Life and the Novel in the USSR

...in another to complacent vegetation...

...It also gives shelter, makes comfort...

...When restrictions on travel to the USSR were eased, scores of firsthand reports confirmed the remarkable accuracy of the descriptions of Soviet life thus provided by the late Vera Alexandrova and others...

...In the wake of World War II, an informal agreement was struck between Stalin's regime and the new Soviet middle classes (Dunham calls it the "Big Deal") whereby the State tacitly approved of meshchanstvo's economic aspirations and also of its cherished concept of kulturnost...

...Dunham's Russia differs substantially from the official image fostered at the time (a happy country healing its War wounds under Stalin's wise leadership) and from the one that began to emerge after the dictator's death (a terrorized country ruled by a bloodthirsty tyrant...

...Kultura is the achievement of the intelligentsia in the sense of higher culture, a synthesis of ideas, knowledge and memories...

...She is concerned with the daily values men really live by, not political creeds...

...The regime, especially after the chaos of war, cared a lot about the manageable, prediotable and 'proper' manners of its citizens...

...As for meshchanstvo, a Russian term roughly akin to philistinism: "It represents today, as it did before, a middle-class mentality that is vulgar, imitative, greedy, and ridden with prejudice...

...He can, for instance, voice widespread views that are taboo by identifying them with his novel's villains or camouflaging them in allusions...

...To paraphrase a formula of Socialist Realism, postwar Soviet life and art was to be kulturny in form and Stalinist in content, with both exuding an aggressive militancy...

...During the last decade of Stalin's rule the USSR upheld the most Viotorian family structure of any European country, and had the dubious distinction of being the only one where wayward husbands were disciplined by the ruling political party...

...In the Soviet Union, scholarship dealing with the literary output of the period has been suppressed largely to obscure the disgracefully obsequious role many living authors played in the orgy of adulation for the Party leader...

...It cannot be satisfied...

...According to the author, "The regime's shift in the public realm from the revolution to Stalinism determines the curious relationship of two additional words, eminently translatable, kultura and kulturnost...

...In Stalin's day, old-fashioned families—however stodgy, addicted to conventions, or downright vulgar —offered the only available refuge from the otherwise omnipresent politicized State...

...A good deal of information can also be transmitted by carefully choosing realia and physical surroundings, ages and occupations of protagonists, and so forth...

...In the aftermath of the War it "was anxious to move its citizens in the direction of rebuilding the family...

...If it were to stop worrying, it would stop existing...

...Drawing on a substantial body of Stalin Prize-winning writing that was extolled in the early '50s as Progressive Mankind's great literature (only to be denounced, renounced, burned, or recycled within a few short years), Dunham reconstructs some of the cultural aspirations of the Stalinist bourgeoisie...

...rather, they are the intelligentsia?in the pre-Soviet sense of the word —and its traditional opponent, meshchanstvo...

...To begin with (and this, it should be noted, was by no means taken for granted in their day), the potboilers are proof of how much degradation a nation's authors can endure...

...There is no denying that, judged strictly on artistic grounds, the bulk of Stalinist literature deserves no better fate...

...Feminine meshchanstvo makes beds—soft ones—and seduces, gossips, quarrels, hovers over children, craves sweets...

...Significantly, meshchanstvo can be satisfied...

...And this is true even if—as was the case at the time—the acquisition of such bourgeois comforts as teacups and lampshades requires considerable financial sacrifices, resourcefulness and sheer physical stamina...

...Intellectually and spiritually, however, it dedicated itself to the humanist proposition that salvation was corporate, that tryanny was evil, that freedom was meaningless unless it was universal...

...The view is not surprising, although admittedly the overall quality of post-Stalin Soviet prose, drama and verse is not strikingly superior to that of the preceding era...

...It is true that the more, at times, it has fretted, the less capable it was of social action...

...Vera S. Dunham's In Stalin's Time is a valuable study of Soviet literature as well as one of the very few successful attempts to explain the nonpolitical aspects of the Soviet ethos and way of life...

...To keep herself and readers awake, she frequently interrupts the narrative with flashes of irony and sarcasm...

...And she points out that since many of the books were about the country's ruling bureaucracy, they offered the masses a glimpse of life at the top: "To the populace even a run-of-the-mill district Party secretary seemed a potentate...

...It bargains hard...

...Following much the same pattern, Vera S. Dunham now gives us the most penetrating sociological analysis of Soviet fiction since the late Ernest J. Simmons' collection of essays appeared over 20 years ago...

...In addition, the stringently regimented writing offers a wealth of data on the values the authorities sought to promote and, allowing for willful distortion, some evidence on the actual functioning of the society it described...

...It prods husbands to get on...

...Reviewed by Maurice Friedberg Professor of Russian Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Westerners generally think of Soviet literature as a body of writing that existed in the 1920s and reappeared after Stalin's death: The intervening quarter of a century they consider a total wasteland...

...But the important point here is that these dead books have been brought to life by a shrewd scholar...

...Her book fully bears out its opening epigraph: "Soviet novels explain both Soviet life and Soviet novels...

...In one poem a bridegroom brings his beloved two brooches (better than one...

...It stubbornly dreamed of an ideal society...

...For like that observation by Alexander Gerschenkron (and a similar one made a century earlier by Fried-rich Engels with reference to Balzac), it points up the special illumination afforded by realistic and quasirealistic fiction in examining a society—something all too often forgotten nowadays by the Structuralists, the New Critics, the Freudians, and the Jungians...

...Fervor for possessions is a key trait...

...Having nothing to do with a spiritual legacy, it is instead a mere program for proper conduct in public...

...kept the mass reader spellbound...

...The two antagonistic forces she focuses on, therefore, are not Stalin's Communism and whatever may have been opposed to it...

...The hundreds of novels, plays, poems, and short stories examined are treated as mere case studies, evidence to support a fascinating survey of "middle-class values" favored by Stalin—and, one may add, his successors as well...

...dissatisfaction is its condition...

...Veteran readers of The New Leader will recall the many analyses of Soviet fiction published here in the late '40s and early '50s...

...and a character in a play dreams of a large apartment with pianos in every room...

...These "are used not so much as class or social group designations, but as cultural terms and as modal personalities...

...This characteristic, plus the fact that it "does not fret except about private matters," made meshchanstvo attractive to the Soviet regime as a safe ally whose appetites were comfortably predictable, politically safe and relatively easy to appease...

...Yet according to statistical data now available, the blatant ten-dentiousness of the Stalinist potboilers, with their complete disregard for psychological truth, made them suspect...

...In one aspect it refers to the social climbing and careerism of the newly rich...

...Given a choice between gossip and political harangues (and they were unavoidable in public places), gossip begins to look irresistibly attractive...

...The other, kulturnost, is its alternative: a derivative, second-hand notion...

...Nevertheless, it is certainly worthy of careful study...

...The final quoted sentence, appearing in context only as a casual aside, contains an important clue to the popularity of meshchanstvo values...

...And, in this portentous matter, no better ally could be found than the young woman craving marriage, polka-dotted cups, orange lampshades, and the status of the first lady of the district...

...That this should have been the case is argued by the past popularity among the lower classes of dime novels depicting life among the aristocracy...

...Conforming with prescribed preferences, it blends with the aspirations of meshchanstvo...

...Kulturnost represents, both at home and abroad, a refurbished, victorious, conservative force in Soviet postwar life, embodying a slick decorum and a new kind of self-righteousness—stable, prudent, heavy...

...Works produced during the Stalin era, especially the peak years 1946-53, have virtually been forgotten in both the USSR and the West—for very different reasons...

...She observes that "the novel substituted for the reader's sense of participation in the social process...

...The same motivation would seem to account for Dunham's finding that the literature of the Stalin era, dull as it now appears, enjoyed considerable popularity...

...Similarly, polka-dotted teacups and orange lampshades in one's private apartment appear alluring when everywhere else—at the factory, in school, at the office—the only color is provided by hundreds of portraits of Comrade Stalin...

...She points, for example, to the reflection in Stalinist literature of an absurd hunger for goods and possessions...

...The description of such a VIP's daily travails and especially of his loves and family pleasures and vicissitudes with details of top-drawer kulturnost...

...Indeed, under Soviet conditions the indirect information gleaned from fiction is often more reliable than that provided by more easily controlled formal studies in the social sciences...

...It is from such data that Dunham, Professor of Slavic Languages at Queens College of the City University of New York, reconstructs an engrossing picture of Russia at the end of the Stalin era...

...The activity was encouraged by the Soviet government...

...We learn that "husband-hunting as part of social climbing, and sights set high, is a solid part of postwar meshchanstvo," and are treated to scores of simultaneously depressing and amusing descriptions of the sport in Stalinist belles-lettres of the late '40s and early '50s...

...As Dunham goes on to explain: "Effectively or not, the intelligentsia, in its old form and its new reincarnation, has always been mainly preoccupied with fretting over social wrong...

...Indeed, there are now many indications that as ideological controls are tightened and scores of the USSR's more original writers emigrate, Soviet literature may be reverting to its Stalinist model...

...Recognizing the less than modest artistic value of the vast majority of books then issued in the Soviet Union, she hardly dignifies any of them by mentioning their authors and titles in the text—the curious reader must hunt for these in footnotes...

...In the West, the material is largely ignored because of its scant esthetic appeal...

...The author of a literary work can utilize a number of subterfuges...

...Interestingly, Dunham finds women to be the chief carriers of philistine values: "Familial and feminine meshchanstvo schemes, knits, goes to market, and drinks a great deal of tea...