The Enthusiastic Objectifications of Skaz: Mikhail Zoshchenko and the “Simple‐Souled” Soviet Reception of Jazz

Abstract

Skaz, an experimental narrative form popular in the early Soviet years, has been defined by its orientation toward orality and the voice of a lower‐class other. Skaz's most widely read practitioner, Mikhail Zoshchenko claimed to speak on behalf of proletarian writers, who, according to revolutionary vanguardist theory, could not yet speak for themselves. Sympathetic and antagonistic critics alike have presented Zoshchenko as a pessimist hostilely inclined to the linguistic consciousnesses depicted in his fiction and to the revolutionary project as a whole. In this article, skaz is reconsidered in relation to its roots in enthusiastic aesthetics and politics, an ancient philosophical tradition which since became central to the analysis of feeling and class in revolutionary societies. Following the Russian Revolution, populist intellectuals “spoke in the tongues” of the lower‐class other in an attempt to step outside their own subjective vantage points. The result was a dialectic made up of the “illusory” objectification of the revolutionary subject and a reciprocal defamiliarizing self‐objectification through this imagined consciousness. The enthusiastic aesthetics of skaz do not enable their object to speak, but they do facilitate a movement toward it. This article makes this case using the example of Zoshchenko's 1927 “Simplicity of Soul,” a prose miniature about Soviet shoving framed by the narrator's recollections of remarks on the matter made by members of a so‐called “Negro‐Operetta.” The anecdote originates in a real feuilleton recounting the impressions of the Chocolate Kiddies, an African‐American jazz ensemble that toured the Soviet Union in 1926. Read alongside Soviet reviews of the Chocolate Kiddies, the story is revealed to be a nuanced critical response to the misguided, racist, and, at the same time, well‐meaning internationalist enthusiasm that defined the Soviet response to jazz. Zoshchenko's point in exploring the crude objectifications which obscured Soviet critics' reading of this emancipatory, transnational art form is to articulate–and offer a qualified defense of–the contingent, illusory, and problematic images produced by his own enthusiastic performances of proletarian voice.