Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Russia

Time at Home

Rebecca Friedman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350112452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Revolution, war, dislocation, famine, and rivers of blood: these traumas dominated everyday life at turn-of-the-century Russia. As Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Russia explains, amidst such public turmoil Russians turned inwards, embracing and carefully curating the home in an effort to express both personal and national identities. From the nostalgic landed estate with its backward gaze to the present-focused and efficient urban apartment to the utopian communal dreams of a Soviet future, the idea of time was deeply embedded in Russian domestic life. Rebecca Friedman is the first to weave together these twin concepts of time and space in relation to Russian culture and, in doing so, this book reveals how the revolutionary domestic experiments reflected a desire by the state and by individuals to control the rapidly changing landscape of modern Russia. Drawing on extensive popular and literary sources, both visual and textual, this fascinating book enables readers to understand the reshaping of Russian space and time as part of a larger revolutionary drive to eradicate, however ambivalently, the 19th-century gentrified sloth in favour of the proficient Soviet comrade.

1

Russian Modernity through Time and Space

Theories of time: Time waits for no one and yet we are still waiting

Scholars have begun to write about “the temporal turn,” one a long time coming and not yet complete. Historians, sociologists, cultural geographers, art historians and so on have approached the historically contextual nature of time and temporality in fits and starts. Scholars have begun to acknowledge the ways in which temporal narratives, such as spatial ones, emerge within fields of power and hierarchy. The early modernists, for instance, contest that modernists imagine a linear march toward progress as centuries move along; creating value judgments about what is modern and not yet so. Modernists claim a certain hegemony, created through Enlightenment-tainted glasses, resides in nations in the West. Yet, because of the long-standing nature of this scholarship and yet its nascent status as a yet-to-emerge field, there is room for maneuver. There is room still for discussions that question these hierarchies and hegemonies from the start. This is precisely the work to be done here, putting Russia and then the Soviet Union at the center of inquiry, a place always and at once modern and unmodern, enlightened and untouched by the enlightenment, intent on swift-paced progress and stuck in the past.

Philosophers and scholars have discussed the meaning of time, whether the rise and fall of the sun, the ticking of a mechanical clock or the impulse to glance backwards toward the closing door and its manifestations through space. Virginia Woolf, in To the Lighthouse, evokes the tenuous and contextual nature of time.

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta’s arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.¹

Here Woolf juxtaposes measurable so-called “objective” time (“a moment longer”) with an elusive glance “over her shoulder” and “already in the past.” She does so again, as she presents mechanical time and personal time side by side in the following sequence in Mrs. Dalloway (1925):

For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty – one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.²

The chiming of Big Ben lies at the center of Virginia Woolf’s story set in a single day. In true modernist fashion, the characters thought to themselves, operating according to the logic of personal time, even as Big Ben chimes in juxtaposition. This passage captures a basic tension in Mrs. Dalloway and in conceptions of time more broadly. The free flow of Clarissa’s thoughts was interrupted or constrained by the predictable chiming of the clock, which marked minutes and hours of the day. This duality, or tension, between mechanical, clock time and more free-flowing personal time reflected some of the tensions within modern time itself. Here Woolf introduces her readers to the concept of private, interior, intimate time and public, civic time, each of which is evoked in the Russian conceptions of time in the early twentieth century, on both sides of the revolutionary divide. Both, too, in various forms, existed well before Virginia Woolf immortalized them in her beautiful prose.

Time, it hardly bears saying, is at the center of history, historical thinking and thus the conceiving of history itself. William Sewell, in his seminal work The Logics of History, explained how all of historical work is the study of time. He wrote that historians are conditioned “to think about the temporalities of social life.”³ Historians, Sewell instructed, are the “theoreticians of temporality.” In describing the historian’s craft, thusly, Sewell wrote: “I think we believe that time is fateful.” This notion of fate itself is contested. Sewell emphasized the irreversibility of time, necessitating a sense that the past is always the past. Time is irreversible, and therefore “an action, once taken, or an event, once experienced, cannot be obliterated. It is lodged in the memory of those whom it affected and therefore irrevocably altered the situation in which it occurs.”⁴ And yet, even this contention is contingent, as Sewell himself articulated: “historical temporality is lumpy, uneven, unpredictable, and discontinuous.” And too, “social temporality is extremely complex.” Ultimately all historical stories involve a kind of continuity and change, where “time is heterogenous.” Historians focus on “historical contextualization”—a concern with chronology, sequence and the broader dynamics at play in any particular moment.⁵ And yet, this very contextualization with its chronological contingency presumes a certain linearity of time. And it is precisely this notion of linearity that was questioned by historians of earlier eras and of nations touched by European imperial ambitions. Why is time “modern” or “more complex” at any particular moment? Is there a notion of time that is quintessentially modern? Scholars tend to agree that temporality itself is a mark of the modern moment and central to the modern experience, a uniformity of time.

Why, though, are some societies considered “modern” and others “traditional”? And where is Russia in all of these conceptual imaginings? The Enlightenment itself projects a linear march toward progress that often begins with Paris, and perhaps 1789, as the center and slowly moves outward from there. Scholars of modernity whose geographic expertise begins in the so-called periphery, in old-fashioned speak, the second or third worlds, have made a multitude of arguments about what constitutes the modern, what its markers are and how its central components ultimately are on a progressive path from darkness to light. Yet, scholars both of Europe and other regions around the globe, including Russia and then the Soviet Union, question the notion of a singular path to, or toward, modernity. Rather, many argue for models that account for “multiple modernities” or “alternative modernities.” Simply put, the multiplicity of definitions of what is modern challenges the idea that the mythological West is always at the center of definition. The study of the “shapes of time,” too, serves to “unsettle” narratives of modern progress. Once the lens incorporates “the multiple ways in which modern subjects, both Western and non-Western, have conceived and experienced time, it serves to highlight the multiple times, or ‘pluritemporalities’, of modern life.” This multiple approach tends to challenge the singular path to modernity thesis with its emphasis on linear, progressive temporal rhythms.

None of this undermines the profound change in time and temporal narratives over the course of the nineteenth century. These changes associated with the nineteenth century might include the standardization of time symbolized by Greenwich Mean Time as the international standard and the basis for a global system of time, mechanization and standardization of clock time over the course of the nineteenth century, which includes the emphasis on efficiency and streamlining on the shop floor in factories.⁶

Just as citizens across the globe lived in multiple modern frames, so did they in temporal ones. “Transferring the paradigm of multiple modernities to temporality, it is readily apparent that individuals live within a plurality of social times.” Within modern life, this multiplicity might include “the time of seasons, governments, school timetables, churches, clocks, instant messaging, pop concerts, political referendums, holidays, veterinary visits, reproduction and birthdays.” And, too, these measures or markers of time coexist with the more mechanical nature of temporal measurements. For example, as scholar of time, A.R.P. Fryxell, notes in a recent exchange in the journal Past and Present:

Thus, while a young woman in 1924 might observe hours and minutes according to her wristwatch, frequent the cinema, and feel as if the events of 1914–18 had irrevocably transformed her world, she might also subscribe to forms of temporality ostensibly antithetical to standard time or historical chronology. She might believe in reincarnation, attend seances to communicate with departed loved ones, and profess herself to be a devout follower of spiritualism. Modern time cannot be reduced to a single framework or methodology.⁷

In this example, as with the opening Woolf sequences, differing temporal regimes coexist alongside one another.

Scholars too have asked questions about the nature of Russian and Soviet modernity, and to a lesser degree, about Russian time regimes. At the turn of the century, when this story begins, Russia, of course, was in a tremendous transitionary moment, and especially regarding processes that echo those that took shape in Germany, France and England decades, if not centuries, earlier. Russia, therefore, had a particular place in this debate about the nature or multiplicity of moderns and its temporal position vis-à-vis its European neighbors. Scholars of Russia have questioned the appropriateness of claiming modernity’s hold on the Russian imagination, and especially in relationship to categories born in lands to the west, at the end of the old regime. Yet, change was afoot. This was undeniable. Russia at this late nineteenth-century moment experienced tremendous transformation, from countryside to city, from autocracy to tentative civic and political participation, and so on. The social hierarchies were toppling as aristocratic elites were fighting for their way of life as peasants abandoned estates and villagers made their way to the city. And, too, new elites emerged, born and bred through education and money, challenging traditional hierarchies of power and control. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century way of life felt, no doubt, under siege, as modern concepts flooded the Russian urban landscape. Russia, albeit on its own path, was becoming modern.

Although certainly categories are never transferable wholesale, scholars of Russia and of the Soviet experiment have reached a tentative consensus about the applicability of modern frameworks to the Soviet years. Michael David-Fox describes some of the scholarly trends regarding Russia’s place within the grand narrative of modernity’s ascendency. David-Fox posits that there are two distinct ways of conceptualizing the Soviet path to modernity: “exceptionalism and commonality.”⁸ Scholars who embrace the idea of Soviet exceptionalism might emphasize the degree to which the Soviet modernity project was fundamentally unlike anywhere else because its main focus was to confront Russian age-old backwardness, a temporally motivated framing. By contrast, other scholars, including very prominently David Hoffman, emphasize the ways in which the Soviet experience was—in significant ways—on course with the West. David Hoffman,⁹ in his cultural history on the heyday of Stalinist values, emphasizes the degree to which the notion of remaking a society at its very core was part and parcel of European modernity and not unique to a revolutionary state. If, indeed, the commonalities thesis holds sway, the issue of continuity in the embrace of modern temporal narratives becomes all the more important. Modern temporal narratives found in Soviet discourses, domestic and civic and otherwise, whether those that emphasize the large-scale epochal change or the smaller-scale modern daily time routines, had resonances both in the fin de siècle and in the postwar moment.

Hoffman does indeed attempt to imagine Russia on the “normal path” with other nations to the west. He highlights, in particular, how he defined modernity in terms of two features common to all modern political systems—“social internationalism and mass politics.” This formulation, he assures, is not new: Anthony Giddens, he writes, “identifies a key aspect of modernity as trust in expert systems, which established rational procedures and norms to replace traditional ways.” Zygmunt Bauman, likewise, “sees as a fundamental characteristic of modernity the impulse to manage society through the application of bureaucratic procedures and categories.”¹⁰ Enlightenment thinkers too contributed to an emphasis on “social interventionism with their belief that society could be reshaped through […] [the creation of] a rational social order.” Yet, as Hoffman instructs, social transformation involved not only “a scientific understanding of society, but also a means to change people’s thinking and behavior. It necessitated the inculcation of new cultural norms and values that could make everyday life orderly and productive. Norms of efficiency, hygiene, sobriety, and literacy.”¹¹ There was also an ingrained impulse to refashion traditional values through intervention. This intervention included, to some extent, as this book will show, the remaking of daily habits and approaches to the fundamental rhythms of life, including temporal narratives. All of these features, Hoffman argues, were common to the Soviet experience and experiment.

The question of when precisely modernity took hold remains an open one. Although the era of so-called mass politics, industrialization and urbanization at the fin de siècle no doubt marked a key moment, scholars of earlier eras posit an alternative entry point and differing criteria. Turning time backwards a century or two, there is also scholarship on Russia’s so-called leap to the modern in the eighteenth century. Luba Golburt, in her study of eighteenth-century Russia, describes the role that eighteenth-century literary culture played in inspiring new perspectives on modern time. The emergence of secular literature, Westernization, modernized vernacular culture, including the spread of universities and the periodical press and so forth, all pointed to new understandings of Russia’s place within Europe as well as the tenor of Russians’ daily lives in the modern world. From this perspective, “the eighteenth century stands as the originary moment of Russian modernity, both historically and literarily.”¹² She highlights “how the circumstances of the eighteenth century were transformed from a meaningful present into a seemingly meaningless past.”¹³ Time, and eighteenth-century temporal rhythms, Golburt highlights, were circular in nature. The past played a major role in conceptualizing and reconceptualizing the present moment. She writes how the transformation of presents into pasts proceeds neither uniformly nor linearly. Bits of the past are necessarily forgotten, recalled and often invented altogether. She explores how subsequent centuries imagined the eighteenth century in memory as a duality: on the one hand it is modern and central, on the other hand it is “pronounced dead.”¹⁴ Temporality, therefore, is a layered phenomenon, where past eras layer on top of one another to define and understand the present moment.

Golburt’s analysis is self-consciously about time. She writes about the transition from the eighteenth-century to the early nineteenth-century temporal imaginary and explains that many believed that time moved “faster” once the nineteenth century arrived: “Historical time in the early nineteenth century appeared to move faster. It was also, compared to the eighteenth century, radically decentered, as the domain of historical knowledge grew.”¹⁵ These changes correspond to one of the major revolutions in Europe and to “the rise of historicism and epochal consciousness.” Golburt writes that as this historicist turn became the “dominant interpretive framework,” which posited that the “present no longer was conceived of as repeating the past in a cyclical pattern,” the particulars of the past mattered and were distinct, while the present itself inevitably was “prefigured by” the past.¹⁶

Golburt also provides a historiographical view on the debates around modernity’s rise in Russia. There are two alternative accounts of Russian modernity in the eighteenth century, she contends. First of all, there is the story about how Peter the Great’s reforms ushered in the modern moment from above and generally by decree. A second alternative includes an emphasis on the maturing social relations and intellectual culture that “finally seems to take root and gain full legitimacy in Russia” by the early decades of the nineteenth century.¹⁷ The simple positing of alternatives, of course, attests to the contingent nature of modernity itself, its definitions and its meanings. Perhaps too, modernity was born when the past was put on full display ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why Time and Home?
• 1 Russian Modernity through Time and Space
• 2 Present Time, Hygiene and the Urban Apartment
• 3 The Past in the Present: Nostalgic Portraits of the Russian Home
• 4 Revolutionary Time
• Coda: Timelessness Today: A Few Observations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint