Ideology and Utopia in Recent Soviet Literature

Abstract

In the last five years, and particularly since the toppling of the Berlin Wall, Soviet Russians have increasingly confronted the inadequacies of Marxist-Leninist ideology. This revaluation of values has taken place in a number of arenas, from historical reassessments of Lenin's achievements to philosophical debates to the restructuring of public rituals such as those on May Day and November 7. The literary-intellectual debate has contributed considerably to discrediting MarxistLeninist thinking and Stalinist practice. Nowhere has this rethinking expressed itself more strongly than in the powerful backlash against the utopian premises informing Soviet ideology. Such sentiments took shape in the sudden appearance in Soviet journals of a large number of earlyand middle-twentieth-century dystopian novels and the massive response to them. The list of examples is truly astounding. In 1986, Platonov's Juvenalian Sea (Iuvenil'noe more, Znamia) appeared, followed in 1987 by his Foundation Pit (Kotlovan, Novyi mir). Three more dystopias were published in 1988: Platonov's Chevengur, in Druzhba narodov, Orwell's Animal Farm (Skotnyi dvor) in Rodnik [Latvia], and the most famous of Russian dystopias, Zamiatin's We (My) in Znamia. In the same year two works, which in the West are not usually seen as dystopias, were published and hailed for their antiutopian qualities: Kafka's The Castle (Zamok) in two translations in Inostrannaia literatura and Neva and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (Slepiashchaia t'ma) in Neva. In 1989, Orwell's 1984 appeared in Novyi mir, and Animal Farm appeared in a second translation as Ferma zhivotnykh in Literaturnyi Kirgizstan. This series of publications has triggered a shock of national self-recognition and has become an important focal point for broad ideological reevaluation. The point of my discussion here is to examine both the constitutive and pathological aspects of this reception process, on one hand, that is, how it opens the future to new ideological models and fresh possibilities for literary expression and, on the