Socialist realist fiction is a form that combines images and ideas based on realism and incorporates certain features of romanticism. The concept that human society develops from darkness to light, a key element in historical materialism, forms the foundation of socialist realism. It is a genre whose characters belong to a "great family" of socialist revolutionaries rather than to the traditional biological family of other literary forms. By depersonalizing and objectifying characters, socialist realist fiction highlights the maturation of the hero from spontaneity to consciousness. Socialist realist fiction is akin to Scripture because in its use as a parable to promote the "sacred spirit," an ideology that incorporates both Marxism and Leninism. It condenses an author's view on historical development into the behaviors and ideas of a single hero.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 449-470). Issued electronically.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 285-298).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

This thesis analyses the persistence of Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs in the literature of Soviet Russia between 1920 and 1940. Nineteenth-century Russian literature was characterized by the almost universal assimilation of Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs, adapted from the fiction of Western writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ann Radcliffe and Edgar Allen Poe. Writers from Pushkin to Dostoevskii, including the major Symbolists, wrote fiction combining the real with the macabre and supernatural. However, following the inauguration of the Soviet regime and the imposition of Socialist Realism as the official literary style in 1934, most critics assumed that the Gothic-fantastic had been expunged from Russian literature. In Konstantin Fedin's words, the Russian fantastic novel had "умер и закопан в могилу". This thesis argues that Fedin's dismissal was premature, and presents evidence that Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs continued to play a significant role in several genres of Soviet fiction, including science fiction, satire, comedy, adventure novels (prikliuchenskie romany), and seminal Socialist Realist classics. My dissertation identifies five categories of Gothic-fantastic themes, derived jointly from analysis of canonical Gothic novels from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and from innovative approaches to the genre made by contemporary critics such as Fred Botting, Kelly Hurley, Diane Hoeveler, Elaine Showalter and Eric Naiman (whose book Sex in Public coined the phrase 'NEP Gothic'). Each chapter analyses one of these five Gothic themes or tropes in the context of selected Soviet Russian literary texts. The chronotope of Gothic space, epitomized in the genre as the haunted castle or house, is readdressed by Mikhail Bulgakov as the 'nekhoroshaia kvartira' of Master i Margarita and by Evgenii Zamiatin as the 'drevnyi dom' of his dystopian fantasy My. Gothic gender issues, including the subgenre of Female Gothic, arise in Nikolai Ognev's novels and Aleksandra Kollontai's stories. The Gothic obsession with dying, corpses and the afterlife re-emerges in fictions such as Daniil Kharms' 'Starukha' (whose hero is threatened by an animated corpse) and Nikolai Erdman's banned play Samoubiitsa (the story of a failed suicide). Gothic bodies (deformed or regressive human bodies) are contrasted with Stalinist cultural aspirations to somatic perfection within a utopian society. Typically Gothic monsters - vampires, ghosts, and demon lovers - are evaluated in a separate chapter. Each Gothic trope is integrated with my analysis of the relevant Soviet discourse, including early Communist attitudes to gender and the body and the philosopher Nikolai Federov's utopian belief in the possibility of universal resurrection. As my focus is thematic rather than author-centred, my field of research ranges from well-known writers (Fedor Gladkov, Bulgakov, Zamiatin) to virtual unknowns (Grigorii Grebnev and Vsevolod Valiusinskii, both early 1930s novelists), and recently rediscovered writers (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, Vladimir Zazubrin). Three Soviet authors who explicitly emulated the nineteenth-century Gothic-fantastic tradition in their fiction were Mikhail Bulgakov, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii and A.V. Chaianov. Many mainstream Soviet writers also exploited Gothic-fantastic motifs in their work. Fedor Gladkov's Socialist Realist production novel, Tsement, uses the trope of the Gothic castle to dramatise the reclamation of a derelict cement factory by the workers. Nikolai Ognev's Dnevnik Kosti Riabtseva, the diary of an imaginary Communist schoolboy, relies on ghost stories to sustain suspense. Aleksandr Beliaev, the popular science fiction writer, inserted subversive clich's from the Gothic narrative tradition in his deceptively optimistic novels. Gothic-fantastic tropes and motifs were used polemically by dissident writers to subvert the monologic message of Socialist Realism; other writers, such as Gladkov and Marietta Shaginian, exploited the same material to support Communism and attack Russia's enemies. The visceral resonance of Gothic fear lends its metaphors unique political impact. This dissertation aims at an overall survey of Gothic-fantastic narrative elements in early Soviet literature rather than a conclusive analysis of their political significance. However, in conclusion, I speculate that the survival of the Gothic-fantastic genre in the hostile soil of the Stalinist literary apparatus proves that early Soviet literature was more varied, contradictory and self-interrogative than previously assumed.

Ce travail explore les modalités de l’intégration de motifs mythologiques antiques et bibliques dans la poésie de RDA. Dans un premier temps sont explicitées les notions de mythe, de mythème et d’« héritage culturel » socialiste. Ensuite sont étudiées les théories de Marx sur le rapport à la culture des siècles passés, qui mettent en valeur une pensée dialectique d’intégration puis de dépassement de l’héritage culturel, sans en rechercher la pure abolition. En témoignant un mépris certain envers les mythes, les autorités culturelles est-allemandes procèdent donc à une surinterprétation des positions de Marx. Si la politique culturelle fait montre d’une attitude schizophrène en instrumentalisant les mythes pour consolider le pouvoir, tout en les dépréciant du fait de leur caractère non rationnel, dans les faits on observe un succès considérable de la matière mythologique dans la littérature de RDA, et en premier lieu dans la poésie. L’étude des motifs mythologiques dans les œuvres de Günter Kunert, Sarah Kirsch et Uwe Kolbe permet de souligner que le recours à cette tradition ouvre la voie, en poésie, à la modernité, puis à la postmodernité. L’emploi des mythes s’articule autour des notions de liberté et de contrainte, que nous mettons en relation avec les concepts du sémiotique et du thétique de Julia Kristeva, afin de montrer que, lorsqu’elle utilise les mythes, la poésie est-allemande développe une esthétique de résistance à la doxa sous toutes ses formes. La reprise de mythes dans la poésie de RDA situe souvent cette dernière dans l’esthétique postmoderne, mais il s’agit d’une postmodernité contrainte, négative, car elle atteste à la fois la difficulté de comprendre le monde contemporain, soumis à l’éclatement du sens, et l’absurdité autodestructrice du régime est-allemand. Finalement, la quasi-disparition des mythes dans la poésie des années quatre-vingt peut se lire comme l’échec de l’idée utopique d’un monde amendable. / This work explores how antique and biblical mythological motives are integrated into GDR poetry. First, the notions of myth, mytheme and socialist “cultural heritage” are clarified. After that are studied Marx’s theories on how we relate to the culture of the past centuries. The latter focuses on how to integrate dialectically and then surpass the cultural heritage, but with no intention to abolish it. By showing outward contempt for the myths, the East German cultural authorities overinterpret Marx’s positions. If the cultural policy shows a schizophrenic attitude by manipulating the myths to consolidate the power, while depreciating them because of their non rational nature, in fact one can observe the great success of the mythological material in GDR literature, especially in poetry. The study of the mythological motives in the work of Günter Kunert, Sarah Kirsch and Uwe Kolbe highlights the fact that resorting to this tradition in poetry has paved the way for modernity, then for postmodernism. The reference to myths implies the notions of liberty and restraint, that we relate to Julia Kristeva’s concepts of semiotic and thetic. Indeed, the aim is to show that, when referring to the myths, GDR poetry develops an aesthetics of resistance to doxa in every way. The recourse to myths in GDR poetry places it in a postmodern aesthetics, but a constrained, negative one, for it attests both the difficulty to understand the contemporary world, exposed to the splitting of sense, and the self-destroying absurdity of the East German regime. Finally, the fact that myths in GDR poetry from the eighties have almost disappeared can be read as the failure of the utopian idea of an improvable world.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第18351号 / 人博第664号 / 新制||人||160(附属図書館) / 25||人博||664(吉田南総合図書館) / 31209 / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻 / (主査)教授 加藤 幹郎, 教授 服部 文昭, 教授 松田 英男 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM

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Popular films in the Soviet Union were the products of the implementation of propagandistic messages into storylines that were both ideologically and aesthetically consistent with of the interests of the State and Party apparatuses. Beginning in the 1930s, following declaration of the doctrine on socialist realism as the official form of cultural production, Soviet authorities and filmmakers tailored films to the circumstances in the USSR at that given moment in order to influence and shape popular opinion; however, this often resulted in inconsistent and outright contradictory messages. Given the transformation that gender relations were undergoing in the early stages of development, one area that was particularly problematic in Soviet cinema was the portrayals of women. Focusing primarily on the Stalinist period of the Soviet History (1934-1953), I plan to look at the ways in which women were portrayed in popular Soviet cinema and specifically the ways in which these presentations shifted before, during, and after World War II.

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