Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin by Peter s> Kenez (review)

Abstract

128 SEER, 8o, I, 2002 difficultto translateadequately, so it looks as though the Western 'canon' of recent Russian literature will continue to differ considerably from the 'in house' 'canon' of recent Russianwriting. It should be said that the scope of this collection of articlesis broaderthan the title suggests:severalof the worksdiscussedor mentioned were writtenin the I970S or I990S, some of them by authors outside or on the margins of, ratherthan well inside, any 'canon' at all. This comment appliesin particular to the three survey articles, on village prose, urban prose and the treatment (or rather non-treatment) of non-Russians and their particularproblems in recent Russianfiction.This last article,by Ewa Thompson, is more polemical and less well grounded than the others, but it does open up new vistas for researchersand budding thesis-writers,because it reminds us of the fact that the Russian Federation is still an empire, and that the future of its national minorities (not only the Chechens) is even more problematical than is the futureof the ethnic Russians.This subjectis addressed,or at least touched on, by more authors than Thompson suggests(she has some harsh things to say about Rybakov and Solzhenitsyn), and it certainly deserves more attention than it has received so farfromWesternliteraryscholars. Perhapsthe best, and best written, contributionto this volume comes first; it is David Bethea's 'IuriiLotman in the I98os: The Code and Its Relation to Literary Biography'. Lotman owed a lot to Bakhtin (who was somewhat critical of the directionsin which Lotman was moving in the 1970s); towards the end of his life Lotman realized that a semiotic approach to life, the arts andtheworldhad to be made more generallycomprehensiblethanBakhtin and he himself had managed to do. Hence his new worksin the I98os on Karamzin and Pushkin,the perfect preliminary stage of reading for novices on theirway to the earlier,more difficultwritingsof the Moscow-TartuSchool and of the genius of Saransk.It is, incidentally,interesting,if not surprising,to note (thanks to the excellent Index) how often Pushkin is mentioned and discussedelsewherein thisvolume, whose only realblemishesresultfrompoor proof-reading, which has produced howlers like Evgeniia Shvarts (p. 3), M. Batkin(p. 69) and L. L. Andreev (p. I70), to mention but three. Department ofSlavonic Studies MARTIN DEWHIRST University ofGlasgow Kenez, Peter. Cinema andSovietSociety fromtheRevolution to theDeathof Stalin. KINO: The RussianCinema Series.I. B. Tauris,London and New York, 200I. xi + 252 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Bibliography.Index. ?39.50. SOVIET cinema is now firmlyestablishedon the Russian academic syllabus, and Cinema andSoviet Society previouslypublishedby CambridgeUniversity Press in I992 has also settled quite comfortably into its niche on many undergraduatereadinglists. There is good reason for this in his lively and comprehensive survey,Kenez guides his readersthrough the institutionsand productions of pre- and post-revolutionary Soviet cinema, providing an accessibleintroductionto key playersand themes, and in particularthe many and varied difficultiesinvolved in producing a Soviet picture worthy of the REVIEWS 129 name. His book is packed with facts and figures, names, dates and places which will no doubt continue to prove usefuland popularwith undergraduate readers, and his central argument that the Bolsheviksalwaysset too much store by the power of cinema as propaganda, and therefore should not have been surprisedthat it failed to live up to their unrealisticexpectations - is unravelled in a very self-consciouslyprovocative way: the tone is forthright and largelycontemptuous of both the subjectmatterand other scholarsin the field. This being the case, we could look a little more closely at the ways in which this argumentis constructed,as it appearsto be representativeof a very specific and, I would argue, outdated branch of Soviet studies which stems from a critical tradition steeped in Leavisite terminology and Cold War rhetoric. Just over a decade afterthe collapse of Soviet state socialism,a reappraisal of scholarlydiscourseon the Stalin era has alreadybegun, reflectingthe need forwesternviews on communistperspectivesto be less impassionedand more methodologically rigorous. One might suspect that there was much revision possible, then, in the time since the publication of the firstedition of Kenez's work. But Kenez disappoints,even before we reach page one. In his preface to this second edition he notes ratherdryly:'I know of no historianwho has admittedin printthathe had been compelled to revisehisviews on some basic aspectsof...