Russian literature. A short introduction

to Peter I (hardly the most merciful of rulers). It is equally illuminating to compare the Socialist Realist novel with Third Reich fiction, with the Catholic novel of mid-twentieth-century France, Italy, and Ireland, or indeed with formulaic genres such as the ‘Harlequin romance’ and the detective novel in Britain and America.

A second position is to ignore Soviet art’s relationship with political power. If Dostoevsky may be stripped of the Pan-Slavic messianism and anti-Semitism that are painfully obvious in Diary of a Writer (1876–81) (and incidentally evident in the novels) and understood as a prophet of universal human freedom, it might be equally legitimate to see the 1920s Mayakovsky as a prophet of liberty in spite of himself. During the final scene in The Bed-Bug (1928), the worker Prisypkin, who throughout the play has been relentlessly guyed as a manifestation of the worst kind of petit-bourgeois materialism, suddenly becomes a tragic figure, writhing in a cage to expostulate against the sterile smugness of the Utopian future, and by extension, the stupidity of any community that believes that bringing the future into existence would represent progress.

Alternatively, ethical judgement may be suspended altogether: Soviet literature may be studied in and for itself, and discussed from an ‘anthropological’ perspective. This means replacing the question of whether the composition of five-year plan novels or odes to Stalin was morally and aesthetically justifiable by the question of what it meant to write them and how they were understood by contemporary readers. Katerina Clark’s pioneering study of Socialist Realism, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, first published in 1981, showed that the homiletic and formulaic novels produced by Socialist Realism were in fact the expressions of powerful myths of self-transformation and loyalty which helped to hold the edgy and unstable new nation of the Soviet Union together. These novels’ sketchy characterization and scant consideration for psychological plausibility, and their emphasis on progress via the overcoming of external obstacles, allied them with