Voices of enthusiasm : the mobilization of revolutionary emotion in Soviet literature and culture
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- "Voices of Enthusiasm: the Mobilization of Revolutionary Emotion in Soviet Literature and Culture" explores how revolutionary emotions were thematized and voiced in early Soviet culture. Since antiquity, the concept of enthusiasm has been applied to phenomena ranging from solitary inspiration to the collective consciousness of congregations, reading publics, warring nations, and revolutionary societies. It was in the early years of the Soviet experiment that enthusiasm was first propagated by the state as a core element of civic virtue and as an emotional disposition necessary for the attainment of political consciousness and the creation of a socialist society. Labor enthusiasm emerged as a key concept during the First Five-Year Plan, when Soviet psychologists were tasked with putting forth a model of the human mind that would both account for its "dialectical" nature and justify the intensification of labor required for the regime's ambitious industrialization campaign. Enthusiasm gave voice to a deep-seated utopian dream shared by many contemporary thinkers: to use the conscious mind to co-opt the energies of the unconscious one. A literary history of this cultural project, Voices of Enthusiasm examines how Soviet artists and intellectuals shaped and were shaped by notions of revolutionary affect. This dissertation focuses on two early Soviet writers: Andrei Platonov, a self-described "proletarian poet" and land-reclamation engineer from the provinces, and Mikhail Zoshchenko, a fellow-travelling satirist from the Petrograd artistic intelligentsia. Platonov and Zoshchenko were masters of skaz, a "tongue-tied" narrative style that, as the author argues, was used by Soviet writers used to portray the mental life of the "ascendant" lower classes. "Speaking in tongues" offered them a literary model for orchestrating the emotionally fraught, individual voices of their contemporaries into a transcendent whole. In the resulting verbal grotesques, Platonov and Zoshchenko countered party slogans with more nuanced pictures of the varyingly intoxicating and traumatizing experience of revolution, imagining alternative paths to the ideological and affective "reforging" that the Soviet regime was imposing by force.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Cieply, Jason |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. |
| Primary advisor | Freidin, Gregory |
| Primary advisor | Greenleaf, Monika, 1952- |
| Thesis advisor | Freidin, Gregory |
| Thesis advisor | Greenleaf, Monika, 1952- |
| Thesis advisor | Safran, Gabriella, 1967- |
| Thesis advisor | Skakov, Nariman, 1978- |
| Advisor | Safran, Gabriella, 1967- |
| Advisor | Skakov, Nariman, 1978- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jason Cieply. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Jason Andrew Cieply
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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