Inhabiting Socialist Realism: Soviet Literature from the Edge of Empire

Abstract

This dissertation examines the development of Uzbek literature across the 20th century, using it as a case study to analyze how Russian Socialist Realist models were imitated and adapted to local contexts in the non-Russian areas of Soviet Union. Throughout this dissertation I argue that Uzbek 20th-century literature contained what I call an “archetypal plot.” That archetypal plot, throughout the duration of the Soviet period, hybridized with, underwrote and undermined, and eventually displaced what Katerina Clark (2000) has called the “master plot” of Socialist Realism. This dissertation highlights the interaction of these two plots—archetypal and master—in an effort to demonstrate how non-Russians of the Soviet Union “inhabited” Socialist Realism. With my use of “inhabit,” I invoke Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of habitus—the totality of structures which govern and generate human practices; a habitus limits the diversity of human practices without determining them or their results. Russian litterateurs created Socialist Realism and its master plot on the basis of Russian literary history and culture. The Russian variant of Socialist Realism came to exercise a hegemony over the literary practices of non-Russians throughout the Soviet Union, but Socialist Realism, because it was to be a universalizing, totalizing project, required non-Russian participation. It required non-Russians to inhabit its Russian-born literary rules, prescriptions, and ideological content. In inhabiting Socialist Realism, non-Russians were limited by those rules, but their literary creations were not determined by them. Their inhabitation of Socialist Realism saw them realize their own versions of the literary phenomenon. Reading Russian modular texts through the prism of their own literary traditions, non-Russians arrived at very different results than their Russian counterparts. An exploration of how non-Russians, in this case Uzbeks, inhabited Socialist Realism sheds new light on the success or lack thereof of Socialist Realism’s universalizing, totalizing project. This dissertation is divided into six parts: an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction sketches and theorizes the archetypal plot and the master plot, establishes the two plots’ relationships to literary modernity, and outlines how the dissertation reads the relationship of Uzbek litterateurs to the Russian Socialist Realist literary models they received from Moscow. The first chapter examines the birth and development of the archetypal plot in Azerbaijani and Uzbek literature from the 1890s through to the beginning of Stalinism. It includes a look at the birth of irony and parody in the archetypal plot. Chapters two through four turn to the archetypal plot’s sixty-year-long interaction with the Socialist Realist master plot and its constituent elements. Chapter two argues that with his 1934 novel Mirage, Uzbek author Abdulla Qahhor sought to hybridize the archetypal and master plots. Chapter three examines Uzbek literature of the 1970s in the broader context of all-Soviet literature of that time. It argues that at this time we see the reemergence of the time of the archetypal plot—a cycle of decline, death, and rebirth—in Uzbek literature. Chapter four argues that the fall of the Soviet Union enabled a return of the archetypal plot, as authors used it to articulate a new post-Soviet national identity. The epilogue briefly reviews the findings of the dissertation and speculates on the future of the archetypal plot as a new generation of Uzbek intellectuals comes of age to interact with it.