Stalinka Revisited

[Daniel Rancour-Laferriere]

17 Oct. 05

Dear Colleagues,
This afternoon at UC Berkeley I attended a lecture by Prof. Mark 
Lipovetsky of the University of Colorado, Boulder, on the topic 
"Strategies of Violence in Soviet Culture: Mythical and Divine."  I will 
not attempt to summarize the contents of this interesting scholarly 
lecture, which was delivered with considerable style and verve.  As can 
be guessed from the title, however, the topic had the potential to 
provoke some emotional distress in listeners, especially those listeners 
among the thirty or so people in the room who had survived Soviet 
violence (or who were close to said survivors, or who were just very 
involved in the study of violence in Soviet Russia).

After the lecture some questions came up which, although politely 
formulated, indicated that some emotional distress had in fact been 
provoked - for example, "are you not perhaps aestheticizing violence?"  
This was apropos of Lipovetsky's talk of "the discourse of violence" in 
certain literary works by Babel, Kharms, Zamiatin, and others, and his 
references to theories of discourse promoted by postmodernist 
theoreticians such as Derrida and Foucault.  What came next however, was 
an assertion that we can view the "discursive practices" of Vyshinsky on 
the same level as those of Mayakovsky, Babel, Zoshchenko....

Say what?  That's right, Vyshinsky's performances at the show trials are 
in the same discursive field with the performances of Mayakovsky, 
Zoshchenko, etc.  This sociopath, Procurator General Andrei Vyshinsky 
(1883-1954), sent countless human beings to their deaths with his 
"discursive practices."  Real people died real deaths because of him.  I 
doubt that any real people died real deaths as a result of, say, the 
"shows" put on by Vladimir Mayakovsky (excluding his suicide).

To place Vyshinsky and other Soviet political monsters like Stalin 
(remember Groys) in the same category with Babel, Zoshchenko, 
Mayakovsky, Zamyatin - is what philosophers would call a category 
error.  Or, if that seems an insufficient explanation, consider this 
analogy: to conflate the "discursive practices" of Vyshinsky and 
Mayakovsky is like confusing a snuff film with a film acted by 
professional actors.

Yes, it's the "Stalinka" problem all over again: foregrounding of the 
properties of discourse at the expense of human feelings (and by the 
way, the builders of that web site have STILL not offered us a 
justification for its name).

A more general topic for potentially productive discussion on SEELANGS: 
is it possible to continue the development of postmodernist theorizing 
about Russia without realistic regard for the massive traumatization and 
massive killings of human beings in Russia during the twentieth 
century?  I wish some of the postmodernist theoreticians on this list 
would stop lurking, would come out and explain to us old-fashioned 
philologists (and psychoanalysts) why postmodernist theorizing should be 
retained.  I am willing to change my mind if there are some interesting 
and convincing arguments put forth.

Best regards to the list,

Daniel Rancour-Laferriere
Emeritus Professor of Russian
UC Davis

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