Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence

by Ann Komaromi, Gary Saul Morson (Editor)

Overview

2016 AATSEEL Prize for Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies

Vasilii Aksenov, Andrei Bitov, and Venedikt Erofeev were among the most acclaimed authors of samizdat, the literature that was self-published in the former Soviet Union in order to evade censorship and prosecution. In Uncensored, Ann Komaromi uses their work to argue for a far more sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon of samizdat, showing how the material circumstances of its creation and dissemi­nation exercised a profound influence on the very idea of dissidence, reconfiguring the relationship between author and reader.

Using archival research to fully illustrate samizdat’s social and historical context, Komaromi arrives at a more nuanced theo­retical position that breaks down the opposition between the autonomous work of art and direct political engagement. The similarities between samizdat and digital culture have particular relevance for contemporary discourses of dissident subjectivity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810131866
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	06/30/2015
Series:	Studies in Russian Literature and Theory
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

ANN KOMAROMI is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Toronto.

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Uncensored

Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence

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By Ann Komaromi

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2015 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3186-6

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CHAPTER 1

Literature and the Field of Dissidence

IN HIS HIGHLY READABLE memoirs, dissident Andrei Amalrik described the room he and his wife Gusel shared in a communal apartment in Moscow in the late 1960s. Amalrik had inherited a huge piano from his aunt, which amounted to a sort of white elephant for the impecunious pair. Neither he nor Gusel could play the massive instrument, which dominated the room and often confounded visitors. Amalrik wrote:

Some people — especially foreigners — used to laugh at us, because while we didn't even have a table to eat at, half the room was occupied by a useless grand piano. But its very uselessness and beauty, together with the paintings, the old books, the grandfather clock, and the withered, spidery plants on the sideboard, made our room look like something out of a fairy tale.

The useless grand piano represents in a delightfully literal way the commitment to autonomous culture that constituted a core belief for those involved in unofficial culture and social dissidence in the late Soviet period. Amalrik socialized with Western visitors, and they might indeed have been confused. The value of such an object depended on the specific context of an official Soviet culture that instrumentalized literature and art as the means of educating its Soviet citizens: it forced culture to have a use. Authorities implemented control of culture by the State through the doctrine of Socialist Realism, by establishing a Soviet canon of realist works that emphasized the tradition's progressive teleology toward a proper revolutionary consciousness, and with the help of a network of institutions that administered the proper interpretation of existing literature and art, and ordered and censored new works.

Reading against the grain of official interpretations of canonical works, Amalrik described a dissident impulse to reassert subjectivity coming from Russian literature of the nineteenth century. Famous literary works, including those by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, comprised a literature "passionate in its defense of the individual against the system," as Amalrik put it. His dissident turn meant mobilizing this defense against the current system, in which the sense of an individual "I" had been lost. Comparing the dissident idea of selfhood to that of opposition in a previous era, he said:

One of the dominant ideas of the prerevolutionary opposition was the readiness to sacrifice one's "I" for the sake of the general public; and in that way everything was lost. But how to replace that senseless sacrifice, not with the idea of narrow selfishness, but with the value of one's "I" in the universal sense ... to live not for oneself alone and not just for others but with all and for all — that was the search that underlay our Movement, and it created real bonds among human beings.

For the democratic dissidents with whom Amalrik identified, but also among the nonconformist artists he knew and the budding original uncensored writers of whom he himself was one, uncensored activity meant reestablishing the "I" in the context of a different social compact, one that would be more humane and authentic than the corrupt official Soviet order. Literature served as a key point of reference and guarantor of these more humane and authentic values.

Official culture in the Soviet Union allowed for no distinction between cultural activity and established ideology, and therefore there could be no dissenting opinions outside of the official line. Dissidents had to establish their autonomy against the insistently propagated vision of perfect public unity. In 1977, for example, the head of the KGB, Iurii Andropov, proclaimed, "We rightly consider out greatest victory to be the ideological-political unity of Soviet society. There never was in history a social system similar to ours, able to knit together in a unified, close family all classes and social groups of society, all nations and peoples of the country." For Amalrik and many others, literature provided a logical sphere of reference for challenging this false public unity: in the nineteenth century the construction of the identity of the Russian intelligentsia had been tied to literature in ways that borrowed from Western models. However, the Russian context featured specificities including the belated emergence of modern secular literature and the repressive environment of an authoritarian tsarist regime. For these reasons, literature might serve as a substitute for debates in the press. Literature also more readily embodied a spiritual authority distinct from and in some sense analogous to, but not directly challenging, State authority. Could literature provide the foundation for robust public debate and real influence on governance? The answer seemed less than clear in both tsarist and Soviet times. Literature and art of the modernist period concentrated debates about autonomy and social relevance in the revolutionary context. In retrospect, as maintained in the mythology of the Silver Age and a martyred avant-garde, the regime bureaucrats won this battle at the expense of poets and artists. People in the late Soviet period sought to reconnect with true art and its independent store of cultural values. Whether those values could be mobilized by dissidents to provide any real check on the actions of the State remained unknown.

Pierre Bourdieu's account of the establishment of a field of literary art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France provides a model for a functional relationship between cultural autonomy and intellectual interventions in public discussion. We can use this model as a starting point for an analysis of Soviet dissidence, keeping in mind important differences: the autonomy of the public collapsed under Stalin. Dissidents hoped that through samizdat and other independent means of communicating with a Western audience, they might achieve status as an independent public. This hope entailed the reestablishment of a distinction between "pure" culture and political interventions. In practice, as the Soviet intelligentsia learned through bitter experiences in the late 1960s, especially the suppression of reform movements in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (the shock of which amplified previous traumas including Moscow's response to Polish agitation and to the Hungarian uprising in 1956), the regime would continue to act with terrible violence and flagrant disregard of its own citizens' views whenever it deemed such measures necessary. Perhaps real political pressure might be brought to bear by foreigners. Thus, for strategic reasons specific to the late Soviet context, but also by the logic of the phenomenon of modern intellectuals, Soviet dissidents felt constrained to establish a sphere of pure culture independent of politics and to disavow the political nature of even social activity and commentary. This proved to be as true of democratic dissidents and national groups as of nonconforming literati and artists.

In this chapter I begin by outlining the emergence of a "field" of dissident culture that involves autonomous literature and dissident social interventions. Unofficial literature has not commonly been described as "dissident," and dissident social activity has not usually been treated as a "culture," but the uneasy relationship between these terms reflects the tension that mutually constitutes the two types of activity (one purely cultural and the other sociopolitical) and charges the field they share. A dynamic of productive competition can be found, for example, among uncensored poets and democratic dissidents in the late 1970s. Both groups understand the value of their activities to be the inverse of values determined by the regime in official Soviet culture, though they compete with one another to define the character of that independence.

Two figures illustrate the position-takings that came to seem like opposing points within the developed dissident field, although they looked closer together at the beginning. Andrei Siniavskii's role in the important 1966 trial of Siniavskii and fellow writer Iulii Daniel for supposedly "anti-Soviet" works published abroad without permission is well known. In this chapter I will focus on the struggle Siniavskii engaged in with his editorial board over an introductory article in a posthumous collection of Boris Pasternak's poetry. This wrangling behind the scenes demonstrates Siniavskii's efforts to stake out a new autonomous sphere of literary culture in the late Soviet era. Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin, a mathematician, developed a highly influential strategy of legal dissidence first employed in demonstrations related to the case against the two writers. Siniavskii and Volpin stand therefore as two related but distinct figures in the emerging field of dissident culture. Bourdieu treats such figures as "agents" in the field, whose perception of the range of possibilities depends on the knowledge about the field they have accumulated through their social position over time. His method will underpin my own critical approach to claims of autonomy and dissident agency.

I use this survey of the activity of two key figures to consider the construction of dissident subjectivity. I will consider dissident subjectivity from a critical analytic perspective, and from the point of view of those who constructed it, finding in many cases resonance between the representation and the analytic model. Toward the end of the chapter I will return to neo-avant-garde literary strategies as a special case of dissident self-perception that exposes persistent forms of dependence and pursues new forms of autonomous expression not through pure separation from the late Soviet context but in critical engagement. This inquiry will set up more detailed exploration of the provocative literary imaginations of dissident subjectivity in the uncensored novels of Vasilii Aksenov, Andrei Bitov, and Venedikt Erofeev. The critical perspective on the dissident field and notions of autonomy operating within it will lead to an analysis of the conditioning context of these writers and their own response to a new field of possibilities: what notions of autonomy did they reflect from within their own social contexts? How much did their own explorations of a dissident voice and possible agency depend on moving their audience — what was this audience and how did they reach it?

The Emergence of a Dissident Field, I: Andrei Siniavskii and Autonomous Literature

Siniavskii stands out as one of those rare uncensored writers in the late Soviet era who did not shun the term "dissident," even though he emphasized that his heterodoxy manifested primarily in his writing, writing that was esoteric, stylistically obscure, and not calculated to evoke broad political resonance. While his role in the landmark trial of literary writers that helped launch Soviet dissidence at home and abroad helps us recognize Siniavskii as a dissident, Siniavskii never took a public stand like the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did. On the other hand, he never appeared as marginal to the Soviet establishment as someone like the poet Joseph Brodsky. Siniavskii occupied a place within the official Soviet literary establishment. Thanks to this position he became aware of the possibility of doing things differently — of bending the rules.

Although they occurred out of the public eye, Siniavskii's debates with the editorial board of the prestigious Library of the Poet (Biblioteka poeta), publishing series in letters spanning the years from 1962 to 1965, offer a window into the way Siniavskii attempted to open up a sphere for autonomous literary expression from inside the Soviet system. The editors considered Siniavskii's introductory article to the collection of Boris Pasternak's poetry they were preparing for publication to be insufficiently political. The correspondence of Siniavskii with these editors shows how deeply Siniavskii's conviction regarding the autonomy of literature informed his professional activity. Siniavskii's statements in letters and memoirs suggest that the eruption of unofficial activity came, not from outside, but from within Soviet society as a result of its own tensions and forces.

Siniavskii himself maintained the idea that dissidence proceeded from the Soviet experience itself. Born in the 1920s like his counterpart Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Siniavskii described dissidence as the experience of a generation born and bred within the Soviet state. Dissidence arose out of a loss of absolute faith in the system. It resulted in Siniavskii's experience from encountering what he called a "stumbling block," which caused him to begin to think and act independently. Repressed modernist masters Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelshtam might be considered "heretics" of Russian literature, but they were not "dissidents," Siniavskii asserted: "one cannot call them dissidents for the simple reason that their roots go back to bygone, prerevolutionary traditions of Russian culture." Dissidents, by contrast, were part of a generation formed within the Soviet order. They experienced a crisis or realization from a position inside the system. This dissident "stumbling block" was essentially an individual experience, one provoking a sense of moral responsibility to "think, speak and write independently, without regard for the norms and prescriptions of the state," as Siniavskii put it. For Siniavskii, this stumbling block was seeing modernism being rooted out of Soviet culture. Unlike his coeval Solzhenitsyn, Siniavskii defined his dissidence as aesthetic — his independent action was to write differently. "In the internal conflict between politics and art, I opted for art and rejected politics," Siniavskii said.

Siniavskii's critical essays and fantastic fictional writing as Abram Terts obviously represent aesthetic dissidence. But Siniavskii's subversive emphasis on the aesthetic was also clear in his work as an official Soviet critic. Prior to his arrest, Siniavskii enjoyed a promising career as a young liberal literary critic working within the establishment. In official publications of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Siniavskii broke new ground by emphasizing the autonomy of literature. His position relative to the context was provocative enough to cause sharp polemics. Surveying Siniavskii's career, Catharine Nepomnyashchy divided Siniavskii's ten articles for Novyi mir (written alone and with his colleague Andrei Menshutin) into three related rubrics — those that reconsidered literary figures formerly banned or marginalized (Pasternak, Robert Frost, Akhmatova), those that emphasized literary as opposed to political evaluation of contemporary Soviet works, and those that criticized establishment writers for hackneyed, politically tainted work.

Siniavskii's critical attitudes and methods as a literary professional fit naturally into Thaw-era developments after Stalin's demise. Writers tried almost immediately to reassert autonomy in literature. As early as 1953, Vladimir Pomerantsev had caused a sensation with his article "On Sincerity in Literature." Pomerantsev attributed the insincere "varnishing" of reality in literature to an attempt to present a desired reality in contrast to the existing reality. He thereby went to the heart of the paradoxical logic of Socialist Realist doctrine, which "demands from the author the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development." Pomerantsev called on the individual author to be more sincere and truthful. Siniavskii's approach to literature several years later was more sophisticated, and it claimed greater autonomy for literature from life: Siniavskii, with his love of modernism, returned to a method of critique based on formal poetic characteristics. For example, the success of Olga Berggolts's poetry about the Leningrad blockade depended not primarily on her personal integrity and not only on the power of her tragic subject, Siniavskii argued: rather, Berggolts's expert handling of specifically poetic techniques, her minimalist poetic form, her lyrical prose, and her avoidance of political or sentimental clichés made her writing powerful. When Siniavskii and Menshutin criticized the upsurge of romantic poetry at the beginning of the 1960s for being longer on enthusiasm than technique, they raised the ire of their colleagues. In response to a spate of heated responses, Siniavskii and Menshutin pointed out that, in fact, being able to chop wood does not guarantee that one can write good poetry about it.

Siniavskii's attention to language and his focus on specifically artistic language made him stand out. He shared an aversion to clichés with other liberal critics of Soviet literature — Siniavskii greatly appreciated Pasternak's convictions on this score, and he analyzed Pasternak's poetry from this point of view in the article for the Library of the Poet edition. The point Siniavskii made was rather subtle: Pasternak used common phrases from everyday and popular speech. These common phrases were called in Russian shtampy, and Siniavskii compared this technique to Maiakovskii's deliberate vulgarisms and street jargon, though the register and effect in Pasternak's case were rather different. In Pasternak's poetry, however, these common oral shtampy represented a way of combating worn-out literary and rhetorical models (shablony). From Siniavskii's single meeting with Pasternak at the end of 1957, he seized on Pasternak's provocative approach to ideological cliché:

For Pasternak, radical changes in the consciousness of society were the concern of tomorrow, a process that could not be reversed and would be all-encompassing. But the first front in this process appeared to him to be the liberation of language from the forms of ideology, not so much from ideology itself as from its restricted character, its formalization, its nauseatingly familiar phrases, which caught in one's throat.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Writing the Free Self: Cultural Autonomy and the Dissident Subject in the Late Soviet Era 1

Chapter 1 Literature and the Field of Dissidence 25

Chapter 2 Aksenov's The Burn: Searing the Hearts of Men 46

Chapter 3 Botov's Pushkin House: Deconstructing the Late Soviet Subject 73

Chapter 4 On the Knife's Edge: Venichka's Performances in Moscow Stations 102

Chapter 5 Samizdat and the Extra-Gutenberg Condition 129

Conclusion: Soviet Dissidence and Critical Subjectivity in an Extra-Gutenberg Age 153

Notes 163

Bibliography 227

Index 247

Editorial Reviews

"Ann Komaromi provides a highly innovative and inspiring literary reading of the field of Russian uncensored literature of the 1960s and 1970s."  —The Russian Review


"This is an exceptionally stimulating monograph which sheds much new light on the role and significance of tamizdat and samizdat in what turned out to be the last two decades of the USSR." —The Slavonic and East European Review


"These detailed case studies avoid romanticizing and mythologizing the subject ... instead raising intriguing questions and prompting the reader to reconsider received ideas of dissidence, autonomy and cultural production in the Soviet era." —Slavic Review

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