Imagining Mass Dictatorships

The Individual and the Masses in Literature and Cinema

M. Schoenhals, K. Sarsenov, M. Schoenhals, K. Sarsenov

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137330697
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This volume in the series Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century series sees twelve Swedish, Korean and Japanese scholars, theorists, and historians of fiction and non-fiction probe the literary subject of life in 20th century mass dictatorships.

1

The Constitution of a Reliable Self: Word for Word by Oleg Dorman and Lilianna Lungina

Karin Sarsenov

In July 2009, Oleg Dorman’s eight-hour documentary Word for Word was broadcast in five episodes on prime-time Russian television. Lilianna Lungina (1920–1998), a translator and a witness to the purges of the Stalin period, tells her life story in front of the camera. There is no dramatization, only Lungina talking and occasional pictorial illustrations accompanying the narrative. The screening was a most unexpected success, and a book containing Lungina’s narrative soon became a bestseller. This achievement is perplexing in several ways. What in this plain and unobtrusive film managed to spellbind the Russian television audience, sated as it is with glamour and sensation? How come a simple life story that contributes little new information on the period in question became a major media event? Moreover, Lungina’s narrative is permeated with episodes, referred to as truthful descriptions of actual events, but to which she obviously was not an eyewitness. How come that she willingly puts her own credibility at risk, seemingly without fear of being accused of false testimony? I will argue that the question of subjectivity is crucial to understanding the cultural signification of this autobiographical narrative, as instanced in the film and the book.¹ I will show how the narrative constructs a reliable subject position, taking recourse in normative conceptions of gendered identity.

Born of educated Jewish parents in 1920, Lilianna Lungina was a member of the early Soviet cultural intelligentsia. It had its root in pre-revolutionary informal circles, in which the political, the aesthetic and the personal were rarely separated. Barbara Walker describes the formation of such circles in her seminal book Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle. She characterizes the bonds among the participants as ‘very different from the pragmatic, self-interested, and servile bonds of networking and patronage [characterizing state administration], better reflecting the new spirit of brotherhood. These bonds in their ideal state were egalitarian rather than hierarchical, mutually supportive rather than mutually exploitative, communal in a spiritual as opposed to an economic sense’.² In her narrative, Lilianna Lungina constructs selfhood precisely by subscribing to these ideals, and by contrasting her own relationships to the ‘pragmatic, self-interested, and servile bonds’ of state-administered power.

In the general atmosphere of social turbulence, rapid modernization, terror, informing and famine of the 1930s, the urge for stability, completeness and trust became acute. A portion of the educated strata, identifying with the values of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, responded to this threat of fragmentation and deprivation of agency by staking their claim as the nation’s moral elite. In his introduction to a thematic issue of Studies of East European Thought, devoted to the post-Soviet intelligentsia, Serguei Oushakine summarizes this stance: ‘Articulating a promise of morality in an immoral society became [the intelligentsia’s] main function’.³ This is the cultural setting which gave meaning to the heroic lifestyle of writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda Mandelstam and created close-knit, informal groups of like-minded individuals, sustained by mutual material and emotional support. Their testimonies about state-administered atrocities were circulated secretly in typed or handwritten samizdat publications, but reached a broader Russian audience only in the late 1980s. Now they constitute one of the main sources of knowledge about the practices of Soviet mass dictatorship.

In these narratives, the major drama is the one played out between the individual conscience and the temptations and threats posed by representatives of the state administration. This drama required a conception of the self as more or less autonomous, a master of its own instincts and impulses. Here, the authorial persona is characterized principally by his or her oppositional stance in relation to ‘the system’.⁴ However, recent research has revealed that other aspects of intelligentsia culture were as crucial for the constitution of an appropriate testimonial position. In Gulag memoirs by Evgeniia Ginzburg and Varlam Shalamov, Adi Kuntsman detects expressions of intense disgust directed at homosexual practices. In Kuntsman’s interpretation, these instances indicate the importance of modest heterosexuality to the intelligentsia’s identity, a marker which posits a boundary not in relation to the state, but to persons with less cultural capital, mainly the criminal inmates.⁵

In the political landscape that took shape after the disbandment of the Soviet Union, the allegedly monolithic ideological ‘system’ was replaced by a field of disparate actors, competing for resources, influence and visibility. In this new setting, the services of a moral elite were no longer in demand. Yet for a short period around 1990, testimonies of the intelligentsia were instrumental in denouncing political opponents, figuring as evidence in accusations of complicity in state-administered terror. But when this potential was exhausted, society paid only scant attention to texts that were now becoming the object of official reverence, parts of a state-sponsored master narrative about the suffering of the Russian people.

It was a big surprise, therefore, when Oleg Dorman’s film Word for Word (in Russian Podstrochnik) received prime-time airing on the commercial TV channel Rossiia. Moreover, its popular reception is all the more astonishing given Lungina’s Jewish background, a fact which is accentuated in her narrative and also by her diction. In the preface to Dorman’s book, the journalist Leonid Parfenov echoes the producers’ initial response to the synopsis: ‘You could imagine how the broad popular masses would react to the teachings of an old Jewess’, alluding to the spread of anti-Semitic sentiments.⁶

The decision to air Word for Word created a stir among the media. Reviews were published in print media such as Izvestia, Ogonek and Nezav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Constitution of a Reliable Self: Word for Word by Oleg Dorman and Lilianna Lungina
• 2 The Post-Communist Afterlife of Dissident Writers: The Case of Herta Müller
• 3 Challenging the ‘Holocaust-Reflex’: Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness: A Novel
• 4 Ulrike and the War: World War II, Mass Dictatorship and Nazism in the Eyes of a German Girl
• 5 Through the Eyes of a Child: Childhood and Mass Dictatorship in Modern European Literature
• 6 Is Fictional Literature Incapable of Imagining the Shoah?
• 7 Politics, Imagination and Everyday Life in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup
• 8 Innocence by Association? Everyday Nazism on DVD
• 9 The Good, the Bad and the Collaborators: Swedish World War II Guilt Redefined in Twenty-First-Century Crime Fiction?
• 10 Who Are ‘We’? The Dynamics of Consent and Coercion in Yi Mun-gu’s Our Neighbourhood
• 11 Swedish Proletarians towards Freedom: Ideals of Participation as Propaganda in the Communist Children’s Press of the 1920s
• 12 The Masses in Their Own Write (and Draw): A Heroes’ Register from the Great Cultural Revolution in Yunnan
• Postscript
• Index