Where Writers Were Made: The Soviet Writerly Family in Houses of Creativity

Abstract

This article examines Writers’ Houses of Creativity (Doma tvorchestva pisatelei, DTP) as spaces of professional formation. More specifically, it describes how Houses of Creativity, as well as workshops for writers hosted within these Houses, adopted new writers and critics into the family of late Soviet literature. To borrow from Boris Eikhenbaum, up‐and‐comers learned, in this particular habitat, “how to be a writer” (kak byt’ pisatelem) through processes of socialization, familiarization, and professional advancement. I trace three main aspects of writers’ adoption by focusing on the Dubulti DTP, operative from 1945 to 1991, in Jūrmala, Latvia. First, I examine writers’ social standing in the field of literature and its relationship to physical location in the Dubulti DTP: access to space was used to signal writers’ position within administrative and aesthetic hierarchies. Second, I demonstrate how the DTP enabled professional networking among writers of different origins and convictions. In addition to delineating various paths of professional progress within the Soviet system, the DTP environment allowed guests to map out, test, and even trespass the bounds of the licit through the circulation of ideas, artifacts, and information. Finally, I describe a genre of pedagogical interaction–literary workshops (the DTP‐hosted “seminar”)–that provided a social setting and professional format for delineating the Soviet ideological spectrum. Workshop interaction instructed writers on how to act professionally in a politically acceptable way and also configured a sense of familial community among writers of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. In sum, the chief consequence of the DTP was not the production of texts, but rather the structuring of habits and social strategies for those who authored, edited, and critiqued them.