Frederick H. White

Tarzan in the Soviet Union

For an entire generation of Soviet youth, Tarzan was a provocative symbol of individualism and personal freedom. Previous scholarship has included Tarzan within the larger counterculture movement of the thaw period (1953–64), but has not specifically examined how this occurred. Joseph S. Nye has coined the term soft power to describe the ability to attract and to co-opt rather than to force another nation into accepting your ideals. Within this rubric, Tarzan’s presence in the Soviet Union was simultaneously entertaining and provocative. As literary fare in the 1920s, Tarzan represented an escape from war and revolution and was sanctioned as acceptable reading for Soviet youths. The celluloid Tarzan also represented an escape, but this time from the repressive Stalinist regime and the hardships of post-WWII Soviet society. Raised on both the books and films, a new generation of Soviet youth longed for the individual freedom that Tarzan came to represent. Tarzan’s impact in the Soviet Union is one example of western cultural infiltration that contributed to the idealization of American individualism over the Soviet collective within the Soviet Union.

Taxi Blues: The anxiety of Soviet masculinity

Using the lens of cultural analysis, this study examines Pavel Lungin’s Taxi Blues as one of the characteristic examples of perestroika cinema. The homosocial theme of the movie is explored in much detail, while using the available historical and comparative materials taken from Russian and Western cultural history. Taxi Blues traces the development of a relationship between a musician and a taxi driver during Russia’s perestroika period. The taxi driver ‘saves’ the musician from alcohol dependency, imprisonment, financial ruin and self-destruction, only to be forgotten once the musician achieves fame abroad. Their relationship demonstrates a reversal of fortune in which economic and social status is conflated with sexual identity. As such, the homosocial relationship of the two men is disrupted when their personal fortunes are reversed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The sexual overtones in the relationship implicitly evoke various cultural stereotypes (degenerate sexual behaviour, Jewish effeminacy) as well as inherent power dynamics (master and slave, teacher and pupil) to engage the explicit issues of social and economic status in a society that has been turned inside out by perestroika.

Cargo 200: a bricolage of cultural citations

Persistently revisiting the notion of a Godless society, Aleksei Balabanov directly dialogued with Fedor Dostoevskii’s cursed question and established a permanent touchstone for his own representations of Russia/the USSR, with the help of William Faulkner’s potboiler Sanctuary, in Cargo 200 (Gruz 200, 2007). Balabanov assembled a cinematic text for viewers, drawing on philosophical ideas articulated by the character Ivan Karamazov, filtered through a vulgar reinterpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche and constructed within the context of socialist realism’s own version of the Grand Inquisitor. Faulkner’s entire novel was forcibly relocated to the Soviet Union, where the degradation of the American South is offered as the wreckage of an industrial civilization tottering on the verge of collapse – or the late Stagnation period. Through the bricolage of Dostoevskii and Faulkner, Balabanov explores the realities of a Godless, morally corrupt Soviet society in which anything and everything is permitted. In so doing, Balabanov invites audiences to reassess Vladimir Putin’s new national unity that relied heavily on sanitized memories of a Soviet past, a Soviet Union that had demanded that citizens renounce personal freedom in order to enjoy collective economic and social stability.

Of Freaks and Men: Aleksei Balabanov's critique of degenerate post-Soviet society

Abstract This article argues that Aleksei Balabanovs Of Freaks and Men is a postmodern commentary on post-Soviet society, displaying the themes of voyeurism, pornography and perversion within the simulacrum of the Russian fin de siècle. This is substantiated by cultural quotations from Fedor Dostoevskii, degeneration theory and the St Petersburg myth in order to depict the demise of Russian civilized society, which will be saved by the West.

Peering into the Abyss : Andreev's Rejoinder to Tolstoi's Kreutzer Sonata

Abstract This essay argues that Leonid Andreev’s (1871–1919) short story “The Abyss” (Bezdna) is an important and often misunderstood response to Lev Tolstoi’s (1828–1910) novella Kreutzer Sonata (Kreitserova Sonata), representing a fundamental shift in the way that pessimistic philosophy and degeneration theory would be incorporated into the cultural, intellectual and literary discourse of the Russian fin de siècle. For Andreev, intellectual currents were suggesting that civilized society was under attack by forces beyond its control. Tolstoi, however, asserted that celibacy and mortification of the flesh could conquer humanity’s primitive urges. In response, Andreev animated popular theories on sexual degeneracy to reject moral restraint as an option against sexual aggression. This rejoinder is significant for many reasons, not the least of which as an important intellectual segue between Tolstoi and subsequent decadent literary discourse on sexuality. After all, morality was no longer solely resident within religious thought in fin de siècle Russia, especially in light of mounting evidence that moral insanity was the result of hereditary taints and biological regression. Consequently, “The Abyss” should be reinterpreted as an important intellectual bridge between what would be deemed high- and lowbrow literature on human sexuality at the turn of the century.

Zamiatin's fact and fiction: Andreev, Mrs. Fitzgerald and the 1905 revolution

Abstract The literary portrait is a specific type of memoir literature. It is usually a fragment of a larger memoir or a totally independent monographic portrait, written by a professional writer. Literary portraits are highly subjective, but it is accepted that they are based on fact, with some leeway for presentation. The portrait then sits uneasily on the border of fact and fiction but stakes its claim as a stylized or interpretive history of an individual. In this respect, literary portraits are relatively reliable sources of biographical information. In the case of Evgenii Zamiatin’s literary portrait of Leonid Andreev, however, the boundary between literary portrait and short story is violated. Zamiatin introduces into his portrait the fictional character Mrs. Fitzgerald from an earlier story, “The Fisher of Men.” The intrusion of a fictional character results in an entertaining memoir, but creates doubt about its factual accuracy. In Zamiatin’s case, it seems that the blurring of boundaries was done to distract readers from the fact that he did not know Andreev well enough to write a portrait. This contamination highlights one of the issues involved in examining the portrait as a literary genre.

Maksim Gorky: Selected Letters

It has been Gorkys great misfortune to be remembered mostly for the wrong things - for his apparent support of the Stalin regime; for his direct involvement in the foundation of the Union of Soviet Writers; and for the composition of the novel Mother (held up by generations of Soviet critics as the model for Socialist Realist fiction). With the advent of glasnost and perestroika, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet order itself, these conventional notions are at last becoming subject to a radical and necessary reappraisal in Gorkys native land. Yet, despite the steady stream of revisionist attitudes, the republication of controversial works long suppressed in Soviet Russia, and the publication of new material from the archives, the creation of a full biography is likely to remain a distant prospect for many years. The present volume has been conceived first of all as a sketch towards such a new biography. It contains 177 letters, written between 1889 and Gorkys death in 1936, and selected so as to allow Gorky to tell the story of his own life and reveal his hopes and fears, his observations and preoccupations over a literary career which spanned almost fifty years. Gorkys letters are of considerable interest on a number of levels: biographically; as representations of the development of Russian literature; in terms of the light they shed on many writers of the period (such as Lenin, Chekov, Tolstoy, and Pasternak) as well as major political figures (including Lenin and Stalin), and as period documents in their own right. Remarkable for its sheer immensity and the variety of its addressees, Gorkys correspondence provides a unique personal commentary on all aspects of Russian culture and society in the era of revolution, by one of the most fascinating figures of an extraordinary generation.