Gerasimov . Ilya Plebeian Modernity: Social Practices, Illegality, and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1906–1916 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 369 Gerasimov. Ilya. Plebeian Modernity: Social Practices, Illegality, and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1906–1916. University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY, 2018. xi + 275 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. £55.00. Plebeian Modernity is a provocative book. I expect a number of readers, like this reviewer, will not fully accept the author’s theoretical approach or interpretations of Russian society (and, in the conclusion, Soviet society), but the book is thought-provoking and worth reading by scholars interested in Russia as an empire, urban society, everyday life, illegality, violence, ethnoreligious identities and communities. Gerasimov poses big and difficult questions. Among these: how did ethnicity and class actually work on the ground in everyday social interactions? What is the relationship between public and normative discourses and the social practices of the urban lowerclasses ? Seeking to recover the subjective and social worlds of a social sphere he variously terms plebeian, the urban poor and subaltern, he focuses on the most visible expressions of plebeian body language, especially illegality, particularly around sex, money and violence (or all three) in a selection of imperial cities: Kazan´, Nizhnyi Novgorod, Odessa and Vilna. The book is rich in stories of the street, bold arguments and insights. Concerning the important ‘sphere of illegality’, Gerasimov shows how local knowledges and systems of value often differed considerably from normative definitions. For example, we see the distance between, as it were, theory and practice concerning prostitution, business (and criminal) relations between ethno-religious groups, and the definition and place of crime in communities. He argues that the street (to use another possible term for the social sphere he investigates) organized itself as a ‘middle-ground’ (Richard White’s concept) shaped by alternative understandings and useful misunderstandings, critical to social sustainability and cooperation but also a source of unruliness. He questions, as many scholars have, overly simple characterizations of violence between ethnic groups as primarily about ethnicity rather than politics, space and work. He shows that ‘vice’ was often tolerated in communities because it was understood, at the level of lived practices, differently than official discourses. He explores the expressive side of violence as a social language. Indeed, he shows illegality itself functioning as language and interpretation. Deepening the complexity, he shows boundaries breached, norms defied and authority ignored, without any of these being consciously ‘political’. I admire Gerasimov’s sensitivity to complexity (even excess), variability, ambiguity, nuance, flux and uncertainty. And this is precisely the ground on which I find the book frustrating. Alongside numerous insights, I found that all too often his theoretical and interpretive arguments introduced new simplifications while overturning others. We could explore this, for example, SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 370 concerning his arguments about religion, identity, or violence. But I will focus on his most persistent argument (for it is related to these questions): the relationship between social discourses and plebeian practices. I appreciate his challenge to our (yes, my own) reliance on the textual sphere for interpreting lower-class lives. I agree, and find his evidence compelling, that on-the-ground social practices are a revealing window into lived meanings and logics — even though we have little access to these practices apart from textual traces in newspapers and records of police and courts. But it is quite another thing to say that these practices stand outside discourse, that the vast majority of the urban population were ‘living largely beyond discourses’ (p. 54) in ‘a prediscursive agglomeration of local knowledges’ (p. 53), that the lowerclass had a fully ‘sovereign subjectivity’ (p. 25). Need we construct this boundary of otherness? Can we not take seriously body language and deviating relationships to normative discourses — and, for that matter, take seriously the sphere of emotions, though he does not draw on affect theory or histories of emotions — while still recognizing the power, influence and internalization of available ideas and language in a complex and situational relationship? In the course of his narrative, he regularly shows how urban life was entwined with words and texts of all sorts that could not be ignored, though were adapted and ‘freely arranged’ (p. 52). Gerasimov is at his best in Plebeian Modernity when recognizing how the evidence speaks of...