Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses ed. by Evgeny Dobrenko et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses ed. by Evgeny Dobrenko et al. Inessa Medzhibovskaya Dobrenko, Evgeny and Jonsson-Skradol, Natalia (eds). Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses. Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. Anthem Press, London, 2018. 362 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. £100.00: £175.00. This comprehensive and well-organized volume edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol is a major new achievement in the study of both a single method by which literature is institutionalized and globalized, and its lasting discourses. It is an achievement that builds on the strengths of Dobrenko and Thomas Lahusen's Socialist Realism Without Shores (Durham, NC, 1997), the magisterial Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (St Petersburg, 2000) edited by Dobrenko with Hans Günther, and A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond (Pittsburgh, PA, 2011) edited by Dobrenko with Galin Tihanov, and also enters into an illuminating dialogue with Tihanov's award-winning The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford, CA, 2019). This new collection features a skilfully arranged set of twenty detailed and lucid chapters by an international group of scholars from Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia and the United States by Imre József Balázs, René Bílik, Rossen Djagalov, Evgeny Dobrenko, Plamen Doinov, Helen Fehervary, Hans Günther, Anne Hartmann, Nenad Ivic´, Pavel Janáček, Natalia Jonsson-Skradol, Melinda Kalmár, David Norris, Ivana Peruško, Evgeny Ponomarev, Benjamin Robinson, Tamás Scheibner, Vít Schmarc, Tatiana V. Volokitina and Vladislav M. Zubok. This heavily archival and scrupulously theoretical volume is the impressive result of many years' work under the auspices of the research project, 'Literary Pax Sovietica: National Revival and Cultural Unification in Post-War Eastern Europe', based at the University of Sheffield. Prior to publishing these important results, they were showcased at two conferences funded by, amongst others, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the International Visegrad Fund and the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund. [End Page 183] On the cover of the book, Cyrillic typewriter keys capture the eye. Their gold inlaid tops are stuck frozen on their arms, idling and untouched. Nobody is using the typewriter: it is an artifact of an era long gone. Who stopped typing? When and why? What did the dominant ideological spirits of Socialist Realism have to do with the eventual abandonment of these keys? Focusing on the former Warsaw pact countries of Eastern and Central Europe — but omitting Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine — the editors thoughtfully place each contribution under one of the three sequential parts listed in the book's subtitle (institutions, dynamics, discourses). Most closely examined is the fate of Socialist Realism in East Germany, Poland, Croatia, Czecholslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia, with brief mention of Albania and Macedonia. With one exception — the Béla Bartók debates that were to influence the larger process of the development of Socialist Realism in Hungary — and unlike the approach used by Dobrenko and Lahusen in 1997 and Dobrenko and Günther in 2000, the volume covers only the literatures and literary criticism of this multilingual region. The volume's structure enables the reader to accurately track the arrival of Socialist Realism in the newly Soviet-occupied zones of war-torn Eastern Europe following the defeat of Hitler's Nazi Germany. After the extermination of many artists who had been anti-Nazi resisters, the devastations of the Holocaust and the purges in the Soviet Union, far from all the surviving writers were able to immediately return home from their places of displacement and exile. (Anna Seghers, for example, did not return from Mexico until 1947, and lived in West Berlin until 1950.) All the volume's essays are sensitive to the difficult circumstances surrounding the construction of the early institutions and discourses of the proto-socialist and popular-democratic cultural fronts in the region. Although comic in part, this was not a makeshift montage job for 'Kremlin gremlins', as Zubok calls them (pp. 78–82). These were...