Soviet Avantgarde and Industrialisation - Detailseite

This seminar will focus on the development of production literature genres (poetry, prose, and reportage) in Russian, Ukrainian, and other literatures of the Soviet Union during the late 1920s and early 1930s within the broader context of the formation of Stalinist culture in the middle and second half of the 1930s. From the second half of the 1920s, theorists of leftist art (“New LEF,” “New Generation”) worked on the concept of “literature of fact” and the theory of artistic reportage (B. Arvatov, V. Shklovsky, S. Tretyakov, O. Poltoratsky, M. Semenko). The objective of left-wing reportage was to transcend purely journalistic and travelogue genres while simultaneously emphasizing the role of “fact” in organizing artistic material. Since the early 1930s, the avant-garde practice of “industrial tourism” (Mansfield 2015) has been actively utilized as a significant ideological tool. Entire teams of Soviet writers engaged in “industrial tourism,” creating travelogues with a strict focus on delivering an ideologically reliable message (cf. M. Gorky’s project “The History of Factories and Plants,” “The I.V. Stalin White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal”).

Concurrently, from the late 1920s onward, the genre of the industrial novel emerged. Alongside narratives of transition and production, this genre incorporates other vital themes such as the catastrophe motif (Platonov's “Kotlovan”), ecological motives, and the topic of multiethnicity, all of which we will explore throughout the semester.