Canon Fodder? Problems in the Reading of a Soviet Production Novel

Abstract

For such a staunch supporter of the Soviet Union’s literary and political institutions, Marietta Shaginyan (1888–1982) has received comparatively little attention from its literary critics — and predictably less from those elsewhere. To British and American Slavists she is probably best known as the author of Mess-Mend, or A Yankee in Petrograd (1924), recently analysed as an example of ‘Red Pinkertonism’,1 and the ‘production’ novel Hydrocentral (1930–31). The designation ‘production’ or ‘Five-Year Plan’ novel seems enough to identify Hydrocentral‘s place in Soviet literature, to tell us why it was written — in response to official calls for literature to reflect and promote the policy of industrialization — and how it should be read. Hence in surveys of Soviet literature such as Ronald Hingley’s Russian Writers and Soviet Society, 1917–1978 the novel is simply grouped with others of the same category, and this grouping provides the necessary commentary. Hingley mentions Shaginyan as one of a number of writers who produced novels about the first Five-Year Plan, including Leonid Leonov. He goes on to qualify the place of Leonov’s The River Sot and Skutarevskii among classic production novels — Hydrocentral, Valentin Kataev’s Forward, Time!, Mikhail Sholokov’s Virgin Soil Upturned and Il’ya Erenburg’s The Second Day — by referring to Leonov’s ‘great originality and subtlety’, his ‘ingeniously oblique approach that enabled him to work within the censorship while yet continuing to present a world all his own, and to project a markedly individual literary personality’.2