Seanan Dunne (260526708)

Take Home Exam

RUSS 330

Prof. Beraha

December 14, 2017

3. Time

Models of linear progress have been central to ideologies that shaped Russia’s political

and literary utopia complex. In this model, history had a teleological endpoint towards which

society was advancing. This manifested itself most significantly in the logical positivism of the

Soviet project, which viewed itself as being scientifically bound to reach the logical utopian end

point of communism. Linear, teleological views of history influenced time orientation in Russian

utopian and dystopian literature, from works that became part of the Soviet canon like

Chernyshevsky’s ​What Is To Be Done? ​to subversive dystopian texts like Zamyatin’s ​We​. Both

present a linear model of progress in their time orientation, Chernyshevsky shows the “here and

now” of becoming in the present, the process of utopian construction itself, whereas Zamyatin in

seeking to expose the totalitarian potential of Bolshevik ideology doesn’t reverse the time

orientation but inverts it, or rather, shows how notions of progress are often relative when the

logic of progress advances to its ultimate end, achieving hell (dystopia) as opposed to heaven

(utopia). However, not all of Russian literary utopia and dystopia follows this time orientation,

this is especially true of post-Soviet texts that sought to problematize the teleological Soviet

worldview and challenge conventional time and space orientation in literature. Tolstaya’s ​Slynx
flips the model of linear progress on its head; in its time orientation the past is progress, the

present is regression and the future is barbarism. While problematizing and transforming time

orientations is characteristic of postmodern Russian literature, a similar twist on the time

orientation of the 19th century radicals and the Soviet project is found in Chayanov’s ​Peasant

Utopia​, which (as Soviet critics themselves argued) disregards the logical positivist model of

social advancement that was grounded in Marxist-Leninist historical materialism. Chayanov, like

medieval and early modern millenarians, sees the utopia as a future return to an idyllic past,

rather than advancing towards the end of history where the height of technological and social

scientific advancement have been achieved.

That Chayanov’s utopian text clashed with the official Soviet ideology is obvious in the

Soviet-approved foreword to the novel by P. Orlovskii, who bluntly states his purpose is to show

how the ideals of the novel are “utopian and reactionary.”1 Here Orlovskii means utopia in its

classical sense, in which the ideal place exists in some mythical past or outside of time and space

entirely. This utopia is “reactionary” because through the Soviet lens its time is oriented

backwards, rather than looking forward to the inevitable teleological endpoint of communism

achieved through linear technological and social progress, it looks backwards towards an

idealized peasant past. It does not, in the words of Orlovskii, “depict that future social structure

which should result from objective historical development.”2

In the time orientation of Chayanov’s ​Journey to the Land of the Peasant Utopia ​the

protagonist journeys from the present to the future which embodies the perfected past. The

perfected past is rural, which in the Russian context reflects how ​Peasant Utopia ​is ​“not merely

1
Chayanov, Alexander. [1920] 1976. The Journey of my Brother Alexei to the land of the Peasant Utopia.
Journal of Peasant Studies, ​4(1), 65.
2
Ibid.
an anti-urbanist tract, but distinctly neo-Slavophile.”3 Like his Slavophile predecessors his

utopian vision combines an idealized past and future, placing it outside of the time orientation of

linear progress. By placing itself outside of this orientation it becomes as Heller and Niquex

argue a “counter utopia,” that is an alternative u​topian vision to that of the Bolsheviks.4

​The urban/rural opposition that was central to Russian political and literary discourse is

solved in Chayanov’s utopia by the complete victory of the rural, the model of development

predicted by Marxist-Leninist historical materialism is reversed, the proletariat becomes the

peasantry as opposed to the “proletarianisation of the peasantry.”5 According to Marxist-Leninist

ideology this proletarianisation was to be driven by the “growing landlessness” of the peasantry;6

however, in Chayanov’s utopia the peasantry has reformed its bond with the land (in the

counter-utopia this is liberating, whereas in the Soviet conception this bond is the “complete

enslavement of man by the soil”).7 This bond was idealized in Slavophile discourse, which saw

the traditional ​mir ​as the ultimate collective social unit. Cities are disbanded in favour of the

decentralized social unit of the village in the post-revolutionary utopia.

However, while revolutionary change is achieved and society is reordered dramatically

according to an anti-urbanist vision, as Raskov argues the new society is missing the “universal”

master plan that is ubiquitous to Socialist utopia, further placing outside of the norms of the

radical utopian genre.8 In Chayanov’s utopia the large agricultural yields aren’t brought about by

3
​Clark, Katerina. 1985. The City Versus the Countryside in Soviet Peasant Literature of the
Twenties : a Duel of Utopias. In A. Gleason, P. Kener, R. Stites​ ​(eds.), ​Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and
Order in the Russian Revolution​. Haute Terre, IN : Indiana University Press, 181.
4
​Heller, Leonid and Michel Niqueux. [1995] 2003. Utopia v Rossii (Utopia in Russia). St. Petersburg :
Giperion, 197.
5
Chayanov, Peasant Utopia​, 6 ​ 5.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., 66.
8
Danila Raskov, Socialist Agrarian Utopia in the 1920s: Chayanov, ​Œconomia​, 4-2 | 2014, 123-146.
large scale planning and technological sophistication but by maximizing human energy and

dedication, by “practically looking after each ear of grain individually.”9 This again looks to an

idyllic vision of old Russia, where ancient peasant wisdom is superior to the technological

advancements and logical planning usually associated with future progress. As Minin, Alexei’s

guide, states: “In fact, we had no need for any new principles; our task was to consolidate the

old, centuries- old principles on which from time immemorial the peasant economy has been

based.”10

The return to the old is also seen in the aesthetic of the utopian world, where objects are

in the style of “Russian antiquity,”11 and where traditional art is admired as opposed to the

militantly political and anti-traditionalist styles of the avant garde and socialist realism (while the

latter may have borrowed extensively from tradition in aesthetics, in its ideology it was explicitly

revolutionary and future-oriented): “After the era of the great revolution, when futurist painting

was utterly disruptive of old traditions” comes the return to the realism of Brueghel.12 Past and

present are synthesized in culture just as in social planning.

Chayanov’s text was a product of Russian revolutionary culture in its early period, when

cultural exchange of ideas was still relatively free and a diverse range of utopian visions

competed for ideological supremacy. By the late 1920s all of these competing utopias and

“counter-utopias” were suppressed by by Bolshevik ideological hegemony, pushed to its

totalitarian extreme by Stalin’s social and cultural revolution in the 1920s and 1930s. While the

USSR would undergo periods of cultural thaw, as under Khrushchev in the late 1950s and early

9
Chayanov, Peasant Utopia, 66.
10
Ibid., 69.
11
Ibid., 75.
12
Ibid., 77.
1960s, this ideological hegemony and its teleological worldview would characterize the USSR’s

cultural life up until Glasnost in the late 1980s and its collapse in 1991. Culture and cultural

orientations of time, space and identity were completely upended, this event was so important

that every cultural product that came after became “post-Soviet.”

Tolstaya’s novel ​Slynx​ embodies this post-Soviet genre, not only was it directly shaped

by the author’s experience of Glasnost, collapse and the “shock therapy” of the 1990s but it

directly comments on the failure of the Soviet project and problematizes its teleological

narrative. She reverses this ideological time orientation completely, the Soviet march towards

progress becomes a degeneration into barbarism. In this new orientation past has become

progress which ended in failure, the present, and leads to barbarism, the future. However, even

the achievements of the past are ridiculed by the pathetic nature of their survival through the

efforts of the oldeners. They cling to objects that represent this lost era that came to an

ignominious end with “the blast,” this fetishisation of old cultural objects reaches its most absurd

moment at the funeral of Anna Petrovna, where she is buried with a manual for a meat grinder.

The remnants of the old social order and intelligentsia are also ridiculed, in his funeral speech the

“dissident” Lev Lvovich throws around ideologically loaded terms that have become empty

signifiers, a clear commentary on Tolstaya’s part on the increasing irrelevance of the Soviet

intelligentsia and dissidents in the anti-intellectual and money focused world of the 1990s. Even

the intelligentsia themselves have lost all sense of purpose, Lev Lvovich constantly talks of the

need for “xeroxes” without any indication of what he would do with them, and who would read

whatever is copied.
 Even after a “revolution” is led by Kudeyar Kudeyarich no progress is made, rather there

is a reversal to an even worse despotism. Kudeyar Kudeyarich claims to be following the

classical path of revolution: “That's how revolution is always done: first the tyrant is overthrown,

then the new Boss of everything is named, and then come civil liberties.”13 However, it becomes

clear that these are empty signifiers as well, showing that all that survives of the old order is its

ornamentation, the ideas once signified have withered away as knowledge slowly dies, replaced

by a false knowledge that only legitimates the continued rule of ignorance.

While the world of the ​Slynx ​does seem to be degenerating into barbarism there is initial

hope in the protagonist Benedikt, who seeks to reacquire old knowledge through reading (the

classic narrative progression of the Bildungsroman). However, this hope is dashed and revealed

to be false by Tolstaya. ​Slynx​ becomes an anti-Bildungsroman, not only is the time orientation of

social progress reversed but so is the time orientation of the narrative itself. The blast has

rendered the knowledge in the “old print” books meaningless for the post-blast generation, the

substance of the books that Benedikt devours greedily is completely lost on him.

Whereas the classic of Russian dystopia, Zamyatin’s ​We​, ends hopefully, the

hopelessness and barbaric nature of ​Slynx’s ​world is entrenched by the novel’s end. This reversal

of the Soviet teleology takes the dialectic of progress and replaces it with the dialectic of

degeneration, in an ironic perversion of the scientific certainty of Soviet ideology it is certain in

Tolstaya’s dystopian world that society will continue to decline as humans become more

barbaric. Society has become stuck in an endless degenerative cycle of, as Nikita Ivanich

says,“ignorance, self-importance,” and “stagnation.”14

13
Tolstaya, Tatyana. 2007. ​The Slynx​. New York: NYRB Classics.
14
Ibid.
 Both ​Peasant Utopia​ and ​Slynx​ create unique time orientations that differ from the norm

of the linear time orientation presented in Russian political and literary utopia and dystopia of the

19th and 20th centuries. ​Peasant Utopia​ offers a “counter-utopia” to the Bolshevik vision that

came to dominate, instead of being future-oriented and looking towards the creation of a new

society based on technological progress that will destroy the old order it seeks to synthesize old

and new, creating a utopia that stands out of time as both future and past. ​Slynx​ seeks to reverse

the linear progress time orientation, making the future a regressive degeneration of the

progressive past and the present the inevitable continuation of this decline. Both critique the

Soviet project, ​Peasant Utopia ​in its early stage and ​Slynx​ in its aftermath, and their unique

twists on time and spatial orientation give their critiques full breadth and weight.
 Bibliography

Chayanov, Alexander. [1920] 1976. The Journey of my Brother Alexei to the Land of the

Peasant

Utopia. ​Journal of Peasant Studies​, ​4​(1) :63-108.

Clark, Katerina. 1985. The City Versus the Countryside in Soviet Peasant Literature of the

Twenties : a Duel of Utopias. In A. Gleason, P. Kener, R. Stites​ ​(eds.), ​Bolshevik

Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution​. Haute Terre, IN : Indiana

University Press.

Heller, Leonid and Michel Niqueux. [1995] 2003. Utopia v Rossii (Utopia in Russia). St.

Petersburg : Giperion.

Raskov, Danila. Socialist Agrarian Utopia in the 1920s: Chayanov, ​Œconomia​, 4-2 | 2014,

123-146.

Tolstaya, Tatyana. 2007. ​The Slynx​. New York: NYRB Classics.