Metal in the Works of Vasilii Aksenov

Abstract

Why has the search for a Soviet cultural mythology become so attractive to scholars East and West? The reasons are complex, and some have more to do with academic politics than with real advances in understanding. Nevertheless, much of Soviet reality-as constructed by both leadership and people-is better interpreted in terms of a shared cultural landscape of myths and symbols, than it is in terms of ideological systems. While Marxist ideology is unmatched for the scope of its rationalist worldview, the lacuna in its historical narrative are too conspicuous to be ignored even by ardent supporters. Leaps of faith across causal gaps demand a shift (whether conscious or unconscious) from logical exposition to a more poetic idiom. The prime example of such a gap is the one separating political and cultural revolution. When Marxism attempts to envision the actual course of events by which changes in economic conditions will lead to a change in human nature, it must resort to metaphor. Thus, the creation of the New Soviet Man is described in terms that evoke mythic archetypes: initiation, death and rebirth, apotheosis. The history of one especially prominent narrative of transformation be traced back for millennia. One finds it in Mexican creation myths, in the initiation rituals of Siberian shamans, in the religious folklore of medieval Europe, in the doctrines of both Occidental and Oriental alchemy, and throughout the symbolic lexicon of modern revolutionary movements. This is the myth of spiritual transubstantiation through metallization. Its archetypal motifs are as follows: a given metal, on the basis of its physical characteristics and the peculiarities of its extraction, is identified with the supernatural realm (or even with the flesh and bones of some divine being). Through the mediation of supernatural forces, mortal human bodies be treated by the methods used in the production of this metal, resulting in their union with the sacred element and their acquisition of its positive characteristics. The forging and tempering of human beings is a variant of the motif of initiation through ritual death and rebirth-and, in particular, that of purification by fire. Metal symbolism has thus been associated from primordial times with the universal revolutionary symbols of fire and light. Another factor explaining its attraction for the Russian revolutionaries stems from more recent history, and the split of the communists into hard Bolsheviks and soft Mensheviks, as manifested in pseudonyms such as those of Kamenev (kamen', stone), Molotov (molot, hammer), and-of course-Stalin (stal steel). Iron and steel provide the commonest epithets for the political firmness of Lenin's followers.2 The post-revolutionary economic role of these metals is reflected in their enhanced symbolic function, particularly with regard to the sacred triad of labour/warfare/suffering. Stalin's declaration that the Soviet Union can and must become a country of metal3 presumes the existence of a nation of ironjawed cadres ready to execute such a cataclysmic task. While traces of the flesh-to-metal narrative are present on every level of Soviet culture, it is, like any Bolshevik myth, rarely encountered in its explicit form. The great attraction of Marxism is its alleged scientific insight into the history and future of hitherto unanalyzable social phenomena. All that is reasonable in the human mind... will necessarily become reality, declares Plekhanov.4 This faith in the power of reason demands that Marxist ideology suppress any irrational elements, not excepting its own ruling myth-that of dialectical materialism as the antidote to all myths. Yet Marxism cannot survive without its myths and symbols, and its history is the ongoing record of their suppression and resurgence. The metallization of the body as a metaphor for the creation of the communist New Man has undergone several cycles of automatization and realization in the course of the twentieth century. …