Proletarian Writers Research Articles

Russian Association of Proletarian Writers: Materials for the History of the Literary Organization

Russian Association of Proletarian Writers: Materials for the History of the Literary Organization

“To Brew a Prefabricated Medley of the Wreckage of All Groups”: The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers in the Federation of Associations of Soviet Writers

The Federation of Soviet Writers’ Associations (FOSP) is examined for the first time from the perspective of the sociology of the literary process. The traditional historical and literary question of who created the FOSP and why is replaced here by a more significant problem from the point of view of the literary process: why did the FOSP emerge in the conditions of competition on the market of literary production, who needed the FOSP most in the conditions of the market economy, and, finally, whether there was any prospect of the FOSP continuing to function after 1932. It is shown that the FOSP and its institutions, first and foremost the Federation publishing house, were the legitimate product of the NEP era and served the strategic goals of the Proletarian Union of Soviet Writers. Since the “genetic code” of the FOSP, like that of the Proletarian Association, belonged to the NEP era, the Federation had no chance of taking root in the economic and political conditions of the 1930s.

On the History of the Unpublished VAPP Reference Book “10 Years of Proletarian Literature” (1927–1928)

The article examines the history of the creation of the unpublished reference publication of the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP) “10 Years of Proletarian Literature”, which was conceived as a reporting work for the decade of the Revolution. The work on the handbook was initiated as a publishing project that accompanied the solution of priority tasks to strengthen the positions of the VAPP, which strives to become a control center that unites all regional and republican proletarian literary organizations around itself. Also related to the work on the handbook are the failed attempts to introduce the VAPP into the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN), which was initially entrusted with most of the work on the book. Approved by Glavlit in August 1928, the reference book was never published. The reasons for the cancellation of the publication are obviously related to the failure of the national policy of the VAPP — the unification under his leadership of all the proletarian literatures of the republics of the USSR did not happen by mid-1928; creation in May 1928 the RAPP, which actually replaced the VAPP, the reference book was not needed; in addition, the untimeliness of the book and the outdated material even before publication would have made it an easy target for criticism, which at the same time took up arms, at the suggestion of Gorky, against another similar publication of the State Academic Academy of Arts — the dictionary “Writers of the Modern Era”.

Ассоциация пролетарских писателей в Саратове как провинциальный эпизод в истории ВАПП

Saratov’s literary process in the New Economy Policy Period was defined by the small regional budget, the slow speed of documentation circulation, and the absence of distinct political guidance from the Party and literary censorship organs up to the mid-1920s, as the themes of the cultural agenda were often chosen by the trade unions. The regional Proletkult became the foundation for the Saratov Association of Proletarian Writers (SAPW). Until the moment the SAPW received the support of the central organs, it did not have sufficient energy for creative and propagandistic activities, which were left to the Proletkult. On gaining this support, the organisation became dependent on the guiding Moscow organs. The search for new ways for proletarian literature revitalised the academic study of literature in Saratov. A new group of literary scholars appeared, which brought new life to Saratov philology. A significant contribution to this was made by G. Lelevich.

От ВАПП к РАПП: к истории литературной организации

The article offers materials on the history of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP). The “line” of the movement from the Section of Proletarian Writers under the LITO of the NKP of the RSFSR to the organizational design of the RAPP at the First All-Union Congress of Proletarian Writers (1928) is considered. An attempt is made to present the processes taking place within the RAPP: organizational separation from the MAPP, the struggle against the Napost minority. The materials on the liquidation of the RAPP are analyzed, making it possible to see that the Organizing Committee of the SSP of the USSR could not do without the experience and accumulated literary practices of the RAPP.The history of the literary organization studied in the article allows us to cover the extensive material presented in documentary sources (statutory documents, transcripts, resolutions, memos) from the archives of the OR IMLI and RGALI, which is being released into scholarly circulation for the first time. The documents also allow us to reconstruct individual episodes in the biographies of writers in the period 1920–1930. The stated topic is one of the most important strategic directions in the study of the literary process of the twentieth century.

«Без божества, без вдохновенья», или как РАПП нашел себе работу в ФОСП

The history of the Federation of Organizations of Soviet Writers (FOSP) has so far only been studied through periodicals. Archival documents could explain the context, the driving forces, and the true motives of the actors of the literary process. The theoretical framework of the institutional approach seems to be the most suitable for considering the history of FOSP, which is inseparable from the history of the struggle of VAPP/RAPP (All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers / Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) for its share in the symbolic capital of the new Soviet culture. After the defeat of the Proletkult, the main financial and power resources were concentrated with fellow travelers. FOSP was needed to achieve VAPP’s hegemony on the literary front. VAPP used the communist faction of FOSP to manipulate the Press Section of the Central Committee. VAPP created a mass writer and a mass consumer of proletarian literature, provided conditions for the destruction of “groupism” in FOSP, ensuring the only suitable environment for the formation of a nationwide, homogeneous, mass writers’ union – the Union of Soviet Writers, controlled directly by the Politburo.

Конструирование единомыслия: Незавершенный проект РАППа по утверждению нового языкового стандарта

The article examines the discursive practices of the Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP/RAPP) as a form of breaking from the symbolic linguistic capital of pre-revolutionary Russia. Mass character, a fundamentally new feature of proletarian writers’ organizations, required the development of an institutional language – as a mechanism of control and suppression, as a language of ideological unanimity. The dictionary of literary criticism and the development of slogans that concentrated the language policy of the time (“Not a fellow traveler, but an ally or an enemy”) became the area of “rupture” and processing. This work began from the very first days of the existence of proletarian writers’ organizations and pushed aside all other issues, including aesthetic ones: any dispute, any discussion, ultimately, were disputes about words, for choosing the right nomination, the right referential apparatus. Later, the arsenal of mastered means of unification was replenished with the right taken by proletcritics to limit the “utterance function” – what can be said. The explanatory dictionary edited by Ushakov and Stalin’s work Marxism and Questions of Linguistics consolidated the destruction of the social and value discord of the word, and annihilated the people’s right to ideological disagreement.

M. Prishvin and A. Platonov: ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’

The article examines critical reviews of M. Prishvin’s novella Naked Spring [Neodetaya vesna] published in the journal Oktyabr in 1940. The scholar and literary critic L. Surovova describes an overall positive reaction to the writer’s chronicle of his trip to the Volga River: He travelled there to observe animals’ survival strategies during the seasonal flooding. The occasional negative remarks in the press invoked the harsh dispute of 1930, when the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers attacked Prishvin’s biographical novel Kashchey’s Chain [Kashcheeva tsep] and the novella Cranes’ Homeland [Zhuravlinaya rodina]. Their characters were castigated as proponents of a bourgeois ideology. The 1940 critical coverage contained, however, a rather scathing review by A. Platonov, whose strong dislike of Prishvin’s writing style was also rooted in this 1930s’ ideological dispute. Surovova suggests that this polemic arose from a clash between the two radically opposing mentalities — Prishvin’s ‘contemplative observer’ against Platonov’s ‘action-orientated’ approach — and resulted in an exchange on a critical as well as literary plane, namely, in Platonov’s novella A Great Man [Velikiy chelovek].

Unpublished Counterpublics: H. T. Tsiang’s Ellis Island Poems

Abstract The proletarian writer H. T. Tsiang worked and lived in the US under the constant threat of deportation since arriving in the country under the Johnson-Reed Act. This article examines a cache of poetry that Tsiang wrote in the Ellis Island detention center from 1940–1941 and mailed to the painter, book illustrator, and author Rockwell Kent. These poems, which are preserved among Kent’s papers in the form of a toilet paper manuscript, a make-shift chapbook, and typescript sheafs, were roundly rejected by publishers in Tsiang’s time. Yet they speak to his precarious immigration status and his long-term project of constituting proletarian readerships outside US publishing. Tsiang’s unpublished poems, I argue, composed a counterpublic of early Chinese American writing that grew from, and responded to, the conditions of exclusion.Having been detained on both Angel Island and Ellis Island, Tsiang was willing to take the “crooked path” into US cultural memory.

Лозунг «одемьянивание» как программа воспитания пролетарского писательства

The slogan of “odemyanivanie”, as a call to proletarian poets to learn from the poet and fable writer, agitator and propagandist D. Bedny was not a short-term campaign of the critics of the Association of Proletarian Writers, responding to the historical moment when the Association was looking for artistic ways to embody a new, properly proletarian content. The slogan of “odemyanivanie” accompanied proletarian critical thought for a whole decade, from 1923 to 1932, each time revealing a new educational, enlightening, ideological and political potential. In this way, Demyan Bedny's experience of working with the word was drawn into the sphere of literary struggle and political order, and the slogan itself changed its reference in response to the political and ideological peculiarities of the current time. From this perspective, the “odemyanivanie” slogan appears as a concentrated expression of the Association's literary policy during the years of its peak as well as in the moment of its decline.

M. Gorky’s correspondence with Kazan children

This article honors M. Gorky, the renowned proletarian writer, and considers his correspondence with Kazan schoolchildren and students of the Kazan Technical Plant in the 1920s and 1930s. So far, these letters have received little attention from researchers, but their value for raising young Soviet citizens in line with the new trends of Soviet education and state ideology is undeniable. Here, M. Gorky’s epistolary heritage and journalistic statements are analyzed, and 12 letters written to him by Kazan children are studied. The letters are available in the A.M. Gorky Archive of the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (AG IWL RAS) and introduced for the first time into the scholarly discourse. The analysis shows that M. Gorky was always considerate and thoughtful towards his young addressees so that he became a mentor to the younger Soviet generation. The survey reveals that the children’s letters have a rich informational and source potential. They provide a better insight into the psychological and social image of the Soviet people in the 1920s and 1930s. The results obtained are relevant to future studies on the epistolary and journalistic heritage of M. Gorky and add considerably to our understanding of the historical and literary process of that epoch. The epistolary materials involved in the study should be of interest to anyone curious about the Soviet period.

Индивидуально-авторский миф о Л.Н. Толстом в очерке М. Горького «Лев Толстой» (к вопросу о толстовском тексте в творчестве М. Горького)

In the article on the material of M. Gorky’s essay “Leo Tolstoy” elements of Tolstoy’s text as a named supertext of literature are considered. It is stated that the basis of this text is a myth about Leo Tolstoy, which has been actively developing for a century and a half, but takes on a particular relevance in the early 20th century during the popularization of the spiritual heritage of the writer and the understanding of his tragic departure from Yasnaya Polyana. The Tolstoy text in the works of M. Gorky is extensive, with mythologized constant representations appearing in almost all of the writer’s fiction texts. The intermediate result of the writer’s mythologizing of Leo Tolstoy’s personality was an essay about him with the same name. This research shows how exactly in this publicist text Gorky creates his own unique myth of Leo Tolstoy, which reflects both the particular attitude of his younger contemporary to the great Russian writer, and his own beliefs about the contradictions and ambiguities of the real genius. Attention is focused on the uniqueness of Tolstoy’s text in the work of “the first proletarian writer”. The Tolstoy myth, as any other myth, can have a sacred or profane nature, in the essay M. Gorky combines both directions.

PORTRAIT OF A RAPW PARTICIPANT: THE EXPERIENCE OF STUDYING QUESTIONNAIRES FILLED OUT BY MEMBERS OF ASSOCIATIONS OF PROLETARIAN WRITERS

Within the framework of the writer associations’ archives digitization project ‘Transcript’: Politics and Literature. The Digital Archive of Literary Organizations of the 1920s-1930s a significant array of questionnaires of proletarian writers was studied. The source is stored in the Department of Manuscripts of A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. At the moment, the project executors have digitized the questionnaires filled out by members of the Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers (MAPW), All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPW), All-Soviet Association of Proletarian Writers (SAPW), Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPW) and presented on the project’s website. The documents from RAPW fund were allocated separately. We have found information about the delegates of the First Congress of Proletarian Writers, held from April 28 to May 8, 1928 in Moscow. While analyzing the questionnaires, valuable information about the biographies and works of writers whose names were not included in encyclopedias and reference books was obtained. In terms of the sociology of the literary process the answers given by the respondents indicate important characteristics of those who had to build the culture of the socialism country. These questionnaires form the Big Data, representing the ‘average’ biography of the proletarian writer, the main actor of the literary process of 1920-1930. The generalized characteristic brings out specific features of the mass literature phenomenon in the context of the Soviet project, which was implemented by the proletarian literary associations. The statistical data open up prospects for further research of literary processes of this period in the anthropology field. The analyzing of the sources stored in the funds of proletarian writers’ associations will allow not only to see the actor of the literary process, but also to get closer to understanding the mass writer and mass literature of the Soviet era phenomenon.

LITERARY DIGITAL ARCHIVE AS CULTURAL PRACTICE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE (INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC AND PRACTICAL CONFERENCE)

The article presents an overview of the work of the international scientific and practical conference Literary Digital Archive as Cultural Practice and Social Experience, held on October 20, 2022 at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences and dedicated to the results of a research project carried out at IMLI with the support of a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RNF) - Transcript: Politics and Literature. Digital Archive of Literary Organizations of the 1920s-1930s. The essence of the project consisted in digitizing transcripts of meetings of proletarian writers’ unions and placing them in a specially prepared digital database. Turning to these sources allows the literary critic to focus on the functions of literary institutions: production, communication, consumption and distribution of material and symbolic goods. The speakers noted the prospects of an extensive path - the expansion of the material involved in digitization, and the intensive development of the project. The discussion of the results ended with general support for the idea of publishing the next volume of the Literary Legacy, dedicated to the history of proletarian writers’ unions, the output of which would crown the historical and literary research vector set by the project Transcript: Politics and Literature.

История Саратовской ассоциации пролетарских писателей: от периода формирования к конфликту

The peculiarity of Saratov literary process of the 1920s is determined by the facts that the local budget was insufficient to implement cultural initiatives, by slow paperwork, and by the creeping pace of accomplishing cultural initiatives. At the time in question Saratov played the role of a buffer territory, where all public figures from the capital suspected of non-conformism were sent. Thus, people noticed to be politically pro-opposition and favoring formalism, were delegated to the provincial town. It was presumed that the slow-paced life in the region will compel the critics G. Lelevich and V. P. Druzin to become more politically loyal towards the strategic direction of VAPP (All-Soviet Association of Proletarian Writers); and D. B. Ryazanov, an archiver, bibliographer, the first head of the Institute of K. Marx and F. Engels, would be distracted from his interest to Menshevism. According to tradition established in the 1920s, all the exiled (in some documents they were officially on business-trips) took part in counselling SAPP (Saratov Association of Proletarian Writers), later SARRAPP (Saratov Division of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers). The history of SAPP falls into two periods: the period of formation (1924–1927) when the former members of Proletkult became stronger and felt the power of their literary voice, and the mature one (after 1928), when the organization faced social, personal and literary conflicts, among other things related to the activity of the people exiled to Saratov. For the first time, Saratov sources are complemented by the documents from the Department of manuscripts of A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature and by personal letters from the archives of the Russian national library in order to recreate the history of SAPP. D. B. Ryazanov’s attendance of SAPP has been first established. It has been first shown that the essence of the conflict in SAPP is confined to the opposition of the groups of academics and writers.

Marxist Realism: Kobayashi Takiji and the Politics of Representation

This paper explores the cross-cultural dynamics and contradictions that surface when attempting to apply the universal claims of Marxist literary aesthetics to the particular case of a non-Western national tradition. More specifically, the key work of 1930s proletarian writer, Kobayashi Takiji (“The Factory Ship”) and his mentoring relationship to Marxist critic, Kurahara Korehito, will be analyzed by examining the tensions in trying to remain faithful to the universal, international claims of global Marxism, while also respecting Japanese historical and cultural particulars and conditions. Broadly speaking, the issues that surface in the Kobayashi/Kurahara relationship reflect inherent difficulties in maintaining metanarrative dimension of orthodox Marxism that belies its Western framework regarding world historical movements. The tension between the universal and particular poles of Marxism’s global vs Japanese context also frames parallel tension between the literary/aesthetic realm of art and its political content; remaining true to the former may bracket the assumed-to-be applicable state of the latter. In short, the question of the viability of a particular work of fiction’s realism (namely, its literariness) vs its fidelity to political orthodoxy, often articulated in terms of its form versus content. Finally, this tension between the universal global and particular national culture setting of Marxist literature and Marxist politics also may indicate a tension inherent within the revolutionary ambitions of idealist philosophy, namely Hegelianism. Stated differently, is Marxist philosophy itself a work of art/fiction – the utopic impulse of the classless society and worldwide revolution – at odds with the realities of specific historical and cultural conditions ‘on the ground’?

Russian modernist manifestos: the genre characteristics

The paper deals with the features and functions of Russian Modernist manifestos. It is shown that proletarian writers adopted, refined and used in a specific manner for their own purposes some of the techniques implemented in the Silver Age theoretical declarations. This may account in part for the active use of the originally political term “manifesto” in the Soviet literary studies. In critical works from recent years one can observe a departure from this tradition.

Battle in the Village: The Agrarian Ideology of Opposition in the Early Showa Period

Efforts by Japanese proletarian writers to forge class consciousness among urban industrial workers during the 1920s and 1930s are well documented. Long overlooked, however, are writers who viewed rural laborers as potential engines of revolutionary change. This article examines self-styled agrarian author Inuta Shigeru (1891–1957), who took up literature as a weapon against fascism, imperialism, capitalism, and urban-centric Marxism. It looks closely at Inuta's journal Nōmin (The farmer, 1927–33) and his suppressed novel Mura ni tatakau (Battle in the village, 1929). It also addresses Inuta's conflict with entrenched proletarian writers, which determined his legacy for nearly a century.

История создания и деятельности Новгородской ассоциации пролетарских писателей: вопросы и ответы

The history of the creation and activity of the Novgorod Association of Proletarian Writers (NAPW) is presented. Various sources were taken as the basis for characterizing the activities of the NAPW: firstly, documents from the State Archives of Novgorod Region and secondly, the journal “Litye”, published from 1927 to 1930 as an organ of the NAPW. For the first time, information about 15 active members of the NAPW, noted for their publications in Novgorod periodicals, is given. Some research questions remain unanswered and need to be worked out using the funds of other archives. Attention is drawn to the lack of documents that would confirm the legal status and membership of the participants of this literary association from the very beginning of its existence. At this time, no documents on the reorganization or infusion of NAPW into LAPW after 1927 in connection with the entry of the Novgorod province into the Leningrad region have been found. Related to this is the problem of determining the time frame for the existence of NAPW.

『일본 태양의 근원』과 소비에트 오리엔탈리즘

‘Asia and East’ was the old theme of Russian literature, but there are few works about real East Asian countries. Pilnyak’s novel Korni Yaponskogo solntsa was the first to describe real Japan in Soviet literature. Like Dante in the Divine Comedy, Hero-Pilnyak travels to a foreign space - Japan and tries to understand the roots of Japan.BR However, Soviet and Japanese proletarian writers criticized the exoticism of this story and unfairly assessed this novel. In addition, they compared this novel with Pierre Loti