Mikhail Bulgakov, Mykola Kulish, and Soviet Theater: How Internal Transnationalism Remade Center and Periphery

Abstract

Most studies of culture are, without explicitly stating so, studies of culture in Moscow, taking what happened culturally in Moscow (and occasionally Leningrad) as metonymy for the cultural production and reception of the entire Union. The prevalent model of culture is therefore one of diffusion, which assumes that the best cultural products were created in Moscow and transported to or copied by the periphery. The diffusion model assumes the provinces as peripheral to Moscow or, to put it differently, the periphery as provincial. (1) Explicitly or implicitly refuting the assumption of Moscow as metonym, studies of culture in the republics often present an alternate model, tracing a well-established teleological trajectory of qualitatively good non-Russian culture created locally under korenizatsiia (indigenization) followed by Russification spread from an increasingly oppressive center. (2) culture then exists in two parallel scholarships: one for Moscow, Leningrad, and Soviet culture nonethnically defined; and an entirely different one for the ethnically defined culture of the non-Russian republics. Ironically, both assume that culture emanated, for good or ill, in a single direction from Moscow, and both largely preclude culture traveling in the other direction, from the provinces to Moscow or Leningrad. More important, however, neither a Moscow nor a regional focus explains the obvious: Moscow came to be perceived as a center, and the provinces as peripheral. Might there be a larger model for the creation of culture that comprises both center and periphery in equal measure? This article advances the suggestion that these two models--one focused on Moscow, the other on the regions--may exist in a larger paradigm by taking into account inside the Union. The creation of culture can be inscribed into the larger postimperial space in two ways. First, what I call internal transnationalism accounts for different cultural processes unfolding in different regions in the Union yet also suggests that these different cultural processes were interrelated. Second, this interrelation may explain how artists, officials, and audiences came to perceive Moscow as a center and the periphery as provincial during the first two decades of rule. The between Moscow and the regions is best understood as an axis of cultural as advocated by Philipp Ther. He proposes a new mental mapping of Europe in which places and axes of cultural exchange, not the nation-state or other territorial units of analysis, shape the map of the continent. Attending to allows the historian to track the transformation of the artistic map of the former Russian Empire into that of the Union. (3) Two playwrights anchor this case study in how functioned: Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) and Mykola Kulish (1892-1937). Each playwright constitutes a focal point in the study of or (Soviet) Ukrainian culture, yet the life and work of each traveled a much more itinerant path than that allowed by a single geographic focus. Their paths crossed textually through their plays Days of the Turbins (Dni Turbinykh, 1926) and Sonata Pathetique (Patetychna sonata, 1929), which were both inspired by the events of the revolution and civil wars. The production and circulation of Bulgakov's and Kulish's works requires a more expansive model for the analysis of cultural production, one that allows for different processes of artistic development in the republics and the center, yet one that allows these processes to shape each other. The case of Bulgakov and Kulish offers a snapshot of in action. Let me clarify the scope of this case study. Through Bulgakov and Kulish this article focuses on specifically between Moscow and Ukraine. …