Authors

Discussion

Under Stalin, lyric poetry, the interpretation goes, was a minor, if not nonexistent genre. The lyric thrived only in 1938–1939 and then during the Second World War. The proposed paper challenges this interpretation by demonstrating that lyric poetry emerged as a significant genre as soon as Stalin came to power, in 1927. The paper focuses on the first decade of Stalinism, 1927–1936, and is based on a nearly exhaustive reading of poetry criticism published in influential Moscow and Leningrad periodicals (a total of some twenty journals and newspapers, e.g., Krasnaia nov’, Literaturnyi sovremennik, and Literaturnaia gazeta), as well as on a more selective sampling of lyric poetry itself.  

The paper shows that lyric verse was not only an important genre under Stalin, but also presented a definition of the Soviet self that should lead us to reevaluate the rich, extensive literature on this subject. Past scholarship has pointed to the centrality of reason in constituting the Stalinist self. Other work highlights the role of the emotions and physiological sensations. In contrast, the self advanced by the Soviet lyric incorporated these three phenomena into a single “complex” (kompleks) of “consciousness” (soznanie). According to the conventional interpretation, consciousness in the Soviet Union was exclusively rational and born of a dialectical relationship with sensations (this based on a reading of Lenin, e.g., his 1909 Materialism and Empiriocriticism). The Stalinist lyric, however, presented a rather different picture. In lyric verse, consciousness was both rational and emotional, and born instantaneously, not dialectically, of physiological sensation. 

Overall, this paper thus offers new insights on Stalinist aesthetics and subjectivity, and reflects, too, on the implications of its findings for Stalin and the Communist Party’s claim to political authority.