov, the secretary of the “Tsentral΄nyi komitet of the VKP,” journal editor-in-chief Pavel Iudin emphasized a dialectic perspective on the role of the proletariat as the “sole heir” to all the creations of world culture and especially to those of bourgeois culture, which can be appropriated and transformed in line with the new, socialist society.Footnote ²⁹ What is new in Zhdanov and Iudin is the emphasis on “critical appropriation” that comes from Lenin and is increasingly rhetorically refined. Opening the first meeting at the All-union Writers’ Congress, Andrei A. Zhdanov declared the “critical appropriation of the literary heritage of all periods” to be precondition for the “the writer as engineer of the human soul” in Stalin's definition.Footnote ³⁰ Iudin emphatically seconded Zhdanov in his editorial in three successive paragraphs.Footnote ³¹ Various contributions to the journal echo these formulas or even carry them to the extreme, for instance V. Gerasimova, who described appropriation in terms of a “fight” against the “titans” and “conquest” in her article “For the Hegemony of the Literature of the Communist World.”Footnote ³²

As far as the notions of “literature” and “author” are concerned, there is a significant shift from earlier definitions of the proletarian as the sole heir to world culture (like Bogdanov's and Lenin's) towards Stalin, Zhdanov, and Iudin. Their argumentation implicitly distinguishes between the writer and his audience in terms of the “engineer of the soul” vs. the addressee. In their case, the appropriation of heritage—literary mastership—serves the purpose of generating the strongest possible impact on the readership. As literature has become an instrument of cultural power, the appropriation of world literary heritage serves to increase this power—of the writer over the reader.

Another shift in the definition of the appropriation of heritage is still ongoing: the question of aesthetic modernism: as heritage and as a mode of appropriating the heritage. The debate went continued but in the end the discussion resulted in the restriction to realism.

Hereditary Disease “Modernism” vs. Heritage “Realism”

After socialist realism had been declared the aesthetic norm for all literary writing, the journal's authors still continued discussing three prominent poetical directions of the past with respect to their usefulness as heritage for the present: realism, romanticism, and modernism. Under the auspice of Marx and Lenin, the notion of realism was broadened and extended to the whole range of premodern classics.Footnote ³³ Gor΄kii in his keynote lecture at the Allunion Writers Congress legitimated Soviet literature to inherit romanticism when he propagated “revolutionary romanticism” as complement to “critical realism” and as opposed to “bourgeois realism” as the most powerful instrument “to provoke a revolutionary attitude towards reality.”Footnote ³⁴ Subsequently, the classical work of historical realism and romanticism could easily be re-canonized and adopted as a resource for socialist realist recycling. At the same time, the appropriation of modernist literature went on winding paths until it was finally inhibited.

As a consequence, it was safe for Iudin to state: “Socialist realism first of all accepts as an heir the best traditions in literature of realism as well as of revolutionary romanticism. The classical inheritance of the past—this is the historical resource of Soviet literature, the material on which Soviet literature started to exist, the ground from which it can delineate itself. Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Heine, Fonvizin, Griboedov, Pushkin, Gogol΄, Chernyshevskii, Tolstoi—they constitute the school, from which in one way or another all authors of Soviet literature graduated.”Footnote ³⁵ But critics elaborating on modernist authors from the west argued or had to argue differently. It is important to underline that even though most of them finally denied the “appropriability” of modernist authors for Soviet usage, what they wrote were not simple accusations but informative critical articles.Footnote ³⁶

Rashel΄ Miller-Budnitskaia is an interesting case, because as a scholarly expert and translator of English and American modernist literature, she was a mediator of the very texts that she also criticized.Footnote ³⁷ In 1934, Miller-Budnitskaia commented directly in the journal Zvezda on the translation the chapter “Pokhorony Patrika Dignema” of James Joyce's “Ulysses” by Valentin Stenich. In Literaturnyi kritik, Miller-Budnitskaia then went on to analyze Joyce's poetics as polluted by “inherited” elements from “medieval feudal-ecclesiastical forms of consciousness”; from “biologizing” naturalism; decadence of authors such as Joris-Karl Huysmans and Octave Mirbeau, and from the bourgeois “neo-romanticism of symbolism and expressionism.”Footnote ³⁸ What Miller-Budnitskaia demonstrates in practice is what Ivan Sergievskii recommends in his article “How to Comment on the Classics”: paratextual framing as a means of critically appropriating works of the past that ideologically do not conform to the political views of the present, of disarming them and steering toward their being read without risk of getting polluted.Footnote ³⁹

While the voices of those who criticize but still discuss and those who finally discard modernist poetics grew stronger, the lively debate on the pages of Literaturnyi kritik went on. Critics remained who suggested experimental forms of contemporary modernist literature was a proper tool to critically appropriate the literary heritage of the bourgeois past.

Between Moscow and Germany: Parallel Controversy about the Right Way to Inherit

From the end of 1933, when his second Moscow exile began and his first article criticizing Expressionism had been published in Literaturnyi kritik, the voice of Georg Lukács became central to the conservative position.Footnote ⁴⁰ During his exile, which lasted from 1933 to 1945, Lukács became an integral member of Soviet institutions.Footnote ⁴¹ In the context of and just after the congress, Lukács's reflections on the genre of the novel became the focus of attention when he prepared the keyword “novel” for the “Literary Encyclopedia” and discussed it with members of the Literaturnyi kritik circle.Footnote ⁴² In clear agreement with many speakers at the First All-Union Congress, Lukács was at pains to formulate his concept of the novel genre with reference to the aesthetic, cultural, and literary-historical statements of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, which had just been published by Lifshits. Yet, Lukács's “genealogy of socialist-realist literature” is special: reaching back to ancient Greece and including as its apotheosis the new Soviet literature, it separates the ‘good’ literature of all epochs as “realist” from the politically unacceptable “decadent” one. Thus, Socialist Realism is given the task of saving and critically appropriating the great heritage of realism on the one hand, while on the other, to safeguard itself against “decay” and the influence of “bourgeois decadence” that—from Lukács’ point of view—realism had experienced in naturalism and then in modernism and expressionism (keyword “formalism”).Footnote ⁴³

Little attention has been paid so far to the fact that, already from 1933 onwards there was debate in Literaturnyi kritik and at the All-Union Congress, which could be called the Soviet parallel to the “expressionism debate.”Footnote ⁴⁴ For both debates the term “heritage” had a key function in the dispute about the right way to deal with literature of the past. In both cases, all participants understood “heritage” both as a given and as a task to actively deal with; yet, opinions differed in “how” to go about this. Lukács insisted on preserving historical realism in the process of claiming its heritage—which he then, in the later contributions of 1937—pushed even further in the direction of party-political key slogans of “sincerity” (as “partisanship”) and “popularity.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Other prominent voices to the contrary linked “mastership” with the criterion of aesthetic-literary innovation and artistic experimentation. Exactly in this experiment they recognized the demand for a critical appropriation of the heritage. At the congress itself, S. Tret΄iakov, the “father” of “literature fakta,” together with Nikolai Bukharin were advocates of this position, while in Literaturnyi kritik Il΄ia Erenburg (who was practically the only representative of this position to survive the Stalin purges) was its strongest proponent. In his contribution “Knigi meniaiut zhizn΄,”Footnote ⁴⁶ Erenburg referred also to his own work when he defended innovative documentary forms such as the “ocherk,” (interview), the stenograph, and protocol as experimental steps toward a new, contemporary mode of writing and a “new form of the novel” against the revival of the classical form of the realist novel, which he criticizes as “epigonal” and “a cult of reactionary aesthetic form.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Looking at these opposing positions, an interesting parallel—indeed a parallel and not the result of reception—can be found in the debate between Lukács and Ernst Bloch, which took place during the following years in Germany (and Switzerland). Whereas Lukács condemned naturalism and dismissed Expressionism as “petty-bourgeois,”Footnote ⁴⁸ Ernst Bloch, in the preface to his programmatic book Die Erbschaft dieser Zeit (The Inheritance of our Time, 1935), like Erenburg, criticized the conservative appropriation of realism as demanded by Lukács and others for being epigonal.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1937, in his debate with Lukács, Bloch explicitly addresses the “problem of cultural inheritance.” Asking why it has “become a fresh problem, a thoroughly bold one?,” Bloch went in the direction Erenburg had actually chosen in 1934, but which had become impossible in the Soviet Union of 1937. Not “the epigone [who] finds in the past only a ‘wealth of forms,’ the Nazi though only the kitsch that he is himself,” Bloch states, “but the Expressionists dug out fresh water and fire, wells and wild light, at least the will towards light. Not through this alone, but in the wake of this renewal the view of the artistic past has also been refreshed, it shines in new, and thus currently burst-open, contemporaneous depth.”Footnote ⁵⁰

In a very similar way, Erenburg had reported on the polemic between the British novelist E. M. Forster and the French author Jean Cassou on the importance of literary and artistic heritage in his “Letters from the International Writers’ Congress,” “Pour la défense de la culture,” in Paris in June 1935.Footnote ⁵¹ Juxtaposing Forster, who made a strong case for the importance of “preservation,” and Cassou, who was in favor of a creative, revitalizing, and inventive approach to heritage, Erenburg, in his fifth and last letter, emphatically and without any further comments quotes the speech of André Malraux, who was his close friend at the time, at the same congress. Using a bold rhetoric of fight and conquest, Malraux uncompromisingly promulgated innovation instead of worshipping the classics and thus interprets the formula of “critical appropriation” in his own way:

Looking at his later projects we can see what André Malraux owed to the Soviet discussion on literature and art as heritage. From the discussions in 1934–35, Malraux developed the idea of the “Musée imaginaire,” which he presented to Gor΄kii at Yalta in 1936 and later elaborated as a minister in Gaullist France after World War II.Footnote ⁵³

In the context of 1934, it is interesting to note how close to the diction of the abovementioned Soviet critic Gerasimova Malraux comes in his rhetoric of conquest. Yet in its essence, it could not be more different, for Malraux’ speech is about the power of art (including literature) and not about the political domination of Soviet literature over the world.

Finally, Bloch's critique of Lukács makes the latter appear merely as a propagator of epigonism. Bloch asks: “what if Lukács's reality—a coherent, infinitely mediated totality—is not so objective after all? What if his conception of reality has failed to liberate itself completely from classical systems? What if authentic reality is discontinuity?” And he argues:

After the purges that eliminated the majority of its authors and subsequently also its original variety of directions, from the perspective of a harmonious continuity on a transregional scale, in the words of Mikhail Lifshits, socialist realism appears as a “world culture.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In this way, and by seamlessly fitting the epic as folklore into this heritage, Lukács and Lifshits complement Iudin's position and spell out Gor΄kii's and, even more so, Zhdanov's theses at the All-Union Congress in a one-sided way and in line with Stalin's conservative literary policy.Footnote ⁵⁶

Literaturnyi kritik as a Platform for Modelling Soviet Minor Literatures as National and as Part of One Soviet Multinational Literature

Soviet national literatures were the third important topic of the journal. Between 1933 and 1936 alone, Literaturnyi kritik published contributions about Ukrainian, Belarusian, Yiddish, Armenian, Georgian, Azerbaijani, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Turkmen, Tadjik, Uzbek, Dagestani, Chuvash, and Baltic literatures. The reason why this point of focus has hardly been looked at so far maybe that the journal did not dedicate an extra rubric to national literatures. It has to be asked whether this is a symptom of a lack of reflection or tacit agreement that all literatures should be viewed equally as part of overall historical development. In the journal's contents-structure, articles on non-Russian literatures were sometimes featured in the first division, “Theory and History of Literature,” but mostly in “Review and Bibliography.” A random glance at the contents of number 1/1936, first rubric “Theory and History” clearly indicates that, first, for this topic there was no special concept and, second, world literature and soviet national literatures were not separated but dealt with together in one rubric:

Articles on non-Russian Soviet literatures appeared continuously in consecutive numbers of the journal and represented a steady element of the journals’ content. The very titles show a historical differentiation between a focus either on current Soviet developments in national literatures or on national literatures in general, or, starting from 1935, on epic and folklore. Another series of articles is dedicated exclusively to single authors who were of central importance to their respective national canons (Mikheil Dzhavakhishvili, Galaktion Tabidze, Lahuti, or Ianka Kupala).

It is obvious that all articles follow the programmatic declarations of the Congress in some way in practice and elaborate on what can be called Soviet style literary nation-building. Even though the fact that the articles on national literature are written by authors with different ethnic origins may indicate that ethnic origin was not a criterion, the fact that in each single case there is at least one article written by a “native” authorFootnote ⁵⁷ may be interpreted as an indicator of what has been understood as an anti-imperial strategy of nation-building and at the same time as the concept of author as representative of the nation, in the sense of incarnation and figure of identification: a principle that corresponds to an article on the “colonial history of Russian literature” that deals with orientalist projections in Russian literature on the Caucasus.Footnote ⁵⁸ The main objective of the articles on non-Russian literatures is to establish a national canon: in other words, to define and critically appropriate a national literary heritage. The dedication, from 1935 onwards, of an extra rubric to epics and folklore can be interpreted as an attempt to adopt Gor΄kii's claim to delimitate the modern concept of literature and—based on his notion of the myth as a main source of cultural identity—to incorporate the epic and folklore as substantial parts of the national literary heritage. But what does this “appropriation” actually look like?

To give an example, Evgenii V. Dunaevskii (1898–1941), the most important translator of Persian poetry at the time, portraits the Persian poet Abolqasem Lāhūtī as a founding father of modern Tadzhik literature.Footnote ⁵⁹ Dunaevskii emphasizes Lāhūtī's merits in conveying the heritage of ancient Oriental poetry's mastership to young Soviet poets while consequently avoiding any kind of ingratiating mimicry, neither in the direction of ancient oriental poetry nor modern European poetry. From today's perspective, the Soviet-style decolonizing attitude of Dunaevskii's strategy seems obvious: it was his task to underline that Lāhūtī's appropriation is a revivification that neither follows the footprints of European orientalism nor recklessly modernizes or Europeanizes old Persian traditions, but rather invents a new soviet Tadjik poetry out of them (as a resource, one might add).Footnote ⁶⁰

In Petr Skosyrev's article “The Oral Literature of Turkmenistan,” the author pursues his own strategy of literary nation-building trough “appropriating national heritage.”Footnote ⁶¹ By interpreting the role of Turkmen poet-singers, “bakhshi,” as keepers and mediators of the legacy of Turkmen poetry (especially the work of the eighteenth-century poet Machtum-Kuli) over a long period of illiteracy in large swaths of the population, Skosyrev constructs an intermediary narrative of national continuity from the perspective of which Soviet Turkmen literature can be seen as a new reincarnation of a long national tradition: “It is the “bakhshi” who are the guardians of the treasure of classical literature. The “bakhshi” is singer and a musician, and often also a poet.”Footnote ⁶²

From his point of view, folklore functions as a mode of handing down literary heritage and securing a feeling of national-cultural belonging.Footnote ⁶⁴ Skosyrev at no point even raises the question of the socialist significance of this literature, nor does he historically classify this literature in a Marxist sense, but simply treats the oral tradition as the heritage of a Turkmen classical period worth preserving.Footnote ⁶⁵

As has been said, many contributions on national literatures are written by “native” authors or literary specialists. Let me elaborate on two prominent contributions: Iakov Bronshtein on Belarusian literature, and Egishe Charents on Armenian literature.Footnote ⁶⁶ The example of Bronshtein will throw light also on the ongoing negotiations of Jewish/Yiddish literature as a Soviet national literature.Footnote ⁶⁷

The Belarusian-Jewish literary scholar Iakov Bronshtein (1897–1937), who was an alumnus of the Communist Academy and a researcher at the Institute for World Literature (IMLI) since its foundation in 1932, wrote most of his research on Soviet-Jewish contemporary literature in Yiddish, which since the 1920s had been serving as the means of building a Soviet Jewish culture. But the fact that Yiddish was also one of the accepted languages of Ukrainian literature and also an official language of the Belarusian Soviet Republic at the time is a symptom of the somewhat special status of Yiddish as a Soviet national language in comparison to the other national languages.Footnote ⁶⁸ Only territorial affiliation was accepted as the basis for national literatures, thus Yiddish literature was problematic because Jews lived in more than one republic. When Ivan Kulik (Jewish-Ukrainiian Soviet poet and, from 1934, first chairman of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union) and Bronshtein spoke at the All-Union Writers’ Congress as representatives of Ukrainian and Belarusian literatures, respectively, they referred to Jewish authors writing in Yiddish in the first place as representatives of Ukrainian or Belarusian literatures.

From 1932 until his imprisonment and death in 1937, Bronshtein was secretary of the Belarusian Writers’ Union.Footnote ⁶⁹ At the All-Union Writers’ Congress, his speech in the 9th section was the second from Belarus after the poet Michaś Klimkovich, who spoke in the third section. Both of them dealt with Belarusian and Yiddish literature alike as essential literatures of Belarus. But only Bronshtein published two articles in parallel on Belarusian literature in Literaturnyi kritik and after two years another one only on Janka Kupala.Footnote ⁷⁰ The fact that despite Bronsthein's focus in his articles and in his speech, the journal completely ignored Jewish/Yiddish literature may serve as a hint as to the journal's role as a laboratory of the concept of Soviet national literatures. In both his speech and articles, Bronshtein argues against what he calls national-democratic developments in literature for being “bourgeois,” “formalistic,” “aestheticized,” “romanticist” and “nationalist.” He applies the term “inheritance” to them in order to underline their uncritical borrowing from bourgeois literary traditions.Footnote ⁷¹ Despite this obedient criticism of bourgeois modernism, however, Bronshtein defends and helps secure the canonical position of the most important representatives of modernism by describing their development as a procedure of transformation and productive turns (povorot), a process of “critical self-appropriation.” Bronshtein defends two of the most important Belarusian modernist writers, Ianka Kupala and Iakub Kolas, who before had been severely criticized for their bourgeois symbolism, and the Jewish/Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson alike.

It is striking how Bronshtein in his speech at the Writers’ Congress dissolves the narrowly-defined national paradigm first through regionalization and then through a more trans- than multinational notion of Soviet literature. Bronshtein presents current tendencies in Belarusian and Yiddish literature as parallel developments represented by their own respective authors whose works feature regional characteristics, yet at the same time equally contribute to the Sovietization of those literatures and literature in general.Footnote ⁷² Bronshtein, whom Gennadii Estraikh has called “a striking example of self-purification in Yiddish literature,” distinguishes Jakub Kolas, Ianka Kupala, and Dovid Bergelson as real examples of self-criticism and of conscious artistic-formal changes that followed changes in political belief.Footnote ⁷³ For example, when he praises Kupala and Kolas for their respective strategies of critical appropriation of the inherited national imagery: resemantization and “translation” of nationalist/romanticist images into socialist ones.Footnote ⁷⁴ Bronshtein refers to Dovid Bergelson in the same way, who according to Bronshtein pursues a comparable strategy of critical self-appropriation and self-transformation.Footnote ⁷⁵

With sophistication, Bronshtein interprets parodic elements in Jewish Belarusian literature as a weapon in the fight against bourgeois nationalism. “In close relation to this we can see a genre phenomenon in Belarusian and Jewish literature. In the novel of Belarusian prose writer Biaduli—Iazep Krushinskii—and in the poem of the Jewish poet I. Kharik—All the Weeks Round—one may notice the sharp lancet of literary parody attacking bourgeois nationalism.”Footnote ⁷⁶

While he points out the political and literary relevance of Soviet-Yiddish folklore, which according to Bronshtein had hitherto remained largely unnoticed, he criticizes the “Moscow” authors for “misjudging the folklore of the peoples of the USSR as something exotic, ossified and a non-class phenomenon” and thus exoticizing, among others, “the expressive poetic figure of the renowned Jewish poet Markish, some of whose works come very close to the pathetic lyrics of Maiakovskii.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Resonating with Gor΄kii's keynote lecture on “Soviet literature,” Bronshtein deals with Soviet Yiddish literature as a Soviet national literature from the periphery. Sophisticatedly arguing and underlining the equivalence and, in fact, propinquity between great authors of the center (like Maiakovskii) and great representatives of small literatures (like Perets Markish), he fights hegemonial exoticization and defends the acknowledgment of new Soviet folklore as a valuable poetic strategy.

Interestingly, there is not a single word on Jewish/Yiddish literature in the series of three articles on Belarusian literature Bronshtein published in 1934 and 1936 in Literaturnyi kritik. In the two articles that came out in the context of the Writers’ Congress, Bronshtein praises the upswing of Belarusian literature in Soviet times as a “remarkable example of a national renaissance”Footnote ⁷⁸, going into detail and giving a whole range of examples besides Kupala and Kolas (like Мikhas Zareckii, Zmitrok Biaduli, Kondrat Krapiva, Kuz΄ma Chornyi, and Platon Golovach), Bronshtein repeats and develops the same thesis and, finally, comes to the conclusion that in the works of all of them one can see the formation of a socialist realism front against “impressionist romanticism that mostly owes in style to national-democratic inheritance.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Keywords of Bronshtein's second and even more militant article in Literaturnyi kritik are Literaturnyi front and perestroika (restructuring). There he juxtaposes less successful examples of self-critical transformation—like, in his words, Jan Skryhan—and ideal examples like Kolas. As adequate “weapons” to fight “natsdemovskii romanticism” and achieve literary “truthfulness,” Bronshtein mentions parody and pamphlet besides the direttissima of socialist realism.Footnote ⁸⁰

But not a single word on Jewish/Yiddish Soviet literature from Bronshtein's side in Literaturnyi kritik. Instead, there are two articles on Yiddish Soviet literature by two other authors: a critical review by Aleksandr Leites on the just-published Russian edition of Perets Markish's collection of poems Thresholds (orig. Shveln, first published in 1919)Footnote ⁸¹ and a portrait of Dovid Bergelson by Isaak Nusinov.Footnote ⁸² Nusinov, who held the chair in “Jewish literature” at Moscow Pedagogical University and gave lectures at the “Academy of the Red Professorship,” characterizes Bergelson on eighteen pages as an author who, while continuing to focus on the social situation on the eve of the revolutions, managed to transform from a Hamsun-like bourgeois pessimist and impressionist into a future-bound socialist realist who in his trilogy Baym Dnieper (1932) almost matches the standard of Gor΄kii's “Artamonovs.”Footnote ⁸³ Elaborating on Bergelson, Nusinov takes the opportunity to resonate on Jewish Soviet literature. When Bergelson, Nusinov writes, realized that the Soviet Union is the only place in the world where Jewish culture has a chance to develop as a national culture, he returned from abroadFootnote ⁸⁴ and became a Soviet writer.Footnote ⁸⁵ Here again the journal Literaturnyi kritik turns out to be the arena where the concept of Soviet national literatures is modelled and negotiated in the course of the 1930s. It becomes clear that the direction of the ideological development was towards—or, if you wish, back to—the one language, (one nation) one territory concept that in case of Jewish culture/literature had become manifest in the “Autonomous Region” of Birobidzhan.

In comparison let me take a look at yet another Soviet national literature: Armenian. The great Armenian modernist poet Egishe Charents (1897–1937) follows in his congress speech,Footnote ⁸⁶ which in his case has been printed more or less identically in Literaturnyi kritik, a line similar to Bronshtein's, but argues differently.Footnote ⁸⁷ Charents's speech features the same two points of focus: the national literatures and the general (Soviet) aesthetic direction, adding different accents, however. Just like Bronshtein in his Congress speech, Charents opposes the exoticization and marginalization of national literatures, but unlike him, Charents's objective is a more general acknowledgement of all the national literatures of the Soviet Union. He argues for an awareness of even the smallest national literatures, because their individual significance lies in their unique characteristics. In this respect, Charents's view seems much closer to present-day UNESCO's concept of culture—which, actually in its turn goes back to Malraux's ideas—than to the Soviet concept of national literature of the 1930s. According to Charents, each national literature is interesting and worth preserving precisely because of its uniqueness:

The Soviet state support for all of these literatures for the first time ever made it possible for their authors to get to know each other. Charents thus argues against the centralist and paternalist view that could also be heard at the Congress and that later was to become the blueprint for the Soviet Union's dominant stance on literature. He is rather in favor of a decentralized, multilateral dialogue between national literatures, in which the heritage of each single national literature is to be honored and critically appropriated.Footnote ⁸⁹

Charents’ thoughts on the aesthetic norm are different and fundamental as well. As a result, he is closer to some of the representatives of the center, in particular to Nikolai Bukharin and Erenburg, both of whom he mentions several times, albeit in a critical manner. In his contribution to Literaturnyi kritik, oxymoronically titled “For a Complicated Simplicity,” he supports the idea of preserving or revitalizing aesthetic-poetic “mastership” in the new Soviet literature. Against the backdrop of history, this new literature should be modelled neither after old bourgeois realism, nor after the aestheticized complexity of modernism as illustrated by authors such as Boris Pasternak. It should in fact rather create a new “synthetic art,” characterized by a “complicated simplicity” that could be at the same time aesthetically sophisticated and accessible to the masses.Footnote ⁹⁰

With the criterion of accessibility, Charents seeks to substantiate and justify his plea for the “critical appropriation” of a heritage passed down by either aesthetically or politically “wrong” authors. The oxymoronic title of his contribution captures this thesis.

More than any other publication of the mid-1930s, the contributions to Literaturnyi kritik illustrate the most important focal points in the debate about the normative understanding of literature during those years—aesthetics, style, imitation, innovation, the social function of literature, world literature, multinational Soviet literature—as well as its complexity and still open dynamics. As has been demonstrated, the notion of heritage was a kind of common denominator of all positions of literary critique and served as a key instrument to define and legitimize the strategies of literary politics: as an instrument to legitimize the acknowledgement, revaluation, and cultivation of pre-Soviet literatures; as an instrument to legitimize the Soviet claim on world literature; as the claim on the prerogative to keep, preserve, analyze, translate and interpret it; as an instrument to distinguish between valuable works and works that should be excluded from the canon; as a means to strengthen the role of literature; as a—or rather the main—instrument to educate the readership and to “forge the soul”; and, last but not least, as the main instrument of literary nation-building.

In the period that this article focuses on—the volumes from 1933 to 1936—the discussion in the journal was closely related to the debate at the First All-Union Soviet Writers’ Congress.Footnote ⁹¹ The group of contributing critics was still very diverse, including voprekisty and blagodaristy, but also representatives of avant-garde positions like Sergei Tret΄iakov. I hope it has become clear that, when it comes to heritage in these years, it was not only about (socialist) realism and not only in the context of aesthetic conservative neo-classicism in contrast to avant-garde, but that in fact heritage served as a concept of overall importance for all different positions.

Even though the question of “Whose heritage?” seems to be answered unanimously as well, the analysis shows that the slogan of “the proletariat as the only legitimate heir to world literature” is sometimes but a phrase, because heritage is meant as a means to exercise power over the readership and over all future production of literature.

Regarding the question “What heritage?” positions also partly correspond, partly diverge. With respect to the necessity to include epic and folklore into the respective national canon all considered positions agree, although they pursue different strategies to carry out this project. But when it comes to modernism there is crucial dissent between those who accept modernist aesthetics either as a way to adequately adopt the heritage of previous times or as a heritage of bourgeois literature on its own and those who want to renounce and exclude it from the canon.

As has become clear from the articles on national literatures, it was an increasingly difficult task to argumentatively circumnavigate the cliffs of the “bourgeois nationalism” accusation; one has to keep in mind that, just a few years later, most of the representatives of national literatures and of somehow individual positions fell victim to Stalin's purges. Still, they all attempted to revalue and include the most important works into a national canon that in some cases had already started to take shape in the years and decades before the revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union, but from now on was supposed to become—and in fact mostly became—the centerpiece of the cultural identity of the new Soviet nation. At a time when the concept of multinational Soviet literature had just begun to emerge alongside (and as part of) the Soviet concept of world literature, and when there was not yet a journal specifically devoted to these (multi)national subjects—Druzhba narodov was initially founded as an almanac in Literaturnyi kritik's last year of publication 1939—the journal Literaturnyi kritik functioned as a platform for the critical and theoretical negotiation of the concept of national literatures as Soviet units and as an integral part of multinational Soviet literature; in other words: for the discussion and implementation of Stalin's dictum “national in form and socialist in content.”