Key to understanding this book is the term “the field,” which builds off the theoretical language of Pierre Bourdieu. In Bourdieu's world, the field is a set of shared cultural conditions, which shape a writer's creative possibilities, but cannot be reduced to institutional control. To select the lens of the field—in the context of Soviet literature—is an important claim in and of itself. It is to propose that Soviet literature arose from a complex creative process involving multiple dynamics that include but also exceed the pressure of party guidelines and censorship. Others have made this core claim before, especially when discussing post-Stalin Soviet culture. Here one can feel the influence of Alexei Yurchak, whose work Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (2006) is cited in this volume. Yurchak's proposal that the very rote, ritualistic layer of public Soviet speech coexisted beside a level of play and creativity reappears in this volume through the notion of Aesopian or double-coded language. In the essay by Dalia Satkauskytė, Aesopian language in Soviet literature “provides for the possibility of heterodox thought” (23).
In distinction to Yurchak and other scholars, however, this volume goes beyond Russocentricism and asks how different lingual and geographic contexts shaped literary dynamics in the Soviet era. Indeed, the articles show that we cannot merely speak of the Soviet literary field in the singular, but that each cultural habitus added different pressures and resources. Evgeny Dobrenko presents this argument in his essay, “Soviet Multinational Literature.” He explores how Central Asian literatures developed along a very different trajectory than did east European literatures, because of their pre-Soviet traditions and because different aspects of eastern versus western culture were deemed valuable under Stalin. Comparisons among the different essays in this volume also support the notion of cultural particularity. Whereas Valentyna Kharkhun shows how Ukrainian writers activated postmodernist gestures like Bu-Ba-Bu (burlesque, balagan, and buffonada), irony, and punk invective in order to rebel against Soviet formulas, rebellion in Lithuania seems—according to the essays in this volume—to be almost always about defending national identity.
The discussion of Lithuanian literature deserves extra consideration, since over half of the volume is dedicated to the topic. These essays are valuable in that they inform the English-speaking world about Soviet Lithuanian writers, like Justinas Marcinkevičius and Eimuntas Nekrošius, whose work deserves to be better known outside the region. As a shortcoming, some of these essays reify an ethno-nationalistic historical narrative, without subjecting it to sufficient intellectual or ethical scrutiny. For instance, Dalia Satkauskytė describes the desirable, authentic, or subaltern topics of Lithuanian Soviet Literature—that which the writer seeks to express but must hide from the censors—as follows: “The nation, its history, Lithuanian statehood, the occupations of the country in 1940 and 1944, the postwar anti-Soviet resistance” (26). Given that Satkauskytė shows such subtlety of thought in other arenas, it is jarring to encounter “the nation” as an unproblematized staple of her language. Even more jarring, this compact national narrative erases the Holocaust, the Nazi occupation, and the role of some Lithuanian nationalists in these events as well, entrenching a timeline that skips from 1940 to 1944. In a similar vein, Donata Mitaitė writes an eloquent essay full of graceful translations, “The Experience of One Generation of Soviet Poets, Their Illusions and Choices,” about a cohort of writers who grew up in the 1930s. Focusing on how these writers were “a product of pre-war Lithuania,” her narrative moves from their memories of the 1930s to their negotiations with Soviet authorities after World War II. Mitaitė conducts interviews with several writers. Seemingly, a personal interview would provide an opportunity to foster self-questioning, to press cultural leaders on uncomfortable topics, rather than echoing euphemisms about “the spiritual trauma of the war and postwar period” (119). The avoidance of direct discussion of the Holocaust in these essays, and the position of Lithuanian writers towards it, is not a marginal factual oversight: it affects the very conceptual underpinnings of these essays, heroizing rather analyzing one's national history. Aušra Jurgutienė, another scholar in this volume, paraphrases the approach of one rebellious literary critic: “Good criticism should disable the fossilized conventions of aesthetics and disrupt the Soviet author's tranquil life” (151). Indeed, the essays on Lithuania could have done more to “disable the fossilized” literary-national narratives of their current environment. Especially in a volume that investigates the very notion of intellectual defiance, this feels like a missed opportunity.
There are some exceptions to this point of critique. Nerija Putinaitė summarizes a scene in the “atheist autobiography” of Jonas Ragauskas in which he remembers the “execution of Jews during the Second World War” (64). She could have taken this analysis further and clarified whether this startling segment falls under her rubric of “atheist propaganda,” as Ragauskas's book becomes, as a whole, a valuable “deviation with respect to doctrinal truths” (77). The essay by Vilius Ivanauskas makes important strides towards modeling a multi-ethnic literary field. He dedicates a section of his essay to “Other Ethnic Groups” within Lithuania, Jewish, Polish, and Russian writers among them (49). It seems that this multi-ethnic awareness, challenging the homogeny of the nation-state, could have been better integrated into the rest of the volume.
The essay by Pavel Arsenev, “State of Emergency Literature: Varlam Shalamov vs. ‘Progressive Humanity’” stands out, in that it broaches questions relevant far beyond the Soviet or Russian literary spheres. Arsenev explores literature that “establishes a state of emergency” (193), literature that strips down the rules of style and consumption in order to act as a material object, proof of its own existence. He weaves playfully through sentimentalism, realism, and literature of fact before arriving at the work of Varlam Shalamov, the Soviet convict, who attempts to turn his writing into “‘life itself’ taking on the features of naked life (Agamben)” (199). Arsenev writes in a poet's prose and I found myself captivated by his own “pragmatics” of writing. On the whole, this volume is a worthwhile read, in that it maps new literary territory and cultivates important conversations that deserve further debate.
