The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The Stalin years 201

cultural diversity (within, of course, a framework of ideological uniformity). In practice this meant that folk songs, legends, colorful costumes and superstitions, local peasant and tribal rituals were allowed their own expression, even their own national language, and could coexist alongside the more “consciously” proletarian plots of hydroelectric dams, cement factories, and metros.But likehistorical factsinsideapatriotichistoryplayduring theRoman-tic era, “authenticity” here was ornamental, sentimental, pre-packaged, and essentially powerless.

The third principle in this quartet, class-mindedness, became less important after 1936, when the new Soviet Constitution declared that the USSR had become a classless society and thus all class antagonism was officially ended. Such conflictlessness made it difficult for fiction writers to find, from within the domestic population, villains, rogues, or any negative principles out of which to construct plots. A new genre appeared: the “optimistic tragedy.” This manic optimism affected writers personally as well as creatively. Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895–1958), perhaps the greatest prose satirist of the 1920s and like so many comics and clowns a clinical depressive, wondered why, if reality could be manipulated and human bodies and natures reforged through attitude alone, he was such a failure at it. In the 1930s, Zoshchenko began writing deeply auto-therapeutic texts, such as Youth Restored (1933), in which he attempted to “engineer” his own physical and psychic health.9 In 1943, in a strange work of “literary research” titled Before Sunrise, this troubled writer attempted to reason himself out of his phobias using a combination of Pavlovian reflexology and Sigmund Freud. Although the choice of Zoshchenko as one scapegoat for the post-war crackdown on writers in 1946 certainly exemplified proizvol, the punishment was probably not without justification in Zoshchenko’s own guilt-ridden mind.

Socialist realism, like every other party line in Stalinist Russia, was never a fixed formula, and certainly not in the 1930s. En route to cleansing Russia of her superfluous heroes and depraved plots, quite a bit of humor and self-criticism remained. Language satire was one vital site for it. Much as eighteenth-century playwrights, including the Empress Catherine II herself, had satirized awkward and ill-learned Frenchifying among the upwardly mobile rural gentry, so the garbled Soviet-speak of the new, barely literate peasants-turned-officials, full of acronyms and poorly digested Bolshevik slogans, was ridiculed by masters of oral narrative or skaz (Mikhail Zoshchenko was one such master; Isaak Babel another). Several years before his suicide in 1930, the poet-playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky had parodied this jargon through the brilliant jingles and slick commercial street talk that formed the aural backdrop to his futuristic farce, The Bedbug. Dysfunctional or substandard speech – a product of the imperfect,