Steinberg, Mark. Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925.

Steinberg, Mark. Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Mark Steinberg chooses as his research subject proletarian writing, which allows him to address a complex of research problems: the making of the Self in late imperial and early Soviet Russia; the relationship of a common map to the modernist project (in its imperialist and socialist versions); the way people embodied and reproduced dominant discourses that aimed to shape them and unleash their individualities, but at the same time involved emancipatory rhetoric; a complex influence that religion (including new spiritual practices) had on people’s belief to exercise power over the surrounding course of events (religion as nomos) and to understand and make meaningful the course of events (religion as ethos); production of cultural forms as a way to make understand what meanings people invested in surrounding reality in the past. A study of “critical limits” of Russian society and culture, aimed at their better understanding. A close attention to the history of emotions: “For all the risks, we must recognize that emotion was a crucial part of the meaning of the past for those we are seeking to understand” (15).

Chapter 1 starts with an investigation of social and cultural background of proletarian writers. Discusses from what exactly group of social classes they came and what their relations were with (a) non-writing people of the same background (often illiterate) and (b) intellectuals who claimed to “guide” them. Looks at institutions, which shaped pre-1917 public literacy, including boulevard literature, “peoples’ universities” and other forms of public education, other forms of propaganda of modernist values. The role of socialist organizations, esp. in larger cities, as early attempts at self-organization. Publications in socialist press. After 1917: Proletcult, “an open and contested site where diverse individuals and groups came together to promote culture among and by workers, though they were not in agreement over what this culture comprised.” (51) Under the Bolshevik auspices, Proletkult turned into a national network where regional organizations had their own specific agendas. Alternative workers’ clubs. Kuznitsa/VAPP as a literary union of most active proletarian writers. Bolshevik leadership feared that without control, proletarian writers would forge a “wrong” proletarian culture; hence increasing attempts at controlling it. But workers “were much less likely to accept party criticisms of proletarian autonomy and control. And most important, in resisting these criticisms, they questioned the underlying philosophical arguments about the sources of knowledge.” (60)

Chapter 2 starts with an argument, that proletarian writers borrow from the nineteenth-century liberal discourses the concepts (or meanings related to the concept) of autonomous personhood, which is him/herself the source of “inner” morality, which they absorbed by reading contemporary literature on morality, personal dignity, or on “degraded,” due to bourgeois vices, personality: “commercial literature exposed lower-class readers to a popularized version of the… idealization of… selfhood and individuality” (68). This made issues related to ethics and morale the centre of workers’ writing. They responded to these worries borrowed form liberal discourse, with an answer borrowed from socialist discourse: that labor and labor alone is that existential practice which automatically enables humans to realize their nature (natural assets). Another source of morality was suffering. Stories of one’s own or other’s sufferings (esp. degraded women) “were used to speak about the universal suffering human self” (78). Culture and civilization as means (or maybe instruments) to realize own selves, hence attacks at social vices, such as alcoholism. Strangers and genius: two popular literary images to “estrange” the surrounding reality. Ambivalence as a dominant way of producing meanings: allowed them to combine conflicting meanings in their works, e.g., a focus on the self and a simultaneous rhetoric of selfless service to other people.

Chapter 3 “The Proletarian ‘I’” explores the ways this formerly marginal workers’ own discourse about the self suddenly appeared in the center of cultural policy when Bolsheviks came to power. Steinberg first causes a clash between it and the revolutionary ideology of collectivism, as new figures central to the production of dominant symbolic order – Lunacharsky and Gorky among them – associated the idealization of “I” with petty bourgeois thinking. Instead, ideas of collective identification and active solidarity were promoted. Bolsheviks activists try to impose the idea of “we” as collective “I”s to replace previous individualism. Appeal to gigantic images from the past (pyramids, temples, epic poems, folklore, even religious images) as embodiments of collective “we,” to which proletarian culture was an heir. Problems with reconciling liberal humanism of workers’ writing with cruelty and de-personification of revolutionary practice (esp. in the context of the Civil War). Attempt to do it by inventing a hero figure of the new man, a revolutionary hero. Discourse of moral growth: through reading “classics,” through “self-enlightenment” (excursions, e.g.). “Everyday grind” (obydenshchina) as the new enemy of worker intelligentsia. Post-revolutionary debate over the role of emotions: while they were obviously important for the “internal self” and, hence, were nurtured and cherished in the writing of many proletarian writers, they clashed with the Bolshevik ideology based on worship of reason and rationality. Compromise: positive emotions (love, hope, enthusiasm, faith of spirit) are absorbed in the socialist project.

Chapter 4 “The Moral Landscape of the Modern City” looks at different meanings invested by proletarian writers in modern cities, as well as these cities as a cultural and social milieu that facilitated workers’ writing. City as a vice and city as an opportunity. Technocratic visions of future development. “Aesthetic love of machines and factories” (162), and at the same time industry and machines as embodiment of hell. Nostaligia for the “lost” countryside.

Chapter 5 “Revolutionary Modernity and Its Discourses” arouses more doubts than previous: to what degree cultural categories of modernity, which Steinberg uses to interpret the writing of proletarian writers, were comprehended as such by authors themselves. “Urban Madonnas,” for example: is the concept of modernity really essential in the way it is applied in this chapter to analyze that proletarian writing? For it looks like in this chapter, Steinberg moves away from problem oriented approach and describes those phenomena which are visible in works under study, but fails to analyze them according to the principle of meanings they produced, instead imposing on them meanings that he produces by applying the concept of modernity to them (which is totally legitimate, but adds to analysis of writing categories which are not necessarily extracted from this writing.

Chapter 6 “Feelings of the Sacred” looks at the rise of popular spirituality and the ways it found its ways into written forms. Eschatological and messianic images of the Russian revolution, which in Chapter 7 Steinberg traces as migrating to revolutionary rhetoric.