Dobrenko , Evgeny Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics by Jesse M. Savage (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 165 but essential for understanding the choices faced by translators into Russian and the novel solutions developed by Ivanov. An overview of the lyric poets of Lesbos sets Alcaeus and Sappho in their literary, historical and linguistic context. Finally, drawing on his earlier article of 2009, Zav´ialov notes that later translators tended to balance Ivanov’s free approach with Veresaev’s more literal method. Zav´ialov’s detailed commentaries to Ivanov’s introduction and translations (pp. 256–378) are full of interesting information and perceptive insights. As well as noting bibliographic details of the translations and Greek originals, the metre of the originals and the textological sources of reconstructed versions (Hunt, Wilamowitz), he offers historical and literary information on the texts and previous translations, notes significant divergences from the originals (such as Ivanov’s introduction of Christian motifs) and cites contemporary reviewers’ comments and current academic opinions. In cases where fuller versions of the Greek text have subsequently come to light, he provides his own prose translations. Insum,thismilestoneeditionisatremendousachievement.Aswellascasting new light on Ivanov’s poetics and the development of Russian versification, it makes an important contribution to two important fields of growing interest: translation studies and the reception of classical antiquity. UCL SSEES Pamela Davidson Dobrenko, Evgeny. Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics. Translated by Jesse M. Savage. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2020. ix + 574 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00: £45.00. Soviet cultural history is a steadily evolving field, its main challenge to understand the role of culture in the Stalinist regime’s social, political and ideological endeavours. As Evgeny Dobrenko asserts in his monumental Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics, culture is the most important subject for the era’s critical biographers because it is ‘essentially the only means of constructing reality, of the regime’s production and the masses’ consumption of its own image and legitimacy’ (p. 18). The goal of his book is thus to replace conventional historical analysis of post-war Stalinism with an analysis of cultural production that helped the party and its leaders to ingrain political ideas into the consciousness of the masses through textualization and narrativization. Following Frank Ankersmit’s theory of the aesthetic perspective in the political sphere and Boris Groys’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk of Stalinism, Dobrenko suggests that before the SEER, 99, 1, JANUARY 2021 166 regime’s most urgent ideas of the 1940–50s, such as nation-building and the Soviet state’s global leadership in the ‘struggle for peace’, were interiorized by the terrorized, impoverished and exhausted population, they could become neither a part, nor a motive of political action by the Soviet government. This is why his comprehensive and nuanced interpretation of political speeches and Pravda editorials, post-war historical and biographical films, plays produced to Stalin’s direct orders, operas and propagandistic verses, focuses on totalitarian ideologemes and how they pass from the newspaper page into a work of fiction, drama, poetry or cinema, and ultimately to the hearts and minds of the people. The most alluring feature of Late Stalinism is its ability to demonstrate how the mechanism of ‘the aestheticization of politics’ functions on the level of text —the‘variousmodiandtropesthatareoftenignored’butthatare,nevertheless, the key factors of the regime’s political representation (p. 23). Dobrenko’s convincing assessment of the shift in Stalin’s self-perception after World War Two (from Lenin’s heir to the dictator who no longer needs to affirm his legitimacy, and from a popular leader to a god-like head of state with a habit of addressing himself in the third person) leads to his discovery of the key figures inthepost-war‘politicaltropology’:synecdoche,whichsupersedesallegory,and metonymy, which replaces historical metaphor (pp. 23, 26). Dobrenko relies on these tropes when conducting his shrewd narratological analysis of literature about the Siege of Leningrad, the second part of Sergei Eizenshtein’s Ivan the Terrible, Mikhail Chiaureli’s The Vow, the party leadership’s response to Vano Muradeli’s opera, The Great Friendship, Ivan Pyr´ev’s film, Tale of the Siberian Land and Osip Chernii’s novel, Snegin’s Opera. His conclusions are edifying: not only was Stalinist reliance on synecdoche and...