Russia's Dangerous Texts: Politics between the Lines by Kathleen s> Parthé (review)

Abstract

126 SEER, 84, I, 2006 Carleton's insistence that we should allow for more 'latitude' in our considerationof thiswriteris refreshing. The articlesby Evgeny Dobrenko andJohn Dunn, in particular,revealthe benefit of broadening this study of Russian humour out from the restricted fieldof literature.Dobrenko givesavibrantaccount of theportrayalof musical heritage in Soviet musical comedies of the 1930s and 1940S. Employing 7The Jolly Fellows(I934), VolgaVolga (I938) and A MusicalStory (I940) as evidence, the article focuses on the changing 'image of the masses in the eyes of state power' (p. 13I) and revealshow, duringthisperiod, the classicwas integrated into high Soviet culture after silencing the former opposition. In the final article in the collection, Dunn uses examples of television comedy from KVN to Kalambur to argue that 'the most important distinctive feature of Russian TV humour is its political orientation and the major role played by satire' (P. I9I). This collection of essays constitutes a welcome addition to the body of critical writing on humour in Russian culture. Its extended historical focus and analysisof various means of culturalcommunication ensures that it will be of considerablevalue to a wide readership. Department ofRussian CLAIRE WHITEHEAD University ofStAndrews Parthe, Kathleen. Russia'sDangerousTexts. Politics Betweenthe Lines. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2004. xix + 283 pp. Notes. Index. C27.50. THEauthor's stated aim in her present book is 'to furtherclarifythe writer/ statenexusby distillingthe most common assumptionsaboutthisrelationship, and then looking at it from new angles to see if this changes our sense of how the paradigm worked, what happened when it ceased to function, and what analysing all of this tells us about Russia and Russianness, past, present and future'(p. xvi). ProfessorParthethen offersten 'common beliefs' (p. 2) about the connection between literature and politics in Russia e.g. that 'i) Russiansreadmore than otherpeople', 'iv)in Russiapoets get shot and v) but manuscriptsdon't burn', and so on. She examines these notions against the broad backdropof Russian literatureand historyfrom Avvakumto Abramov and beyond, identifyingdangeroustexts that frequentlytakeon a paraliterary function in that their words become less important than the fact of their existence and the polemics they arouse: 'The drama of the text easily outweighed the drama in the text' (p. 53). She argues that the last genuinely 'dangeroustext from the past' (p. i86) is Solzhenitsyn's T7he Gulag Archipelago, as published in Russia in I990, characterizing it as part of the one-text phenomenon, wherebythe intelligentsiafindsitselfengaged in discussionsof a singleworkto the exclusion of all others(untilthe next one comes along). She feels that this one-text paradigm changes with the publication in Russia of Gulag,for by now Russian readers were spoilt for choice and Solzhenitsyn's monumental expose of Stalinism (and Leninism) produced 'relatively little effect'(p. i86). REVIEWS I27 The author is attempting a freshlook at the relationshipbetween literature and politics in Russia and the resultis a studythat is rewarding,well-written, uniformlylucid and at times even entertaining. Partheis at pains to point up the positive and aesthetic strengthsof the village prose writers,on whom she haswrittenauthorativelyand, asbest she can, to distancethem from the more unsavoury aspects of Russian nationalism. The passages on Abramov, Rasputin, Shukshin and Tendriakov arejudicious, while the examination of Russian chauvinismand russkost' is conducted with wit, if not a sortof chilling glee. With the break-up of the Soviet Union, the analysis of conservative literary commentators 'was at times a rather predictable exercise in blood typing, with Russian-Jewishwriters and critics inevitably failing the test of Russianness unless they made themselves useful by criticizing other Russian Jewish writers' (p. IO9). Then there is the delightful story of one Andrei Cherkashin, a war invalid, who spent forty years compiling a genealogy of Pushkin which took in a thousand years of Russian history and some five thousand names without noting a 'single "money-grubber, rogue, careerist, traitor, coward, scoundrel or libertine" in the lot' (p. iii). Contemporary writerssuch as Tolstaia and Voinovich were quick to offer a counterblastto the more ludicrousextremesof Russian chauvinism. Its qualities notwithstanding,one might have reservationsabout this book. Though we have a lot of contemporaryand near-contemporarymaterial, set skilfullyin the broad context of Russian literaryhistory, the analysis overall strikes one as old wine in new skins. Might...