katerina clark/socialist realism

“common stipulations for socialist realism were […] mandatory optimism, aesthetic conservatism, moral
puritanism, and partiinost” (3).

“the ‘positive hero’ is the key element that defines the tradition [of socialist realist literature]. The
positive hero encapsulates the cardinal public virtues, and his or her career over the course of the nvoel
symbolically recapitulates the nation’s progress toward communism.” (3)

“verbal code of the Soviet novel” (3)

“’heroes’ or ‘leaders’ function as human embodiments of, or emissaries from, a higher-order space.” (4)

“at the same time the Soviet state was ‘creating’ its new culture, it was also rebuilding its capital,
Moscow, as the symbolic center of the renewed nation.” (5)

“The entire country was organized in a hierarchy of spheres of relative sacredness, a cartography of
power. It was the task of socialist realism […] to present the public with its landmarks” (8)

the “valorized spatial binary, high-low […] informs the choices of many of the symbolic heroes who were
foregrounded in the rhetoric and ritual of the thirties, such as aviation heroes, who were said to go ‘ever
higher’” (9)

“the hero progresses in the novel from ‘periphery’ to some sort of center.” (10).

“a cliché of literature from the early thirties is the hyperbolic claim that ‘all of Moscow is under
scaffolding’” (10)

“only some sections of the capital were rebuilt, principally those in the center” (10)

“the privileged space in the symbolic system of socialist realism can have either a worldly import—
luxury—or a more sacred one. Or both can be there simultaneously.” (13)

because “it was operating in the modern secular world, […] the exalted in its culture was always in
danger of devolving into something of more mundane, material value.” (13).

“in literature the positive hero is […] at a fundamental level also an abstraction.” (14). “His or her
principal function is to mediate between the provinces (the periphery) and Moscow.” (14)

- whereas Platonov injects (impregnates) Moscow with the periphery (?)

“The role of the masses is to be forever in motion, striving to attain ‘Moscow,’” which is reflected in []
(14).

[in The Radiant Path] “white affirms the radical extent to which the quality of life has improved for the
worker. It is also symptomatic of the extent to which the heroic age of Marxist revolutionism in the
twenties has come to an end: realistically, a worker could not wear white” (15).

“leap from provincial backwardness (often underlined with scenes of muddy roads) to the glittering,
modern city” (15).
the metro
“The meeting with stalin may, as in tribal initiation, simultaneously serve as a kind of sexual initiation.
But Stalin (or some counterpart) sends the initiate out into the world to bear children and enter the
lifestream.” (16)

Naiman
The “numerous maimings of Stalinist heroes” in socialist realism is imitated and disfigured in Happy
Moscow (Naiman xii)

“masochism and symbolic filial castration in narratives that prioritize the potency of Stalin, the ‘Father of
Peoples.’” (xii).

“compensated for by a new, symbolic empowerment [..] informed by a sense of historical development”
(xii).

“discourse can transform life into a poster, producing subjects all too aware of the ideological
inadequancy of sham three-dimensionality” (xiii)

“lethal aestheticization of life” (xiv)

Moscow, the urban center, the “ world of record players and female parachutists,” is reflected in
Platonov’s depiction of Moscow’s empty life. (xi)

Feminine Prose

Brodsky: “Platonov turned the language of the Soviet state against itself” (3)

“implicates the reader morally and ethically in the values of the world he describes” (3).

“his vision ironically conflates the Christian-idealist notion of perishable flesh, which is usually help up as
evidence for the soul’s transcendence […] the corollary of that belief for Platonov is that the soul finds
itself condemned to inhabit a vessel which is itself subject to decay.” (4)

1. “His mind and soul, along with is monotonous body, were structured the same until death”
(100).

“gender, physicality and abjection” (4) (Kristeva; what is self and what is Other)

“In common with many other proletarian intellectuals, Platonov configured the ideal society in terms
hostile to femininity” (4).

“Gnostic utopia” (5)

“the alienated male reifies the female body and feminine identity to bolster his flagging ego. The
fragmented subject seeks to locate his wholeness […] in the absolute category of woman” (12). //
“Platonov’s heroes seek self-preservation in the simultaneous denigration and deification of the
category of woman” (12)

The mythologies at play are also more difficult to pin down because “language and the body […]
undermine the values of the text’s surface.” (15) [COMMENTARY]
the values of the NEP read as feminine included the “conspicuous consumption, transient pleasures and
egotism [which] took the place of abstinence, asceticism and the collective” (17) – [move to kulturnost
section]

Platonov “virulently expresses his horror not only at female participation in Stalinist society, but also at
the feminization of Soviet society which was undertaken in the name of kul’turnost’” (PRB 19).

the “innocuous analogy [of] the miracle of female emancipation as proof of the supremacy of socialism
is transformed into the textbook example of the male gaze” (137).

Ross-Bullock proposes that Platonov created Moscow Chestnova as “a tainted symbol of Stalinist values
[…] less an autonomous and joyously corporeal heroine than a projection of male desire and anxiety”
(138); she is/embodies the emptiness at the center of the novel [I don’t entirely buy this]

1. “Moscow opened the door of the airplane and did her step into emptiness; a fierce vortex struck
into her from below, as if the earth were the muzzle of a mighty blast engine inside which air is
compressed to hardness and stands erect, like a solid column; Moscow felt she was an empty
tube, being blown straight through and through, and she kept her mouth constantly open so she
would have time to breathe out this wild wind piercing point-blank into her.” (17)
2. Moscow represents a contorted view of gender equality; gender equality seen through
Platonov’s eyes

“selfish enjoyment of the privileges granted to the elect” (139) “regime intent upon fostering
respectability” (139).

Moscow’s overt sexuality is “implicitly cuckolding an ideological husband,” because her sexuality has
gone unsublimated for some greater cause. (PRB 140)

“the all-consuming commitment of masculine discourse to reshape the world (here, through the
heroism of Stalinist transformation and the race to technological perfection) and the compliance of a
supine feminine” (139)

The “heroism of Stalinist transformation and the race to technological perfection” (139) are a
“masculine discourse […] which would not consult her, would not concern her” (143)

Moscow Chestnova becomes “the object of a whole set of cultural assumptions about power, sexual
availability and self-definitions” (PRB 145) //

“masculine concern for itself” (145).

MEH

“faith debased by Stalinist compromise” (137)