Reconstructing the (Authentic Proletarian) Reader: Mikhail Zoshchenko's Changing Model of Authorship, 1929-1934

Abstract

In his 1934 essay, "The Author as Producer," Walter Benjamin discusses the fraught relationship between ideology and aesthetics—between "tendency" and "quality" in literature—and asserts that there is a direct correlation between "politically correct tendency" and "literary quality." 1 According to Benjamin, an author must recognize that his or her work serves "certain class interests"; the "more advanced type of writer" recognizes this choice and chooses to side with the proletariat (768). But it is not enough to pass through a "revolutionary development" in one's attitude toward contemporary relations of production: the author must become a producer—who rethinks his own work, his relation to the literary means of production, in a "really revolutionary way" (772). His mission, like that of the Soviet writer and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Tretiakov, is not merely "to report, but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively" (770). Quoting Brecht, Benjamin explains that such an author should no longer focus on individual experience, [End Page 816] but should work toward the transformation of institutions and of the "productive apparatus" of literature (774). In fact, this cultural transformation was already well underway at the time: as Benjamin writes, "we are in the midst of a mighty recasting of literary forms, a melting down in which many of the opposites in which we have been used to think may lose their force" (771). Citing examples from journalism, photography, music, and theater, Benjamin traces the current, ongoing evolution of new, hybrid genres, cast from the "molten mass" of traditional forms and a concordant "literarization" of life. 2 One desired outcome of this evolution is the revision of the relationship between author and reader.