Worker Correspondents:

Between Journalism
and Literature
JEREMY HICKS

W hile journalism is often seen as the antithesis of literature, the two enjoyed a close
and productive relationship in the Soviet Union in the decade following the Revolution.1
The influence of the Bolshevik press was key to Red victory in the Civil War, and much of
Bolshevik journalism’s power stemmed from its application of literary methods to factual
genres and harnessing of literary talents such as Vladimir Mayakovsky.2 Early Soviet
journalism’s innovative emphasis upon the presentation of factual material for political
persuasion rather than information was the inspiration for remarkable 1920s cultural forms
such as Dziga Vertov’s revolutionary newsreel and the ubiquitous newspaper feuilleton.3
Yet this groundbreaking approach to propaganda was not the most unusual feature of
1920s Soviet newspapers. This honor belongs to journalists’ active solicitation of readers’
letters leading to “a volume of mail probably unprecedented in world history.”4 By 1922
such letter-writing had been christened the movement of “worker correspondents” (rabochii
korrespondent, or rabkor). For writers Mikhail Bulgakov and Mikhail Zoshchenko the
torrent of correspondence furnished source material for stories of disputes in restaurants,

1
Kate Campbell, “On Perceptions of Journalism,” in Journalism, Literature and Modernity: From Hazlitt to
Modernism, ed. Kate Campbell (Edinburgh, 2000), 1.
2
See Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, 2nd rev. ed. (Edinburgh, 2000), 211 (“One of the major White
weaknesses was a failure to match the scale and quality of Bolshevik propaganda”); Roger Pethybridge, One
Step Backwards Two Steps Forward: Soviet Society and Politics in the New Economic Policy (Oxford, 1990),
121; and L. A. Molchanov, Gazetnaia pressa Rossii v gody revoliutsii i grazhdanskoi voiny, 1917–1920 (Moscow,
2002), passim.
3
Whatever its practice, liberal conceptions of the press make a sharp distinction between the information
gathering function of a reporter and genres of explicit comment. See Jeremy Hicks, “From Conduits to
Commanders: Shifting Views of Worker Correspondents, 1924–1926,” Revolutionary Russia 19:2 (2006):
132–33. For discussions of the feuilleton see Jeremy Hicks, Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz
(Nottingham, 2000), 105–46. For the influence of Bolshevik journalism on newsreel see Jeremy Hicks, Dziga
Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London, 2007), 5–20.
4
Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution and Soviet Newspapers
(Cambridge, MA, 2004), 83. See also Jeffrey Brooks, “The Press and Its Message: Images of America in the
1920s and 1930s,” in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick
et al. (Bloomington, 1991), 234.

The Russian Review 66 (October 2007): 568–85

Copyright 2007 The Russian Review
 Between Journalism and Literature 569

trams, communal flats, and bathhouses.5 At the same time this growing mass of writing
workers exemplified a new literary culture produced by proletarians themselves. As 1920s
cultural debates raged as to what proletarian literature was or would be and who would
produce it, the example of worker correspondents was seized upon as a key instance of the
relation between journalism and literature. Each faction’s view of the emergent literary
culture was reflected in its attitude to the worker-correspondent movement.
Despite the existence of a substantial body of literature mapping out these various
positions and the evolution of these debates, only Evgeny Dobrenko’s sociological account
has touched upon the role played by worker correspondents in the development of Soviet
literature.6 Dobrenko emphasizes the proletarian literature movement’s political success in
winning worker correspondents as recruits, and treats the relevant theories as purely
instrumental. The present article, however, argues that the attitudes of the various literary
factions toward worker correspondents spring from their approaches to art and culture in
general, and in particular from attitudes to the relation between proletarian literature and
journalism. While the proletarians saw worker correspondents as potential proletarian
writers, the Lef group stressed their role as journalists and chroniclers. As the article will
demonstrate, this dichotomy paralleled tensions in the worker-correspondent movement
itself between literary aspirations and journalistic duties. These preoccupations find parallels
in Soviet literature, as writers also used the figure of the worker correspondent to explore
the role of culture in the new society. Mayakovsky’s shifting attitudes to the worker
correspondent reflect his own anxieties about the fate of revolutionary art and criticism in
Soviet society, whereas Zoshchenko explores ways in which a variety of factors obstruct
the worker correspondent’s journalistic function.

TROTSKY, VORONSKY, AND THE FELLOW TRAVELERS

Alexander Voronsky, the prominent critic and founding editor of Krasnaia nov', initially
dominated NEP cultural policy in literature. The very decision to publish this first
postrevolutionary “thick journal” from 1921 symbolized an attitude of rediscovered respect
for the Russian cultural inheritance. 7 Voronsky wanted to assimilate the best of
prerevolutionary culture and create a lasting literature in an unbroken tradition, rather than

5
See Lesley Milne, Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography (Cambridge, England, 1990), 27, 51–53; and
Hicks, Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz, 126–42. While a distinction can be made between the
worker correspondent and the sel'skii korrespondent, or sel'kor, they were subject to the same pressures and
the present article treats them as interchangeable.
6
Evgenii Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo pisatelia: Sotsial'nye i esteticheskie istoki sovetskoi literaturnoi
kul'tury (St. Petersburg, 1999), 27. For his account of this process in the worker-correspondent movement, see
ibid., 302–9. See also Robert A. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Princeton, 1968);
Herman Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories, 1917–1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism (New York, 1977);
Edward J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature 1928–1932 (New York, 1953); S. Sheshukov,
Neistovye revniteli: Iz istorii literaturnoi bor'by 20-kh godov, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow, 1984); and Evgeny
Dobrenko, Aesthetics of Alienation: Reassessment of Early Soviet Cultural Theories, trans. Jesse M. Savage
(Evanston, 2005).
7
For a discussion of the “thick” journal genre see Robert A. Maguire, “Introduction,” in Literary Journals in
Imperial Russia, ed. Deborah A. Martinsen (Cambridge, England, 1997), 1–8.
570 Jeremy Hicks

to define or create anything specifically Soviet or proletarian. His position was virtually
identical to Trotsky’s 1923 Literature and Revolution: “there is no proletarian culture and...
there never will be any.”8 For Trotsky poetry by second-rate working-class poets, including
worker correspondents, held value solely as a document, and was therefore inferior to art:

It is not proletarian literature, but it expresses in writing the molecular process

of the cultural rise of the proletariat. We have already explained above that this is
not one and the same thing. The worker correspondents, the local poets, the
complainants, are carrying on a great cultural work, breaking up the ground and
preparing it for future sowing. But a cultural and artistic harvest of full value will
be, happily! Socialist and not “proletarian.” ...
The products of proletarian poetry—not all, but many—are significant cultural
and historical documents. But this does not at all mean that they are artistic
documents. ... Undoubtedly; the weak, the colorless and even the illiterate poems
may reflect the path of the political growth of a poet and of a class and may have
an immeasurable significance as a symptom of culture. But weak and, what is
more, illiterate poems do not make up proletarian poetry, because they do not
make up poetry at all.9

Since for Voronsky and Trotsky there could be no such thing as proletarian literature,
they were consequently not especially concerned to attract proletarians to the literary process,
either as worker correspondents or as potential writers.10 Indeed, such would-be writers
could potentially be obstacles, since for Voronsky literature itself performed a cognitive
function that revealed deeper processes in life and gave a sense of the bigger picture.11 The
most talented writers, whatever their political complexion, were the most suited to this
task. Such a view informed his courting of such “fellow-travelers” as Vsevolod Ivanov and
Boris Pil'niak. By contrast less talented writers, including worker correspondents, were
typically limited to a vulgar descriptive or recording function he called “bytovizm.”12 Despite
the so-called proletarian critics’ antipathy to Voronsky for his promotion of fellow travelers,
this view of literature’s cognitive function was to influence them.

THE PROLETARIANS

In the early 1920s the proletarian-literature movement and the neo-Futurists around the
journal Lef shared a common concern to break with the art of the past, and a common belief

8
Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor, 1960), 185–86.
9
Ibid., 201–2. I have altered the Strunsky translation which renders the Russian term “rabkor” as “letters of
the workers.” In view of the focus of the present article, I felt justified in replacing this with the more precise
“worker correspondents.” For the Russian text see Lev Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1991),
158. Trotsky is reacting here to the poets of the “Smithy” (Kuznitsa) group. His comments, however, are
rightly viewed as a rejection of the notion of proletarian literature as it was espoused by the various groupings
of the movement, most notably around the journals Na postu and Oktiabr' (Brown, Proletarian Episode, 25–
45).
10
Sheshukov, Neistovye revniteli, 73
11
Maguire, Red Virgin Soil, 297.
12
Aleksandr Voronskii, “Iskusstvo videt' mir” (1923), in his Iskusstvo videt' mir. Portety. Stat'i (Moscow,
1987), 552.
 Between Journalism and Literature 571

in the need to create a proletarian literature, although they disagreed about how to do it.
Indeed, Lef and the Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers (MAPP) published a joint
statement in which they warned of the dangers of a return to the art of the past.13 Soon,
however, as they fell under the influence of Voronsky’s theory of literature, the proletarians
adopted a more guarded attitude to the notion of proletarian culture and embraced traditional
literary models such as Lev Tolstoy.
Subsequently, the proletarians stressed the role of art, and the need for art to grasp the
underlying significance of phenomena. The type of art they promoted used typical, but
fictional, characters to explore a wider historical situation. Art “rejects chance,” wrote
Edward Brown when summarizing prominent proletarian Iurii Libedinskii’s view of art:

It tries to portray the world as it is and to reveal the hidden laws of its movement.
The artist, however, accomplished this through the selection of meaningful material
from his storehouse of “immediate impressions.” He selects “typical phenomena”;
he fixes the attention on such concrete images as will enable him to show the
connection of one event with another, and generalize the phenomena of the real
world.14

This conception of the role of the artist demanded a certain distance, or even
detachment, from current events. Consequently, the proletarians were hostile to anything
that might be termed the passive registering of facts, since artistic reworking to show things
in the light of the bigger picture was always more important.15 Writing in the proletarian
literary journal Na postu in 1925, Fedor Raskol'nikov similarly distinguishes between the
worker correspondent and the proletarian writer:

The range of interests of the proletarian writer is broader than that of the worker
correspondent: the worker correspondent reflects everyday life, ways of doing
things, economic conditions, the order or disorder of his own factory, whereas
what the proletarian writer reflects is not just the life of a factory, not even just the
life of the working class as a whole, but what he reflects is life, the psychology
and the outlook of the most disparate classes, of the most disparate layers of
society, but of course, from his proletarian point of view.16

Unlike Voronsky, however, the immediate and urgent aim of the proletarian-literature
movement was to produce new, proletarian writers, albeit writers in the realist tradition of
the nineteenth century.17 Like all those associated with the proletarian-literature movement,
Raskol'nikov stresses the worker correspondent as a future proletarian writer, for whom

13
Iu. Libedinskii, S. Rodov, Leopol'd Averbakh, V. Maiakovskii, O. Brik, “Soglashenie MAPP i gruppy
‘Lef,’” Lef 4 (1924): 4–5.
14
Brown, Proletarian Episode, 75.
15
Ibid., 170.
16
Fedor Raskol'nikov, “Rabkory i proletarskaia literatura,” Na postu (June 1925): 109. This and all further
translations are mine unless credited otherwise.
17
Michael S. Gorham discusses the proletarians’ vision of worker correspondents as potential proletarian
writers in “Tongue-Tied Writers: The Rabsel'kor Movement and the Voice of the “New Intelligentsia” in Early
Soviet Russia,” Russian Review 55 (July 1996): 416–18. Dobrenko stresses that proletarians approach worker
correspondents as potential writers (Formovka sovetskogo pisatelia, 304-5).
572 Jeremy Hicks

journalism was simply a preparation. As Dem'ian Bednyi put it to a Central Committee

conference in May 1924, “New, clear-sighted, genuine writers will emerge from the ranks
of the worker and rural correspondents.”18 Implicitly, at present, the correspondents were
neither clear-sighted nor genuine writers.
As a remedy the proletarians offered worker correspondents a path into literary politics,
seeing in them a mass of potential recruits that would enable their faction to prevail through
sheer weight of numbers. There were calls for VAPP, the USSR-wide organization of
proletarian writers, to throw open its doors to worker correspondents;19 there is a concomitant
stress in proletarian discussions on organizing, leading, educating, and controlling these
would-be writers, particularly through the party.20 The proletarians offered young, aspiring
writers a path from the factory to the literary sphere. This was a route trodden by no less a
figure than Aleksandr Fadeev, who published his first articles for Sovetskii iug, in Rostov-
on-Don, where he was a leading light in the local worker-correspondent movement until his
1927 literary breakthrough with The Rout (Razgrom). While this kind of trajectory was
often what the frequently ambitious worker correspondents themselves wanted, by
undermining the worker correspondent’s journalistic role, it weakened the movement.
However, the proletarians were too concerned with literature to worry about their ossifying
effect upon Soviet journalism. This attitude sharply contrasts with Lef’s position.

LEF

As the literary group that championed journalistic forms most consistently, Lef
enthusiastically supported the worker-correspondent movement.21 Although the notion of
factography was advanced by its successor, Novyi Lef only starting in 1927, from its inception
in March 1923 Lef nonetheless advocated art which actively intervened in life. “The
tournaments in aesthetic arenas were over,” the prominent Lef writer and theorist Sergei
Tret'iakov wrote in 1924.

We had to make real life. Futurism plunged head first into that “applied” everyday
sphere, so spurned by all those “priests of pure art,” unwilling and unable to work
“on demand.” Work on agitational rhymes (chastushka), the newspaper feuilleton,
the agitational theater, and the marching song strengthened the Futurists’ call: art
into life, dissolve art in life!22

18
Karl Eimermacher, ed., V tiskakh ideologii: Antologiia literaturno-politicheskikh dokumentov, 1917–1929
(Moscow, 1992), 271; “Rezoliutsiia soveshchaniia pri otdele pechati TsK RKP(b) o pomoshchi proletarskim,
krest'ianskim i komsomol'skim pisateliam, 9 maia 1924,” in Kul'turnoe stroitel'stvo v SSSR 1917–1927:
Razrabotka edinoi gosudarstvennoi politiki v oblasti kul'tury. Dokumenty i materialy, ed. A. P. Nenarokov
(Moscow, 1989), 191.
19
V tiskakh ideologii, 282.
20
For an example of this stress upon organization and education of writers see, for example, Leopol'd Averbakh,
“O politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi literatury” (1925), in V tiskakh ideologii, 406.
21
This journal served as a mouthpiece for an unstable alliance of Futurists, Formalists, Constructivists and
Productivists (“Za chto boretsia Lef?” Lef 1 [1923]: 3).
22
Sergei Tret'iakov, “Otkuda i kuda? (Perspektivy futurizma),” Lef 1 (1924): 197.
 Between Journalism and Literature 573

Lef critics and practitioners desired a revolution in culture whereby art and poetry
would cease to be the reserve of the few, but would instead invigorate the everyday spheres
of journalism, politics, and advertising. Such art would address and transform the present
rather than the posterity coveted by literature. While Mayakovsky’s ROSTA “Windows”
was cited as a significant Lef application of high art methods to the low art of persuasion,
Lef achievements in nonfictional and journalistic writing were few.23
This discrepency was seized upon by veteran Marxist critic Petr Kogan to dismiss Lef:
“The theory is not bad, but not convincing because there are no artistically exciting works
to corroborate it.”24 Kogan argued that from the outset, the Revolution itself collapsed the
distinction between life and literature. As the best example of this wonderful “non-literature,”
Kogan cites Pravda poetaster Bednyi rather than any avant-garde theoretician.

What Lef writes about in weighty dissertations, Dem'ian realizes in practice. Lef
talks about how poets should go and join the newspapers. Dem'ian never left
them. Lef demands art do things, build things, and so on, that poets cease to
devote themselves to poetry. Dem'ian has always been doing this both before and
since Lef. He never “devoted” himself to poetry. Lef demands the artist get
involved in the common cause rather than be an isolated specialist, Olympian and
majestic. Dem'ian is precisely that. ... His poetry is a piece of the general plan,
like a Soviet of People’s Commissars’ decree, like instructions issued by a People’s
Commissar. Lef has no reason to get in such a state. What it has been searching
for so frantically is sitting under its nose. All of Dem'ian’s works are written on
demand.25

Trotsky similarly praised Bednyi as the true newspaper writer, whose verse has
influenced political life, despite condescension toward his work from the likes of Lef:

Some of his things have the power of a great and finished art, but there is also
much of the newspaper in him, of a daily and second-rate newspaper at that. Not
only in those rare cases when Apollo calls him to the holy sacrifice does Dem'ian
Bednyi create, but day in and day out, as events and the Party Central Committee
demand. But taken in its entirety, his work represents the most unusual and unique
phenomenon in its way. Let those little poets of various schools who like to sniff
at Dem'ian Bednyi and to call him a newspaper feuilleton writer (sic!) dig in their
memory and find another poet who by his verses has influenced so directly and
actively the masses, the working and peasant masses, the Red Army masses, the
many-millioned masses, during the greatest of all epochs.26

Possibly in response to such criticism, following its relaunch as Novyi Lef in January
1927 the journal began to publish articles praising a wider range of nonfictional phenomena
in an attempt to broaden appeal. One piece lauded the late pioneer of proletarian literature,

23
“Za chto boretsia Lef?” 5. A similar argument was made by Sergei Tret'iakov, “Tribuna Lefa,” Lef 3
(1923): 156. ROSTA was the acronym for the Rossiiskoe telegrafnoe agenstvo, a forerunner of ITAR-TASS.
The “Windows” were posters typically displayed in shop windows, and summarized the news.
24
P. S. Kogan, Literatura etikh let, 1917–1923 (Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 1924), 129.
25
Ibid., 18, 23, 24.
26
Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 213.
574 Jeremy Hicks

Dmitry Furmanov, for his fictionalized memoir Chapaev (1923), another hailed the worker-
correspondent movement.27 As the most radical and most distinctive expression of Soviet
journalism, worker correspondents seemed to offer a potential model for an invigorated
journalism. Whereas proletarians saw the movement as a recruiting ground for writers,
Tret'iakov argued that there were far too many writers and not enough journalists: “It is
unacceptable and disgusting that there are twelve thousand poets and writers of belles-
lettres in Soviet literary organizations but our newspapers lack literate sketch (ocherk)
writers and reporters.”28 Elsewhere Tret'iakov celebrates the writing of Soviet journalists
“from the worker correspondents to the leader writers on national newspapers” as taking
the place of Tolstoy’s novels.29 The emphasis here is on nurturing the worker correspondent
as a distinctive kind of journalist rather than as a future writer.30
For the artistic revolutionaries of Lef, the attraction of worker correspondents was the
very novelty, naivete, and lack of literary awareness that the proletarians wanted to overcome.
Far from simply symbolizing the new, for Lef, the worker correspondents were journalist-
writers unspoilt by the literary traditions of the intelligentsia; they were pure products of
the new culture. As Lef critic Viktor Pertsov wrote (of Furmanov’s Chapaev), “real material
also turns out to be the surest safeguard against cliché.”31 Striving solely to record can
bypass the hated aesthetic clichés of type, generalization, and the living person (proletarian
catch phrases).32
Yet for all its significance to Lef, the group’s attitude to nonfiction was somewhat
ambiguous. Mayakovsky praised the recording function of worker correspondents, but
limited this endorsement to the revolutionary period.33 While the unvarnished recording of
the naive worker correspondent held the attraction of avoiding literary commonplace, Lef
was less interested in the recording function of nonfiction for its own sake, since that bore
the shameful stigma of “passivity,” “contemplation,” and “representation.” Newspapers
were and should strive to be propagandist: “The Revolution has advanced the practical
tasks of influencing the mass psyche and organizing the will of the class.”34 The point was
not to record, but to act upon life, to apply all the techniques of literature and art to the
reworking of material drawn from life with the intention of changing it.35
However, despite their eloquent theory the writers who most consistently used the
newspapers and other nonfictional forms were not formally innovative, as were Mayakovsky
and Tret'iakov. Instead they were, as Kogan pointed out, the likes of Bednyi, whose verse

27
P. S. Kogan’s review of Chapaev points to the great sympathy for factographic and journalistically oriented
writing that stretched far beyond the reach of Lef (“Dmitrii Furmanov,” Pechat' i revoiutsiia, 1926, no. 3:76).
28
Sergei Tret'iakov, “S novym godom! S ‘Novym Lefom’!” Novyi Lef 1 (1928): 2–3.
29
Sergei Tret'iakov, “Novyi Lev Tolstoi,” Novyi Lef 1 (1927): 37.
30
Sergei Tret'iakov, “Nashi tovarishchi,” Novyi Lef 10 (1928): 2; Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo pisatelia,
307–8.
31
Viktor Pertsov, “Kakaia byla pogoda v epokhu grazhdanskoi voiny,” Novyi Lef 7 (1927): 41.
32
Pertsov, “Kakaia byla pogoda,” 39.
33
Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Kak delat' stikhi” (1926), in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (PSS) (Moscow,
1955–61), 12:99.
34
Tret'iakov, “Otkuda i kuda?” 197.
35
The ambivalent attitude of Lef to factual recording is reflected in the dispute between Lef-associated
filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov (Hicks, Dziga Vertov, 52).
 Between Journalism and Literature 575

transposed the day’s top news stories to widely accessible folkloric forms. Trotsky sees
predictable form as the price Bednyi pays for the influence of his poetry.36 This sort of
writing was emphatically not the aim of Lef. Their goal was not so much the rendering
banal of poetry as the rendering poetic of the everyday: “We do not acknowledge any
distinction between poetry, prose, and practical language.”37 This was what distinguished
it from hack journalism and the poetry of Bednyi: “Even though the work is calculated
upon the requirements of the day, there is still authentic craftsmanship.”38
One concept Lef employed to explain this tension between the claims of journalism
and art was “linguistic overcoming” (iazykovoe preodolenie), by which they meant the
Futurists’ enriching and remolding of everyday language.39 Tret'iakov argued that the
Futurists’ work on sound, imagery, and meter helped their posters, agitational verse, and
newspaper feuilletons “overcome” the habitual language of the masses so as to make it
“more expressive, more flexible, and more effective.”40 Tret'iakov’s response to the danger
that such works might be as little understood or read as Futurist poetry was that readers
should strive to understand the poems, so as to become “true masters of their own language.”41
Through “linguistic overcoming” Lef hoped to transform the worker correspondents into a
new kind of nonfictional writer: “The mass of amateur photographers, the reporters, and
the thousands of worker correspondents, for all their lack of experience and refinement are
potential factographers. We must train them to a high degree of competence.”42
Ultimately then, for all their praise for worker correspondents, Lef too wanted to educate
and transform them, as is clear from Mayakovsky’s How Are Verses Made? The difference
was that Lef wanted the correspondents to remain journalists, albeit of a new kind, rather
than the writers envisaged by the proletarians.43

INFORMATION VERSUS STYLE IN THE

WORKER-CORRESPONDENT MOVEMENT

If the proletarians tended to see the worker correspondents as future writers, and Lef valued
them more in their own right as journalists, in the movement itself a similar tension was

36
Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 213–14.
37
Vladimir Maiakovskii and Osip Brik, “Nasha slovesnaia rabota,” Lef 1 (1924): 40.
38
Tret'iakov, “Otkuda i kuda?” 197.
39
Sergei Tret'iakov, “Tribuna Lefa,” Lef 3 (1923): 156. For a discussion of preodolenie see also Vinokur,
“Futuristy — stroiteli iazyka,” Lef 1 (1923): 207.
40
Tret'iakov, “Tribuna Lefa,” 160, 156. Another Lef theorist, G. Vinokur, however, argued that cliché is
intrinsic to newspapers, and therefore that transforming its language was a necessarily fraught process (“Iazyk
nashei gazety,” Lef 2 (1924): 133–34. Even Tret'iakov accepted that the envisioned transformation was not
always possible in the short term: sometimes a message must be conveyed as quickly and accessibly as possible,
such as in Mayakovsky’s Rosta “Windows” (Tret'iakov, “Tribuna Lefa,” 162).
41
Tret'iakov, “Tribuna Lefa,” 164.
42
Sergei Tret'iakov, “Prodolzhenie sleduet,” Novyi Lef 12 (1928): 4. See also
Osip Brik, “Protiv “Tvorcheskoi” lichnosti,” Novyi Lef 2 (1928): 13.
43
Dobrenko claims Mayakovsky is reacting to Shengeli, whose brochure is explicitly aimed at worker
correspondents (Formovka sovetskogo pisatelia, 305). Jennifer Clibbon writes of Mayakovsky’s inspirational
importance for the worker-correspondent movement, and cites one correspondent dedicating a poem to him
(“The Soviet Press and Grass-Roots Organization: The Rabkor Movement, NEP to the First Five-Year Plan”
[Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1993], 120–21).
576 Jeremy Hicks

expressed as two competing tendencies. On the one hand, we see the desire to fulfil the
journalistic task of informing by means of the colloquial language that came most naturally
to the correspondents. On the other hand there is growing concern to improve the literary
style of correspondents’ contributions. Previously this tension has been seen as a
contradiction between the incompatible languages of the people and of the state leading to
incoherence and unwitting self-parody.44 However, worker correspondents’ assertion of
the right to write in this common idiom was vital to the defense of the movement as a
relatively independent source of information on grassroots moods and opinions. For many
commentators the language of the contributions was not ridiculous, but an intrinsic part of
their documentary value.
Worker correspondents often were bad writers and expressed themselves poorly, but
normative conceptions of literary style and talent tended to detract from the primary purpose
of such writing as a form of civic activism. One correspondent makes this case well:

No one could say it for them [the masses] like they would themselves, and no
one can give voice to the masses quite like they can themselves.
It is not important whether every worker correspondent grows up to become a
feuilleton writer, – their value does not lie in this, but in their capacity to set out an
idea fully and intelligibly, and to possess content. Articles (zametki) by conscious
workers always have content, because they reflect the activity that surrounds them.
Talent in a worker correspondent is secondary, supplementary.
For this reason, no newspaper should particularly insist upon the literary quality
of articles if it wants worker correspondents to write as they think, directly, and
not disfigure themselves in incompetent imitation of books. It is not talent that
pushes a worker correspondent to write, but the circumstances in which they find
themselves and the need to use public opinion to affect these circumstances.45

Freedom to use the register of language most natural to them aided correspondents’
self-expression. In a 1924 article for the peasant newspaper Bednota, Mikhail Kalinin
underlines the documentary, informational value of these letters and suggests there is an
inverse correlation between good style and information:

In Bednota I have often had the occasion to read letters by peasants that have
been published without any changes. All their clumsiness of style and grammatical
errors were left in their original state. And I confess these letters give me far
more than those sharpened by the pencil of a literary corrector. In those letters
that are printed in what you might call “their birthday suit” I see the genuine
inhabitant of the countryside, his genuine psychology, his genuine attitude to things,
his cultural level, even a reliable picture of his social identity, his economic
position, and ultimately, the degree to which he is sincere.46

44
Gorham examines the mixture of standard and colloquial registers in the language of the worker
correspondent in detail, but sees these registers as ultimately working against the delivery of factual material
(“Tongue-Tied Writers,” 420). See also Michael S. Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture
and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, 2003), 78–102.
45
Slesar' Zasim, “Zametki iz zapisnoi knizhki rabkora,” Rabochii korrespondent, 1924, no. 1:26–27.
46
Mikhail Kalinin, “Krest'ianskii korrespondent” (10 May 1924), in his Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow,
1960), 1:485.
 Between Journalism and Literature 577

If the value of the letters is as a source of information, their language is also informative
as to the mentality and cultural world of the peasant. The dangers of rewriting the letters of
correspondents are clear from another article in Rabochii korrespondent: “Workers’ articles
(zametki) written in simple, expressive language often fall into the hands of editorial hacks
and either disappear altogether, or are printed in such a form that the worker-author can
learn nothing from his printed article beyond dry newspaper cliché.”47
Such rewriting of material was a matter of course even for factory wall newspapers,
despite claims that their working-class editors valued the workers’ idiom.48 This is clear
from a 1924 guide to the making of wall newspapers which, on the one hand, warns against
the harmful practice of making contributions too literary (oliteraturivanie), while at the
same time dispensing guidance on how to rewrite insufficiently expressive material:

If you receive a protocol-report type of article (zametka) about some meeting or

conference, then it should be reworked so as to give it a narrative character (that
is conveying only the most vivid and essential moments of the conference in their
inner logical connection, rather than their outer, chronological connection), or
moving the article’s centre of gravity toward evaluation of the given conference.49

For those associated with Nikolai Bukharin, the most prominent advocate of the worker-
correspondent movement in this period, the content and function of what correspondents
wrote were paramount. Thus, in 1924 Nikolai Borisov dismisses calls for an improvement
in the correspondents’ style, arguing that “the chief thing is what they say not how they say
it.”50 Likewise, that same year another Bukharinite, Mariia Ul'ianova, emphasizes the worker
correspondent as a source of information over any considerations of style or literary quality:
“The important thing is not how a worker’s article is written, the extent to which it follows
the rules of spelling, how grammatically correct it is, and so on. The important thing is
what it writes about.”51 The defense of the correspondents’ freedom to write badly is also
the defense of the documentary value of what they write.
While the least accomplished letters, from the point of view of style, are often from
those who have the most to say, those correspondents with the greatest literary pretensions
sometimes seem to function badly as correspondents, as this report from Tula makes clear:

The Krasnyi oruzheinik wall newspaper began publication. Its editors received
material that was so semiliterate and incoherent that in the majority of cases they
could not make head or tail of it.
However, after some determined deciphering they managed to perceive some
very practical ideas about production among this semiliterate material.
Certain articles correctly pointed out shortcomings in production and ways of
dealing with them and what’s more described the distinctive features of workers’

47
S. Eventov, “Eshche o pol'ze stennykh,” Rabochii korrespondent, 1924, no. 8:39.
48
Ibid.
49
Kh. Pekler, Praktika stennoi gazety (Moscow, 1924), 32.
50
Nikolai Borisov, “O vrednykh oshibkakh,” Rabochii korrespondent, 1924, no. 6:13.
51
Mariia Ul'ianova, “K 2-mu vsesoiuznomu soveshchaniiu rabsel'korov ‘Pravdy,’” Rabochii korrespondent,
1924, no. 10–11:4.
578 Jeremy Hicks

life in the conditions of production pretty accurately and characteristically. We

have to admit frankly that the most valuable material comes not from our
experienced, older worker correspondents, but from beginners, the semiliterate,
and inexperienced.52

The older correspondents are more interested in “belles-lettres” and “feuilletons” than
in actual factual reporting. This interest in language and style is symptomatic of a widespread
desire on the part of worker correspondents to climb the social ladder by literary means.
Bukharin seized upon the above report from Tula; he believed it illustrated the dangers of
interfering in and organizing the worker-correspondent movement too much. For Bukharin,
untrained “partisan” correspondents are more useful because they are closer to workers’
lives and present a more reliable picture of it: as they become more experienced, they tend
to conduct a form of preliminary self-censorship on their own work, as they begin to see
what will and will not get published.53
At the same time, increasing organizational and political control over editorial boards
meant that worker correspondents were encouraged to inform less and interpret more.54
Such practices clearly opened the door to political manipulation along with stylistic
correction as normative tendencies in style were associated with normative tendencies in
politics. The correct political position became the only guarantee of correct style. As one
Kiev organizer put it, “If the correspondent is not an active worker, if he is not an active
participant in professional, public life, his correspondence will possess the characteristics
of a protocol.”55
Whereas earlier in the movement the tendency was to stress content, not style, during
1925 there was a drift toward stressing the need to see the bigger picture. An August 1925
guide to describing party meetings warned against the danger of reproducing speeches
verbatim. The well-written article, “aside from the purely informational task of recounting
what happened at the meeting, also fulfils another more important task: it organizes the
opinions of the working public, gives a definite, correct direction to their thoughts, and will
teach them how to see themselves in a critical light.”56
There was a consistent worry that worker correspondents might concentrate on the
isolated fact without linking it to the bigger picture.57 This concern informs a 1925 Central
Committee Press Department description of the intended outcome of worker-correspondent
education as enabling them “to generalize individual facts and on the basis of this

52
A. Kuz'min, “Rabkory v Tule,” Raboche-krest'ianskii korrespondent, 1925, no. 1:58.
53
Nikolai Bukharin, “Dva slova o nekotorykh osobennostiakh rabkorovskoi raboty,” Rabochii korrespondent,
1924, no. 3–4:15.
54
Most discussions of the worker correspondent necessarily miss this evolution away from the informational
or reportorial function taking, as they do a brief sample of sources from 1924 to 1928. See, for example,
Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin
(Oxford, 2001), 276. The same is true of Dobrenko who sees the movement as directly controlled from the
outset (Formovka sovetskogo pisatelia, 303). For an account of this evolution see Hicks, “From Conduits to
Commanders,” 131–49.
55
O. Sirota, Kak vooruzhalas' “Proletarskaia Pravda,” (Kiev, 1925), 15.
56
N. Pilatskaia, “Kak pisat' o sobraniiakh,” Raboche-krest'ianskii korrespondent, 1925, no. 8:13.
57
“Rezoliutsii 2-go Vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia rabkorov, sel'korov i iunkorov pri ‘Pravde’ i ‘Rabochem
korrespondente,’” Rabochii korrespondent, 1924, no. 12:49.
 Between Journalism and Literature 579

generalization to be able to come to correct conclusions, corresponding to the interests of

the working class as a whole.”58 Clearly worker correspondents at these sessions were told
what to think, what kinds of things were important and what were not. This shift toward the
ability to understand the bigger picture indicated by a given localized incident is part of a
tendency to marginalize worker correspondents’ informational function, and is bound up
with greater efforts to organize and educate the movement. Increasingly, information from
below was fed into a template enforced from above, so that no unwelcome information
could actually penetrate the pages of the press. If the story did not conform to a predetermined
pattern, it was discarded as in some way unnewsworthy. This practice led to self-censorship
as correspondents stopped writing what would not get published. As journalism became a
charade, increasing numbers of correspondents came to resemble the “The Worker
Correspondent Fleeing Production”: “He wrote an article and it was published. Wrote a
second, and it was praised, a third was successful and he was well paid. So he decides: it’s
easier and it’s cleaner.”59
It was becoming clear that real possibilities for advancement were available to a worker
correspondent who was willing to sacrifice the desire to inform to the need to say the right
thing in the right way, and the result was that literary aspirations began to stifle journalistic
function. Similarly, in Soviet literature of the 1920s the worker correspondents’ core mission
of factual disclosure was gradually obstructed and undermined by factors ranging from the
violence, intimidation, and bureaucratic indifference of others to the correspondents’ own
self-interest and careerism.

LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF WORKER CORRESPONDENTS

The dominant literary image of the worker correspondents, particularly in the first half of
the 1920s, was of a worker heroically speaking out against all kinds of abuse and injustice
despite the fear of reprisal. We find this image in a broad swathe of works from Bednyi to
Mayakovsky and Tret'iakov of Lef.
Tret'iakov characteristically makes a worker correspondent the hero of his 1924
melodrama Gas Masks, famously staged by Sergei Eisenstein the same year. This play was
based on a worker correspondent’s zametka that had been published in Pravda.60 The
play’s main character is Dudin, a worker correspondent who writes to Pravda exposing the
manager of his gas plant for not equipping the workers with gas masks. At the same time,
his denunciations of the factory’s drunkards prompts them up to beat him up. Yet when
there is a gas leak Dudin succeeds in getting the workers to fix it working without gas
masks, at great personal risk, and the factory fulfills its targets. Despite the violence and
intimidation, the worker correspondent is not to be silenced and prevails heroically.61

58
“Proekt ‘Polozheniia o kruzhke rabkorov na predpriiatii,’” Raboche-krest'ianskii korrespondent, 1925,
no. 9:8.
59
D. Levochskii, “O nashikh nedostatkakh,” Rabochii korrespondent, 1924, no. 8:12.
60
The zametka journalistic form, where information was minimally embellished, was the worker
correspondents’ favored platform.
61
Sergei Tret'iakov, “Protivogazy, melodrama v trekh deistviiakh,” in his Slyshysh' Moskva?! (Moscow,
1966), 29–62.
580 Jeremy Hicks

Similarly, Tret'iakov’s “Worker Correspondents” (1924) stresses the worker

correspondents’ fearlessness:

У красных с белым The Reds and the Whites

Смертельный спор, Are in mortal feud,
Будь в бой смелым Be brave in battle
Пиши, рабкор. Write, correspondent.
… ...
Дадут по шее? So they beat you up?
Стерпи урон. Take the blow.
Опять траншею Dig another trench
Копай пером.62 With your pen.

In his 1924 poem about the widely reported death of a rural correspondent, “Words
into Battle (On the Death of Comrade Malinovsky),” the Constructivist Eduard Bagritsky
also described the heroic, fearless attributes of the worker correspondent:

Мир встает, яснеет кругозор...
И на битву с крепью злой и темной
От завода движется рабкор.
Сталь пера, зажатая сурово.
Крепче пули и острей ножа...
...
Что сильней рабочего напора!
Слово едкое, как сталь остро!
В героической руке рабкора
Заливается, звенит перо!
Голосом маховиков и копей
Говорит рабкор. И перед ним
Сила вражья мечется, как хлопья
Черной сажи, и летит, как дым.
The world rises, the horizon grows clear...
And from the factory the correspondent
leaves for battle with the old world, evil and dark.
Sternly grasping the steel of his pen.
Stronger than a bullet, sharper than a knife...
...
What is stronger than the onslaught of workers!
The caustic words, sharp as steel!
In the heroic hand of the correspondent
The pen rings out and bursts into song!
With the voice of fly-wheels and mines
Speaks the correspondent. And before him
Enemy forces scatter like flakes
Of black soot, and vanish, like smoke.

Bagritsky’s poem explains the reasons for Malinovsky’s death:

Слишком смело он пером рабочим Too brave with the pen of the workers
Обжигал, колол и обличал, He burnt, stabbed and exposed,
Слишком грозно поглядел ей в очи, Too formidably he looked it in the eyes,
Слишком грозно правду закричал.63 Too formidably he shouted the truth.

In a poem that also was prompted by Malinovsky’s death, Bednyi called rural correspondents
“Knights of truth and light.”64
The most extensive and nuanced treatment of the theme of the worker correspondent,
however, comes in the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Mikhail Zoshchenko.
Mayakovsky’s treatment of the figure of the worker correspondent initially reflects his own

62
Sergei Tret'iakov, “Rabkory,” in his Rechevik – Stikhi (Moscow, 1929), 91.
63
Eduard Bagritskii, “Slovo v boi (Na smert' T. Malinovskogo,” in his Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Moscow,
1964), 322–23. Proletarian writer Aleksandr Bezymenskii also refers to the personal courage of the worker
correspondents in his “Dorogoi vsem chelovek,” in M. I. Ul'ianova – Sekretar' “Pravdy,” ed. Z. D. Bliskovskii
et al. (Moscow, 1965), 155.
64
Dem'ian Bednyi, “Pamiati sel'kora Grigoriia Malinovskogo” (1924), in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
(PSS) (Moscow, 1954), 3:186.
 Between Journalism and Literature 581

hopes for a new kind of literary culture and subsequently his disillusion with its prospects.
In Mayakovsky’s “Worker Correspondent” (1923) we see the familiar, clichéd image of the
worker correspondent fearlessly exposing the truth in the face of intimidation:

У бюрократов – The bureaucrats

волнение. are worried.
Сыпет The Sovbureaucrat
на рабочих is sprinkling
совбюрократ on workers
доносы denunciations
и увольнения. and sackings.
Видно, верно бьем, Clearly, we’re hitting the mark
видно, бить пора!65 clearly, it was high time.

Throughout the 1920s Mayakovsky associates the figure of the worker correspondent
with the new world and the new literature. In the same poem Mayakovsky proclaims “we
write,” including the worker correspondents in a common “we” with himself as writers
with identical purpose. This gesture reveals the esteem in which Mayakovsky holds the
worker correspondent, as not just a potential writer, but as a substantially developed example
of the new culture. Similarly, we find these attitudes in Mayakovsky’s many poems and
statements of the 1920s about the need for writers to publish in and become more attuned
to the tasks of newspapers.
In a 1925 poem that is also called “Worker Correspondent,” Mayakovsky contrasts
the efforts of worker correspondents with popular prewar novelist Vera Verbitskaya’s The
Keys to Happiness (Kliuchi schast'ia), which he presents as emblematic of the low standards
of prerevolutionary literature.

«Ключи счастья» Any old idiot can write

напишет какая-нибудь дура. The Keys to Happiness.
Это In the old days
раньше they even called
и называлось: this
л-и-т-е-р-а-т-у-р-а! l-i-t-e-r-a-t-u-r-e!
Нам этого мало – That’s not enough for us –
не в коня корм. that’s not the feed we need.
Пришлось The correspondents
за бумагу had to take up
браться рабкорам.66 the pen.

In this and another 1925 poem with the same title Mayakovsky again stresses the worker
correspondent’s fearlessness in the face of intimidation and violence.67
However, a profound shift has occurred by 1928, when in “The Ballad of the Bureaucrat
and the Worker Correspondent” Mayakovsky uses the image of the worker correspondent’s

65
Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Rabochii correspondent,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (PSS) (Moscow,
1955–61), 5:48.
66
Maiakovskii, “Rabkor,” PSS 6:105.
67
Maiakovskii, “Rabkor,” PSS 6:107, 109. Mayakovsky pursues the same themes of the fearless writer
transposed to the rural correspondent in “Sel'kor” (ibid. 6:92–93).
582 Jeremy Hicks

fruitless complaint as an image of the triumph of Soviet bureaucracy. The bureaucrat simply
consumes the endless complaints and ultimately the worker correspondents themselves:

Рабкор The correspondent

критикует criticizes
указанный трест. this trust.
Растут Mountains of articles
статейные горы. grow.
А Васькин... And Vas'kin...
слушает да ест. listens and eats
Кого ест? Who does he eat?
– Рабкора.68 – The correspondent.

The situation depicted here anticipates the shift in Mayakovsky’s thinking displayed in his
late plays The Bathhouse (Bania) and The Bedbug (Klop): the Soviet bureaucrat has
completely triumphed, and probably for quite some time. Worker correspondents are as
powerless as others to change this.
Mikhail Zoshchenko’s work provides the most interesting and complex literary
treatment of the worker correspondent by entirely avoiding the cliché of the hero fearlessly
exposing wrong. Like the writers mentioned above, Zoshchenko’s works feature a number
of worker correspondents, but to a greater extent than anyone else, he uses their
correspondence as a source for the incidents, mentality, and language of his stories.
Where worker correspondents appear in Zoshchenko’s stories, they do not appear as
heroes—as one might expect from this satirical writer. Rather, Zoshchenko explores ways
in which the worker correspondent’s purpose of exposing and informing is undermined less
by ideological opponents and enemies, and more by force of circumstance or self-interest.
One example of this is his story “American Advertising” (1926), in which a worker
correspondent denounces a landlord for charging exhorbitant rent.69 Following the norm
for such reports, the correspondent gives the landlord’s name and address. The following
morning, instead of a public outcry there is a line of would-be tenants waiting outside. The
housing crisis is so acute that it inverts the worker correspondent’s attempt to castigate the
worst abuses: his report functions as a small ad, and the landlord gets three times the original
price.
Elsewhere, Zoshchenko shows how the literary pretensions and careerist aspirations
of worker correspondents are at odds with their informational function.70 In “The Writer,”
Nikolai Drovishkin aspires to become a worker correspondent and, on the basis of his
eloquence, believes himself to be a talented writer. But when he is accepted as a
correspondent by the fictitious newspaper Krasnoe chudo (Red Miracle), he cannot find

68
Maiakovskii, “Ballada o biurokrate i o rabkore,” PSS 9:269.
69
Mikhail Zoshchenko, “Amerikanskaia reklama,” in his Sobranie sochinenii, ed. Iurii Tomashevskii
(Leningrad, 1986), 1:329–30.
70
Gorham lists Babel', Pil'niak, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Seifullina as writers who all wrote about the tensions
between the language of the population and that of the state. However, none of these writes about the worker
correspondents explicitly (“Tongue-Tied Writers,” 421).
 Between Journalism and Literature 583

anything significant enough to write about. The character of Drovishkin clearly illustrates
the tension between the correspondent’s role as a source of information and his aspiration
to command the literary idiom: Drovishkin can write eloquently, probably too eloquently,
but has nothing to say and no news to impart. His desire to become a worker correspondent
is implicitly informed by careerist motives.71 Similarly, in “A Peasant Autodidact” (1924)
and “The Man of Letters” (1927), Zoshchenko again depicts peasant or working-class men
who see writing as an easy way to make money.72
Besides these representations, Zoshchenko also draws extensively on the factual
material of worker correspondents’ letters as the basis for many of his works.73 Most
obviously his 1929 collection of readers’ letters and commentaries on them, Letters to a
Writer includes numerous examples.74 Yet some of his most famous stories, such as “The
Bathhouse” (1925), also refashion worker correspondent letters received by Krasnaia gazeta.
Key details, such as the cloakroom tickets on strings that wash off and the idea of a bathhouse
in which it is impossible to get washed, are culled from published worker correspondent
letters.75 This context is evoked by the way in which the original magazine-published
version of the story ends, with the narrator refusing to divulge the location of the bathhouse
for fear of reprisal the next time he uses it.76 Read against the background of the widespread
violent reprisals against worker correspondents, this seems to be an example of a worker
correspondent who is not the clichéd hero but someone who is weak and fearful for his own
safety. Through the figure of a cowardly correspondent Zoshchenko shows how the vocation
of informing the public is all too easily subverted by violence and intimidation.
Yet Zoshchenko’s most original appropriation of the worker correspondent phenomenon
is his recreation of their language. Zoshchenko went further than writers such as Mayakovsky
and Bednyi in his willingness to write in the very language spoken by newly literate readers
and written by newly literate writers.77 The worker correspondent, a proletarian writer, was
an important model for Zoshchenko’s skaz narrators whose command of both the standard
Russian language and the official political idiom was fragile. Where the press tended to
rewrite worker correspondent letters to ensure that their political message struck home,
Zoshchenko’s stories restore their original linguistic state. A story such as “Economy
Measures” is clearly structured after a typical worker correspondent’s letter trumpeting
local success in implementing the 1926 national “Economy Measures” campaign. In the
story, the characters’ search for something to economize is ended by the cleaning lady:

71
Zoshchenko, “Pisatel',” Sobranie sochinenii 1:155–57.
72
Zoshchenko, “Krest'ianskii samorodok,” and “Literator,” both in Sobranie sochinenii 1:283–85 and 1:379–
81, respectively.
73
Chukovskii, “Iz vospominanii,” in Vospominaniia o Mikhaile Zoshchenko, ed. Iurii Tomashevskii (St.
Petersburg, 1995), 67. See also “Kak ia rabotaiu,” in Mikhail Zoshchenko, Uvazhaemye grazhdane: Parodii,
rasskazy, fel'etony, satiricheskie zametki: Pis'ma k pisateliu, odnoaktnye komedii, ed. Mikhail Dolinskii
(Moscow, 1991), 589; and Zoshchenko, “Ot avtora,” Sobranie sochinenii 1:448.
74
Mikhail Zoshchenko, Pis'ma k pisateliu (Leningrad, 1929). This work also is available in Zoshchenko,
Uvazhaemye grazhdane, 345-430.
75
Hicks, Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz, 128–36.
76
Ibid., 129–31.
77
Zoshchenko, Uvazhaemye grazhdane, 371, 586.
584 Jeremy Hicks

Then, thankfully, the cleaning woman Niusha opened her women’s question up
for discussion.
“Considering,” she said, “the international situation, and the general mess we’re
in, why don’t we,” she said, “for example, stop heating the toilets. What’s the
point in wasting fuel over there? After all, it’s not a drawing room.”78

Тут, спасибо, наша уборщица Нюша женский вопрос на

рассмотрение вносит.
— Раз, говорит, такое международное положение и вообще труба,
то, говорит, можно, для примеру, уборную не отапливать. Чего там
зря поленья перегонять? Не в гостиной!79

Besides incorrect uses of Russian such as dlia primeru, as well as colloquial usages
such as chego and truba we also see here the narrator’s lack of understanding of political
concepts such as “women’s question,” which he takes to be a question posed by a woman.
This confusion is made all the more ridiculous by its combination with the pompous
construction “opened up for discussion” (vnosit' na rassmotrenie), typically associated
with legislative scrutiny. Similarly Niusha refers to the “international situation” to justify
not heating the toilet, and her argument carries the day in a further parody of the decisive
power of barely digested Soviet cliché.
While the language serves to parody the narrator’s ignorance, there is at the same time
an underlying sense of admiration for the energy and expressive power of this idiom.
Zoshchenko openly advocated and practised his own, literary economy measures of the
short sentence and simplified syntax as a means of attracting a wider readership. He felt a
sense of tangible achievement in creating engaging works of literature entirely in this new
language, the idiom not of the finished article of the proletarian writer, but of the
contemporary worker who writes, the worker correspondent.80 Nevertheless, for Zoshchenko
this is not a writer in control of language, but at its mercy. This helplessness implies a
scepticism toward any marriage of journalism and literature as worker correspondents’
attempts to use language as a neutral vehicle for information founder.

A critic’s or writer’s attitudes toward the worker-correspondent movement crystalize their

views of proletarian culture and the relation between literature and journalism. They are
also revealing of the different groups’ instincts for realpolitik. Lef’s praise for the worker
correspondent has been justifiably characterized as politically naive in that it contradicted
the strivings of the worker correspondents themselves toward the higher-status profession
of literature, whereas the proletarians’ profoundly pragmatic position appealed to precisely
these aspirations and was thus bound to prevail.81 Lef comprised writers who wanted to

78
Mikhail Zoshchenko, The Galosh and Other Stories, trans. and intro. Jeremy Hicks (London, 2000), 100.
79
Zoshchenko, “Rezhim ekonomii,” Sobranie sochinenii 1:343.
80
See Hicks, Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz, 110–16.
81
Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo pisatelia, 308.
 Between Journalism and Literature 585

become journalists, whereas the proletarians were journalists who wanted to become
writers.82
In satirizing the venal motives of the working-class would-be writer who sees literature
as a way out of the hard life of manual labor, Zoshchenko was picking up on the sociological
reality that workers typically had aspirations toward social mobility out of the working
class.83 Worker correspondents’ age, high incidence of party membership, and Civil War
background made them typical of the class of upwardly mobile manual workers who ascended
to command positions by the end of the 1930s.84 Similarly, Zoshchenko’s dramatization of
the competing claims of language and informational intent expands upon a very real friction
in the worker-correspondent movement.
Yet the worker-correspondent movement cannot be reduced to a ladder for social
climbers, nor was its informational function entirely obscured by the noise of its ‘contorted’
language. For a period in the 1920s, it functioned as an albeit flawed source of information
and self-expression for a relatively wide section of the population, furnishing something
other than what newspaper editors and party officials wanted to hear. The vibrancy of the
worker-correspondent movement was what made the figure important for Tret'iakov and
Mayakovsky as a heroic symbol of the new culture. It is the worker-correspondent
movement’s initial vitality which makes it so symptomatic: its fate reflects that of attempts
to forge a proletarian literature.

82
One of the proletarians’ first collections of poetry, “Pod piatikryloi zvezdoi,” was even condemned by V. F.
Pereverzev as overblown journalism. See his “Na frontakh tekushchei belletristiki,” Pechat' i revoliutsiia,
1923, no. 4:132.
83
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–1934 (Cambridge, England,
1979), 16.
84
Ibid., 239. Moreover, the typical worker correspondent exactly fits the typical biographies Fitzpatrick
maps out for vydvizhentsy (ibid., 243). Approximately 50 percent of worker correspondents and 25 percent of
rural correspondents were party members. Many were among the “Lenin enrolment.” They were usually quite
young, between twenty and thirty, of which 52 percent were between ages twenty and twenty-five, and were
often former Red Army men. See Pechat' SSSR za 1924 i 1925 gg.: K XIV s''ezdu RKP (b), ed. I. M. Variekis
et al. (Moscow, 1926), 30. Moreover, given their youth and party membership, the possibilities for promotion
were very real: from 1925, 20–25 percent of worker correspondents became involved in state or public
organizations or in newspapers. See G. A. Kozhevnikov, Partiia—organizator rabsel'korovskogo dvizheniia v
SSSR (1917–1937) (Saratov, 1965), 72.