“Critical Appropriation of Literary Heritage” and the Shaping of Soviet National Literatures: A Close Reading of the Debate in the Journal Literaturnyi kritik (The Literary Critic, 1933–36)

Abstract

This article zooms in on what can be called the laboratory of the notion of Soviet literature: the debates of the journal Literaturnyi kritik, in which the programmatic debate at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934) was prepared, followed up, and further elaborated. It puts the focus on one of its key concepts—“the critical appropriation of heritage,” and tries to distinguish between different notions of heritage (with regard to realism and modernism respectively) and modes inheriting and tracing their instrumentalization in competing aesthetic and political positions. In this context it elaborates on the attempts to conceptualize Soviet national literatures by means of national heritage and within the horizon of what in the same context was conceptualized as “world literature.”