The Writer and the Socialist Village

Abstract

Between 1928 and 1930 TreViakov visited a collective farm ^kolkhoz7 in the northern Caucasus region four times, first as a reporter and later as a standing member of the commune. He was certainly not the only cultural producer at the time who wanted to understand and participate in the epochal social and psychic transformations that collectivization was introducing into the undeveloped Soviet countryside at an unprecedented pace: from Eisensteins 1929 film General Line (The Old and the New) to Aleksandr Luriia's famous psychological studies of Uzbek kolkhozniks, which later became the basis for Walter Ong's book Orality and Literacy (1982), countless figures from the scientific and intellectual community swarmed the collective farms to observe one of the most striking object lessons in modernization and social revolution. This domestication of the savage mind, to borrow Jack Goody's apt phrase, represented nothing less than a total restructuring of premodern consciousness, for it was not just tractors that the first Five-Year Plan brought to the provinces, but countless other forms of machine production (recall the creamer in General Line), abstract mechanical time, collective child care, political representation, administrative bureaucracy, radio, literacy, and technical culture, as well as functionally differentiated modes of production and specialized labor. TreViakov performed a wide variety of duties on his kolkhoz, the Communist Lighthouse. He edited a newspaper serving sixteen different localities, wrote as a kolkhoz correspondent for Pravda, managed the administrative communications between the commune and the Moscow authorities, and organized radio and traveling movie programming in the village where he lived. Thus he was in a privileged position to witness the dramatic impact of the modern media on a largely illiterate, rural populace. And yet The Writer and the Socialist Village, written to accompany a slide-show presentation given by TreViakov in Berlin, does not dwell upon the effects of these developments on the kolkhoznik mind. real primitives in his account are the urban intellectuals who visit the communes and continue to work in outmoded genres, with time-consuming techniques, using inefficient