Disseminating Moldovan Identity:Moldovan W!ters and "eir Au#ences du!ng Stalin%m

Petru Negură, Dr.

The audience(s) of the Moldovan Soviet Literature during Stalinism

(1928-1940 / 1940-1953)

The target audience: the workers (urban and rural)

The real audience: the educated readers (teachers, students, komsomol members, etc.)

Main (hypo)thesis

These two audiences reflect the binary structure of the Moldovan literary

milieu and the contents of the literary output during Stalinism. They also explain the evolution of that milieu.

1924-1940 - the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR)

1940-1941, from 1944 - the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR)

1918-1940 - Bessarabia - a Romanian province

The consulted sources

The Party CC and the Moldovan Writers' Union's Archives

Interviews with writers and villagers (born in the late 1920s)

A body of 150 literary texts (100 poems and 50 in prose)

The Moldovan "workers" as "target audience"

An object of the Bolshevik official discourse: to be "emancipated," transformed, educated...

Enlightenment, Marxist, and narodnik ideals of the "New Man" (and masses as history makers)

"National-cultural building,""cultural revolution,"and the "engineers of the human soul"

The Soviet (Moldovan) literature: narodnost' and partiinost'

The kolkhozy and kolkhoz workers as literary themes and characters

The writers and kolkhoz workers: a missed meetingThe literacy rate in the MASSR:

1926: 63% - illiterates

1937 - 85% - literate, including 20% half-literates

The rural, elderly, female population: the less educated

1924-1940 - 4 linguistic reforms in MASSR

Literacy campaigns and literary soirees in factories and kolkhozes

In Bessarabia, in 1941, more than 50% - illiterates

The literary meetings in kolkhozes in MASSR

The "literary soiree" in Ternauca village, in october 1929: a failed meeting

To elevate the "working people" to the level of the literature or to adapt the literature to the educational level of the "people"?

In the 1930s - the writers' visits in kolkhozes - a current practice, then a routine

An unpopular "popular" literature

1935, in the Kotovski distrikt, only 4 % from the planned amount of books were sold

1935, in the Ghedirim village, from 1300 books in the village library, 463 in Moldovan - 40 books (in Moldovan) were borrowed for reading (30 by pupils, 6 by kolkhoz workers)

1935, in the Rîbnița district, in the city school library - only 9 books in "Moldovan", no books in "Moldovan" in the kolkhoz libraries and the Rîbnița sugar factory; in the whole district - only 6 subscriptions to the Octombrie review

1935, in Tiraspol, 1695 volumes of Octombrie review and 1010 of Scînteia leninistă were to be "recycled."

The ambiguous status of the "real audience"

Young teachers, students, komsomol members, selkors, and rabkors, actively involved in literary activities (literary circles, literary meetings / soirees, reading houses, correspondence with the Writers' Union and Octombrie review, writing literature, criticizing the "professional" literature etc.)

A pool of new recruits for journalism and the Moldovan Writers' Union

Tinerimea, the young writers' group (within MWU), 1930

The literary audience in Soviet Moldavia after '44: further stratification

From the late 1940s, young educated people claim progressively a literature designed for their interests, reference universe, "horizons d'attente"

From early 1950s, the first stories in prose written for young professionals, teachers, journalists - self-referentiality

The "peasant" prose reinvented (Ion Druță)

The literature for children

Instead of conclusion:

The stratification of the literary audience reflects the double aim (and logic of action) of the Moldovan literary milieu:

The "social demand" (to educate and to trasform the "working people")

The aesthetic vocation / function (to instill an aesthetic feeling)

The sub-field of large-scale production vs. the sub-field of small-scale production (P. Bourdieu):

The existence of a "real" audience: a premise for literary autonomisation

Epilogue

The "real audience" as mediator between writers and the "target audience"

The Moldovan literature became a "mass literature" starting from the 1950s, due to its "real audience" (esp. teachers) who spread it through schooling.