CFP: Romantic Subversions of Soviet Enlightenment

[Elena Gapova]

*CFP: Romantic Subversions of Soviet Enlightenment: Questioning Socialism's
Reason (Interdisciplinary Conference, Princeton, May 9-10, 2014)*

*Princeton Conjunction – 2014*

*An Annual Interdisciplinary Conference*

*ROMANTIC SUBVERSIONS OF SOVIET ENLIGHTENMENT:*

*QUESTIONING SOCIALISM’S REASON*

*May 9-10, 2014*

*Princeton University*

One year after Nikita Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech,”* Voprosy
Literatury (Literary Issues*), a new Soviet journal dedicated entirely to
topics in literary theory, history, and criticism, published an essay that
initiated a long-term intellectual discussion. In her article, Anna
Elistratova, an expert on the English romantic novel, directly challenged
the aesthetic doctrine of the post-Stalin period by asking, “When it comes
to the artistic perception of the world, can we really say that realism is
historically the only effective method we should rely on?” Was it not time
to admit, the essay continued, that the legacy of romanticism, with its
humanistic dreams and rebellious outbursts, could still offer an important
source of inspiration for progressive socialist art?



This initial challenge to the hegemony of realist art was followed by a
series of heated debates in 1963-1968 and 1971-1973. Drawing on European
and Russian aesthetic traditions, participants of the debates highlighted
such characteristics of romanticism as its propensity “to stare at the
darkness in order to discern new directions” and its emphasis on the
“absolute autonomy and uniqueness of the individual.” Within a few decades,
the status of romanticism had radically changed. From “literature’s
ballast,” romanticism  evolved into a symptom of “social emancipation.” By
the 1980s, dismissive descriptions of romanticism as “passive,
conservative, and reactionary” had ceded to a vision of it as a “revolution
in arts” that privileges dynamism, becoming, and spontaneity.



Today it is hard not to read these literary debates as an attempt to
reframe the role of the humanities in the USSR in the wake of the Terror,
World War II, and Stalinism. Ostensibly an esoteric philological
enterprise, these late-Soviet discussions used romanticism as a
historically available framework that could generate alternative versions
of identity, spiritual values, social communities, and relations to the
past.



Philological explorations of romantic tropes, of course, were only one
expression of a broader interest in reclaiming romanticism. In the 1960s,
newly publicized texts by Isaak Babel, Andrei Platonov, and Boris Pilniak
helped to reframe the Bolshevik Revolution, giving Communist Utopia one
more chance.  The reappearance of revolutionary romanticism was paralleled
by a host of other trends. Late Soviet cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare
and the theatrical productions of Alexander Vampilov and Viktor Rozov
highlighted the figure of the “problematic hero,” deeply attuned to
psychological nuance and the complications of being in the world.  Interest
in the occult and the mystical (facilitated by the publication of Mikhail
Bulgakov’s *Master and Margarita* in 1966) provided yet another ground for
destabilizing normative socialist-realist canons. A structurally similar
escape from the rationality of Stalinist neoclassicism was manifest in
various attempts to articulate a feeling of kinship with the natural world:
from the vagabond aesthetics of ‘tourism in the wilds’ and the
*bardovskii*chanson to the village prose movement, with its insistence
on cultural
rootedness and national belonging. Throughout the Soviet Union, romantic
nationalists offered alternatives to the unifying and universalizing notion
of the “Soviet people” via reinterpretations of folkloric motifs (in Sergei
Paradzhanov’s films), revitalization of the historical novel (through the
novels of Vladimir Korotkevich), revisions of ancient history (in Lev
Gumilev’s exploration of ethnogenesis), or reconceptualization of Marxism
(in Yulian Bromley’s theory of ethnos).  The rhetorical force of
romanticism had a profound impact on such key late-Soviet phenomena as the
communard movement in education, major construction projects in Siberia
(e.g. in Bratsk), or Soviet fascination with taming the atom and conquering
the cosmos.



Instead of reducing these romantic interventions to the status of
non-conformist versions of dominant Soviet aesthetics, our conference
proposes to view *sotsromantizm* as an autonomous (and relatively
coherent) *form
of historical imagination. This politico-poetical* configuration brought
together dispersive impulses, anarchic inclinations, psychological
introspection, and metaphorical structuring in order to repudiate the basic
Soviet conventions of normative rationality and mimetic sotsrealism.  In
short, this conference will approach the romantic imagination in the late
Soviet period as a form of critical engagement with “actually existing”
socialism.



While many  recent studies of late socialism are structured around
metaphors of absence and detachment, we want to shift attention to
concepts, institutions, spaces, objects, and identities that enabled
(rather than prevented) individual and collective involvement with
socialism. *Sotsromantizm* offers a ground from which to challenge the
emerging dogma that depicts late Soviet society as a space where pragmatic
cynics coexisted with useful idiots of the regime. The romantic sensibility
sought to discover new spaces for alternative forms of affective attachment
and social experience; it also helped to curtail the self-defeating
practices of disengagement and indifference.



We invite historically grounded and theoretically informed submissions from
anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and scholars of art,
architecture, cinema, literature, music, media, theater,  and popular
culture, and all those interested in investigating social and cultural
practices made possible by the late socialist appropriation of romanticism.
In particular, we welcome submissions that analyze the double nature of
*sotsromantizm*, understood both as a critique of the Soviet Enlightenment
and as an alternative form of Soviet socialism.  We especially encourage
submissions that explore instances and practices of romantic subversions in
non-Russian cultural and linguistic contexts of the socialist world.


Abstracts (300 words) and *short* CVs (no more than two pages) should be
sent to sotsromantizm at gmail.com  by January 20, 2014.

Those selected to present at the conference will be contacted in early
February 2014. Final papers will be due no later than April 15, and will be
posted on the conference website.

We may be able to offer a number of travel subsidies for graduate students
and participants from overseas.



*Program committee*:



*Serguei Oushakine*, Chair (Princeton University)

*Marijeta Bozovic* (Yale University)

*Helena Goscilo* (The Ohio State University)

*Mark Lipovetsky* (The University of Colorado at Boulder)
*Vera Tolz-Zilitinkevic* (The University of Manchester)

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