'A Laboratory for the Manufacture of Proletarian Writers': The Stengazeta (Wall Newspaper), Kul'turnost' and the Language of Politics in the Early Soviet Period

Abstract

DURING THE LAST DECADE OR SO of the 20th century the historiography of Russia underwent, somewhat belatedly, the 'linguistic turn' that had previously been negotiated by the historiography of Western Europe, the Americas and Asia.2 Both social and literary historians expanded their understanding of acceptability in source materials almost infinitely, to include texts that one or other, or both, types of investigator would have treated with suspicion, or simply ignored, in earlier decades. Such material included letters, diaries and memoirs; products of commercial culture, for example popular songs, advertisement texts, mass-market books and printed ephemera; journalism and broadside polemic.3 The employment of sources of this kind was not entirely novel in the context of Russian culture (both the Russian Formalists of the early Soviet era, notably Viktor Shklovsky and, later, Lidiya Ginzburg, and their successors, the Tartu semioticians of the 1960s and 1970s, had also produced work drawing on some of these areas).4 However, boundaries were now drawn more broadly, to include, for instance, popular culture rather than folklore as traditionally denominated, and memoirs and letters by ordinary people as well as by the major figures who had previously attracted individual study.5 At the same time, better established types of source material (e.g. legislative acts or political speeches) began to be regarded not as a transparent reflection of social change, or even merely an expression of ideology, but as a set of rhetorical structures reproducing wide-ranging cultural patterns, many beyond the control of the individual or individuals who shaped them.6 A 'post-modern' conviction that there is no reality beyond language