"Doomed to great deeds" : Soviet literature and the Second World War
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Soviet writers created a huge volume of novels, short stories, poems, and historical works devoted to the Second World War. This dissertation argues that this large and multifarious body of work can be usefully understood in terms of a problem that every writer purporting to represent the past faced: what constitutes an "adequate" depiction of the past? This is to say that Soviet writers, like their American and Western European counterparts, were engaged with the problems and stakes of representing the catastrophic past in prose, even if the conditions under which they did so meant that theirs was writing "under duress." This dissertation argues that Soviet writing on the war can be understood as negotiating a spectrum consisting of two "modes"—the "mimetic" and the "metaphysical"—for depicting the past. The former, based on mimetic writing of the Remarquist type, was closely tied to veterans' desire to remember the war "as it really happened" and to shed ideological distortions. The latter, to some degree a reaction to the perceived inadequacies of this "mimetic" mode, was based on a "metaphysical" view of what the war meant and in particular on an attempt to get beyond appearances to some "deeper truth" of the event. This dissertation examines these modes through analysis of the works of five outstanding representatives of Soviet literature: Viktor Nekrasov, Konstantin Vorob'ev, and Svetlana Alexievich (exponents of the "mimetic" mode), and Andrei Platonov and Vladimir Sorokin (exponents of the "metaphysical" mode). This dissertation aims to contribute not only to our understanding of Soviet literature and its development and the methods Soviet writers developed to depict the war, but also to our understanding of the "limits of representation" and the ways in which writing "under duress" attempts nevertheless to depict the past "adequately." In particular, the difficulty in the Soviet Union of depicting the past, or aspects of the past, in certain ways, and especially the presence of an official aesthetic method, socialist realism, meant that Soviet writing about the Second World War placed special importance on "setting the record straight, " or getting to "the truth" of what happened on the Eastern Front. This elevated position of mimetic writing has important implications for our understanding both of the possibilities inherent in mimetic writing about the past and of the "metaphysical" depictions that set themselves against it.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Bush, Daniel |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Skakov, Nariman, 1978- |
| Thesis advisor | Skakov, Nariman, 1978- |
| Thesis advisor | Eshel, Amir |
| Thesis advisor | Safran, Gabriella, 1967- |
| Degree committee member | Eshel, Amir |
| Degree committee member | Safran, Gabriella, 1967- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Daniel Bush. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Daniel Marle Bush
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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