Soviet Literary Culture in the 1970s: The Politics of Irony.

Rollberg, Peter

When first reading the announcements for Soviet Literary Culture in the 1970s, I could not but feel intrigued. Finally, I thought, somebody dares to look at Russian culture of recent decades, while avoiding the stereotypes of "loyal communists" and "dissidents," "neo-Slavophiles" and "neo-Westernizers," and the like. Finally, I thought, there is somebody who has ventured to analyze that peculiar layer between the highbrow and lowbrow strata, a culture that gave flavor to Russian rank-and-file everyday life to a larger extent than did the official and unofficial canons of masterpieces. That culture determined the atmosphere of the 1970s; it had its own spaces, its genres and subgenres, its stars; moreover, it was heavily involved with electronic media and therefore accessible to millions, and, last but not least, it was almost incomprehensible to foreigners.

Anatoly Vishevsky was himself an insider to this cultural scene, and whenever he shares his personal recollections and observations, his investigation exhibits freshness and originality. Unfortunately, such personal flair makes up only a minor part of Vishevsky's book, even though it seems to have originally inspired the project. Instead, most of the chapters are heavily stuffed with pseudotheoretical elaborations and tedious recountings of miniature short stories, many of which are presented in the book's second part, an anthology of "ironic prose."

I spare myself the task of reflecting on the cloudy, casually researched, and sloppily rendered passages on "irony," "structural irony," "weltanschauung irony," et cetera - all pillars of an apparatus that is never really used, because the book does not contain literary analyses on a level deeper than plot discussion. Any dictionary definition of the term irony would have served the purpose, as a tool to legitimize the author's point. Still, this reduction of theoretical overhead hardly would have rendered more persuasive the author's claim that "the predominant world view of Soviet writers in the 1970s was irony." This statement, like so many others in the book about the literature and culture of the period in question, risks broad generalization without ever attempting to prove it. With regard to the political components of the presentation, Vishevsky's argument completely distorts all proportions when he holds that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was a major factor in the appearance of irony as a dominant mode.

A look at the literary material presented by the author in order to stabilize his more than shaky conceptual construction makes one wonder whether he himself was feigning irony when pretending that these short stories and feuilletons were a challenge to Soviet censorship. The actual texts, usually between half a page and two pages long, published on the last page of Literaturnaia Gazeta in millions of copies and immensely popular among newspapers readers, invariably dealt with common human virtues and vices. Almost half of the stories contained in Vishevsky's anthology begin by telling that some man wakes up in the morning. The following adventures are often as repetitive as is the beginning. However, no reader seemed to mind the stereotypical structure, which indicates that this genre, like the oral joke, had accepted stylistic stereotypes defining it. The plot is often reduced to the description of the dullness of a character's life, or it involves some sort of supernatural event which sheds new light on the character's ordinary problems, revolving around marriage, job, kids, life, death, and money (the latter was usually excluded from Soviet highbrow literature). It was the triviality of the setting which made these stories easy to relate to, and it was the untrivial transformations experienced by the character which could be of benefit to the reader: a minute to ponder's one's own life, a melancholic or indeed ironic smile.

The "construction principles" of these miniature narratives remained largely the same, for the literary painkiller providing temporary relief in a permanently frustrating environment had to be recognizable, its effect had to be the same. It is certainly telling that half the authors of these stories were engineers by education, a background that may have helped them adapt to the constructedness of the genre. Another factor which supports my assumption of the collective rather than individualistic nature of the humorous miniatures is the fact that many of them were joint efforts by two authors.

This newspaper genre is clearly flavored by Vishevsky (he himself authored or coauthored a number of such pieces, a few of which are also included in the anthology) and is complemented by two chapters on Siberian prose and Georgian cinema. True, there is irony in both, but does this alone make them "ironic prose" or "ironic cinema?" The films and prose works mentioned, albeit created in the Soviet period, belong to utterly different cultural contexts and traditions and lie worlds apart from those little stories enjoyed by Moscow intellectuals while riding the Metro. Rather, Eldar Riazanov's films might fit in Vishevsky's pattern; there the mild irony, caused by inner resignation about the seemingly unchangeable social circumstances is obvious.

I agree with Vishevsky's view that in the 1970s there was an invisible unity, almost a partnership, between the audience on the one hand and the creators of feuilletons, the bards and balladeers (with their songs distributed semi-legally via magnitizdat or clandestine tape recordings), and the stand-up comedians on the other. This unity was an important sign of the time, and its relevance for the creation and perception of Soviet culture still remains to be understood. Likely, a descriptive mode would have been more adequate to the subject. It is regrettable that, instead, the author sacrificed a worthwhile topic to a narrow theoretical aspect.

Peter Rollberg George Washington University