written with the bayonet: soviet russian poetry of world war twoby katharine hodgson

4
Written with the Bayonet: Soviet Russian Poetry of World War Two by Katharine Hodgson Review by: Roger Cockrell The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Oct., 1997), pp. 716-718 Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212504 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 12:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic and East European Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.106 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 12:56:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Upload: review-by-roger-cockrell

Post on 20-Jan-2017

216 views

Category:

Documents


3 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Written with the Bayonet: Soviet Russian Poetry of World War Twoby Katharine Hodgson

Written with the Bayonet: Soviet Russian Poetry of World War Two by Katharine HodgsonReview by: Roger CockrellThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Oct., 1997), pp. 716-718Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212504 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 12:56

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and EastEuropean Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic andEast European Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.106 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 12:56:07 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Written with the Bayonet: Soviet Russian Poetry of World War Twoby Katharine Hodgson

7I6 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

predecessors have already drawn together the political and aesthetic strands of the novel; secondly, her conception of the writer as a restless revolutionary, dissatisfied with the entropy of the Bolshevik Revolution (hence the title Revolution Betrayed), brings to mind the figure of Zamiatin, or possibly Trotskii, more readily than it does Olesha. Zamiatin's views on entropy and energy (explicitly mentioned on pp. II, 26, 46 and I52) have been extended by Tucker to the point where they become a universal cultural principle, applying to the entire Soviet creative intelligentsia, including Olesha, with the result that one of the most striking features of Envy -- its essential ambiguity is passed over in favour of a view of Olesha as, quite unambiguously, an intellectual enemy of the Soviet Marxist state (p. i 6).

Tucker's central argument may be questionable, but some of the points which she makes in advancing it are undoubtedly valuable. Among the sections which I found particularly illuminating were those on the classical and literary references in the novel and on the matter of gender, marriage and procreation. Despite a tendency to push comparisons to the point where they become tenuous (almost invariably sensed by the author herself and marked by her frequent use of parentheses and question marks to indicate the speculative nature of some of the points being made), Tucker does stimulate the reader to examine closely the many mythological and cultural references in the novel. Her suggestions about the underlying meaning of some of these references are frequently thought-provoking. Rather less satisfactory, in my view, are those instances where a perceived linguistic similarity is used as the basis for an argument, as when it is confidently asserted that 'poduska (pillow) invokes the word for soul, dus'a' (p. I I 2).

In the final chapter Tucker provides an interesting discussion of the similarities between the avant-garde visual arts of the revolutionary period and Envy, arguing convincingly that 'Olesa uses Envy to condemn not only the sterile determinism of the new society but also to point an accusing finger at those artists whose aesthetic theories and works actually hastened the domination of that determinism and, hence, of their own destruction' (p. 148). It is an argument similar to that of Boris Groys, and it serves as a useful if rather belated - counterweight to the earlier unquestioning acceptance of the wholly oppositional nature of the relationship between the creative intelligentsia and the Soviet state. Yet, asserting that 'Envy can at once be treated as a political commentary as well as an aesthetic masterpiece' (PP. I49-50), Tucker reverts to a simple oppositional model and fails to consider the possibility that the 'political commentary' within Envy might be as complex and ambiguous as other aspects of Olesha's masterpiece.

University of Sheffield ROBERT RUSSELL

Hodgson, Katharine. Written uwith the Bayonet: Soviet Russian Poety of World War Two. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, I996. 328 pp. Notes. Biblio- graphy. Index. ?3 2.00; LI 7.50.

As Katharine Hodgson writes in her Preface, there has been little critical reassessment of Soviet poetry of World War II. At a time when many people,

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.106 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 12:56:07 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 3: Written with the Bayonet: Soviet Russian Poetry of World War Twoby Katharine Hodgson

REVIEWS 717

in both Russia and the West, seem to be doing their best to erase all aspects of the Soviet period from their minds, this book performs a useful function in examining a neglected topic.

Hodgson's analysis identifies and explores the tensions and dichotomies which characterized art during the Soviet period. From the Soviet regime's point of view, poetry was by its very nature the most dangerous genre of all, since it was the least susceptible to rational analysis and therefore to ideological control. The study's underlying theme concerns the part played by art and the question of artistic autonomy in a totalitarian society during the traumatic and ironically liberating circumstances of war. Hodgson's specific aim is to explore the extent to which wartime poets took heed of Maiakovskii's famous exhortation to equate the pen 'with the bayonet' that is, to use their poetry as a weapon against the enemy in accordance with official expectations and to determine how far they were able to take advantage of this period of relative relaxation from ideological constraints.

After a wide-ranging chronological survey Hodgson turns, in the study's central section, to a detailed examination of three specific areas: the ideological impact of socialist realism on wartime poetry, the theme of the common man, and the role and contribution of women during this period. Finally, there is a discussion of the representation of the war in post-war poetry, together with a brief look at the poetry arising from the Afghan conflict.

Although the study as a whole succeeds admirably in fulfilling its aims, it contains a number of flaws. The decision to preface the thematic analysis with a chronological survey entails some repetition of material. In common, furthermore, with many such monographs which started their lives as dissertations, it is not always clear what type of readership is being addressed. We are told, for example, that 'In order to determine the ideological significance of Soviet poetry's representation of the hero, it is necessary to look at the literary method which was the main vehicle of ideological control socialist realism' (p. I34). And, a few pages later, that 'It is important in this context to note that the Russian use of the word "propaganda" has more positive connotations than the English equivalent' (p. 140). The difficulty here is that whereas such statements are clearly not for the specialist, the study as a whole is not obviously directed at either the undergraduate or the general public. In similar vein, only certain categories of reader will not already know that in Aleksandr Blok's Dvenadtsat' 'violence is an elemental force which sweeps away the past' (p. 23). On a few occasions the reader is confronted by sentences that play, at best, only a limited role in advancing the argument: we learn that Konstantin Simonov wrote a long poem, 'Ubei ego', 'counter- manding the commandment "Thou shalt not kill"' (p. 7 ); that bread was 'literally of vital importance to Leningraders' (p. 247); that critical disapproval of Simonov's poetry 'was no obstacle to its popularity' (p. I83); and that one Soviet war poem contains 'perhaps, a faint echo' of an earlier work by a British poet (p. 14).

Nevertheless, Hodgson not only openly confronts, but skilfully turns to her advantage the major difficulty entailed in writing a study on such a topic: the fact that many of the poems discussed possess relatively little artistic merit. Her decision to concentrate on poets such as Simonov, Tvardovskii, and

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.106 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 12:56:07 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 4: Written with the Bayonet: Soviet Russian Poetry of World War Twoby Katharine Hodgson

7I8 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Berggol'ts (on whom there is a particularly illuminating section) while paying less attention to writers who are better known in the West, such as Akhmatova and Pasternak, is by and large fully vindicated. Not the least of the merits of the book is the manner in which it places these poems within the broader context of the development of Soviet Russian literature.

Department of Russian ROGER COCKRELL

University of Exeter

Maryniak, Irena. Spirit of the Totem: Religion and Myth in Soviet Fiction, i964-i988. Edited by R. Russell. MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 39. W. S. Maney and Son Ltd, Leeds, I 995x + I85 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?25.00: $6o.oo.

SINCE the collapse of the Soviet Union in I 99 I, scholars both in the West and in Russia itself have attempted to analyse and assess the qualities and legacy of the hybrid called Soviet literature, and particularly its relationship to pre- I 917 Russian literature. In the West, recent years have seen the publication of new literary histories (Deming Brown, N. N. Shneidman), studies of history and literature (Rosalind Marsh), village prose (Kathleen Parthe), 'alternative' literature (Robert Porter) and the role of censorship (Herman Ermolaev), to name but a few. Irena Maryniak's monograph on the role of religion and myth in the literary consciousness of post-Stalin Soviet literature is a cogent and very well-researched and presented contribution to the field.

Dr Maryniak's approach is interdisciplinary, and concentrates on the role of religion in Soviet literature during the 'stagnation' years of Brezhnev's rule and up to the decisive moments of glasnost' under Gorbachev. Its rationale is perhaps best summed up in a sentence towards the end of the book: 'Between the mid- I 960s and I 988, religious motifs in Soviet fiction reflected a profound awareness of Russia's millennial past, and gave evidence of the persistence of traditional Christian values in the Soviet consciousness' (p. I 63). These motifs are traced through the work of Russian writers (Rasputin, Belov, Zalygin, Tendriakov, Bondarev, Granin) and non-Russians (Chebua Amiredzhibi and Chingiz Aitmatov).

The study begins with an exposition of the religious impulse and a definition of 'myth' through the work of Edward B. Tylor and Emile Durkheim, and throughout the study the author makes copious and consistent reference to these two writers. Russian religious thinkers from the Old Believers to Lev Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, Solov'ev and S. Bulgakov are also enlisted to present historical background and a formidable theoretical foundation. This is then followed by a brief but concise discussion of the major works of Soviet literature that take Christianity as their central premise: Master i Margarita and Doktor Zhivago.

Separate chapters are devoted to several writers: Rasputin, Aitmatov and Tendriakov, on whom a substantial body of critical writing already exists, and Daniil Granin, Sergei Zalygin and, most intriguingly, the Georgian Chebua Amiredzhibi, on whom it most certainly does not. The concluding section details the relevance of religion in modern, post-Soviet Russia, with the rise of

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.106 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 12:56:07 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions