Russian Fairy Tales Exam #3

Where do we get the term “Romantic?”

Where do we get the term “Romantic?”

Confusingly, not a reference to Roman culture (which is romantic)

A reference to “Romantic Languages” (Latin based) … and the stories that were written in that language in the medieval era

Specifically French “roman courtois” … novels of courtly love

The Romantic Hero

Cult of the individual genius

Exaltation of emotion over reason

Energy, Passion

Emphasis upon imagination, originality, self-expression

Tragic

The Sublime

Beautiful, yet terrible or frightening at the same time/Indication of power of forces beyond ourselves

Romantic Nationalism

• The “nation”

• The invention of the “folk” - narod

• Folklore as an archive of the national soul

  • Produces interest in fairytales and other elements of folk culture among intellectuals like Afenasyev

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837)

Founder of modern Russian literature and literary language

Cult of Pushkin • Poetry (lyric and narrative), drama, prose, criticism • Founder of modern Russian literature and literary language • Romantic tradition

Romantic Hero in “The Tale of Tsar Sultan” (Guidon)

Individual

Exiled from home

Imaginative

Passionate

Tragic

The Sublime

• Dark blue skies and starlets flashing,

• Dark blue sea and wavelets plashing,

• Cloud across the heaven slides,

• Keg across the ocean glides.

• “Wave, my wave I beg of thee,

• Ever ranging, ever free,

• Foaming far in feckless motion,

• Rolling rocks beneath the ocean,

• Coursing up the coastal crest,

• Heaving hulks upon thy breast—

• Do not let us perish, save us,

• Up onto the mainland wave us!” (106-123)

Orientalism

Intrinsically racist, artificial division of world into “East” and “West”

Orientalist Binaries

Ashik-Kerib

a short story by Mikhail Lermontov written in 1837. displays characteristics of Orientalism and Romanticism

The Romanov Family

Everyone is related

• Foreign Rule

• Hemophilia

• Wars feel like family squabbles

• More power than other European monarchies

• 300 years of rule

• A gigantic Empire

Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918)

• Vilified by USSR

• Probably a nice guy*

• Terrible at his job

  • Russo-Japanese War

  • Formation of Duma

  • Failure in WWI

  • Abdication

Grigori Rasputin (1869-1916)

• Self-proclaimed Holy Man

  • Unaffiliated with Orthodox Church

• Befriended the Romanov family in 1906

• Helps “heal” Prince Alexi’s hemophilia

• Widely disliked by the court and nation

  • Seen as a puppeteer

  • Rumors of sexual impropriety

  • Royal family had to keep friendship a secret

• Advisor to Nicholas in WWI

• Assassinated by conservative noblemen

  • Survived earlier stabbing

  • Poisoned

  • Shot

  • Shot again

  • Drowned

1905 Revolution

“Bloody Sunday”

People were peacefully entering the property yet they were killed, the revolution was spurred from this

1905 The Duma Formed

Parliament; was their just for show so people don't get upset; monarchy still controlled everything

1917 February Revolution

• Lenin Returns from Exile

• About frustrations with the gov again

• Massive famine; and death

• Anyone who was against the gov. Was exiled

1917 October Revolution

• Tsar Nicholas II Abdicates

• Stage a violent coup and take off the provisional gov.

• Soviet union still their till 1922

1918-1922 Power Struggles

• White Army: Monarchy; Anti-Communist

• Red Army: Lenin was the head; incredibly violent

1922 USSR formed

Lenin is the de facto head of state; Knew lots on Marxism

1924: Lenin dies, Stalin leads

Power struggle; Stalin communist party

1928: 1st 5-Year Plan

• Stalin doesn't want people owning private property like lenin

• Instead he did collective labor

• Stalin makes gogule; labor camps for those who are anti-communist; the great purge; killing labor officials to protect communism

• Stalin acts like a diacbtor; people are scared of him

1933: US recognizes USSR

Famine

1953: Stalin dies

• What now?

• Everyone realizes what's going on

• Thaw succeeded Stalin; he promises not to abuse power like him

1991:

USSR falls

Vladimir Lenin & the Bolsheviks

• A better leader than US History suggests

  • A result of the Cold War

  • Conflated with Stalin

• Not without problems

  • Authoritarian

  • Violent

  • Anti-Democratic

Anastasia Nikolaevna (1901-1918)

• Fourth daughter

  • A royal disappointment

• Troublemaker

• Worked in hospitals tending to wounded soldiers in WWI

• Assassinated with her family in 1918

  • Rumors of her survival

Anastasia’s Death

• House Arrest in Alexander Palace

  • Moved to Ipatiev House (“House of Special Purpose”)

• Shot by firing squad in basement

  • Jewels in their clothes

  • Finished off with bayonets

• Bodies left unattended for some time

  • Surviving sisters clubbed to death

• Bodies burned with acid, buried in multiple locations

The Rumors

• Bolsheviks claimed publicly that the family was still alive

  • Couldn’t anger Germany

  • Couldn’t anger people

• “The Yurovsky Note”

  • Sympathetic guards

  • Bodies left unattended (and still alive)

  • No corpses found

The Impostors

• Rumors quickly took hold that the youngest princess had survives

• A real-life Fairy Tale Princess!

• Laying claim to the Romanov fortune

• Fixture of Tabloid fascination outside of Russia

  • An enduring rebuke of Soviet state

• Many famous impostors

  • Most of them had a history of mental illness/trauma

• All proven through DNA to be false claims

Saint Anastasia

• Nine bodies discovered in 1980

  • Hidden by Soviets by 10 years

  • 1990, confirmed by DNA testing

• Two bodies found in 2007

  • Confirmed by DNA testing

• Canonized by the Orthodox Church

The Apocalypse

• WWI: 16-20 million deaths

• Spanish Flu: 50-60 million deaths

Enlightenment and Romanticism

• Body fundamentally Humanist

• Both backward-looking

Modernism

• Ca. 1900 to ca. 1960

• From the dawn of the twentieth century to the sixties

• Doubt

Paintings from Modernism

• The River Bennecourt Claude Monet 1868

• The Scream Edvard Munch 1893

• Card Players, Theo van Doesburg 1917

• Guernica, Pablo Picasso 1937

• Convergence, Jackson Pollock 1952

Modernism

a specific movement from the 1900 to 1960s

Modernity

everything since the Enlightenment

Mod

Fashion trend in the 1960s

Modern

Often confusing. Try “contemporary” or “current”

Soviet Modernist Culture

• Revolution in October 1917 brings Bolshevik Party, headed by Vladimir Lenin, to power.

• The Bolsheviks (“Reds”) seek to establish a proletarian state

• They exclude bourgeois parties from government, and gradually ban all other parties as well

• 1917-1920: Civil War against the “Whites.”

Marxist Theory

A new organization of the means of production will produce a new culture

The Bolsheviks thought that

because they were actively building a new economic organization, they should promote a new culture to support it.

The Problem of Power

• The activated mind is a resistant mind. Soviets need to activate proletariat minds to spark revolution

• Communism only works if everyone plays along. Once you’re in charge, how do you keep everyone in line

Soviet Modernist Culture

• Proletarian

• Didactic

• Rational

• Urban

• Modern

• Militaristic/Adventurous

• Utopian

The Soviet Critique of Fairy Tales

• Nadezhda Krupskaia: Lenin’s wife, a major figure in Soviet education

• Fairy tales reinforce bourgeois and feudal values

  • Kings, princes, princesses

  • Wealth as reward

  • Emphasis on Individual Achievement

Fairy Tales are dangerous

• Fairytales are a “Harmful influence on the fragile consciousness of a child.”

• Fairy tales teach superstition and mysticism

• Fairy tales obscure the “materialist picture of the world”

• 1924: Fairy tales are banned from children’s libraries: “It is better to be overzealous than negligent.”

Fairy Tales are useful

• Folk fairy tales re-enter library circulation

• They should be accompanied by discussions intended to inculcate a critical attitude toward fairy tales.”

• New literary fairy tales should be composed to promote modern, revolutionary values.

Mikhail Tsekhanovskii’s Flower of Seven Colors (1948)

• Proletarian: Heroes, Selflessness

• Rational: Magic?

• Urban: Setting

• Modern: Skyscrapers, automobiles, soccer, the metro

• Militaristic/ Adventurous: Heroism, polar exploration

• Utopian: Children in the lead

Soviet Modernist Culture

• Proletarian

• • Didactic

• • Rational

• • Urban

• • Modern

• • Militaristic / Adventurous

• • Utopian

The Avant-Garde

• The vanguard of art

• Sought to express the newness of modernity in new ways

• Embraced new artistic techniques and new ideas about what constituted art

The Avant-Garde in Russia

• The vanguard of art

• Sought to express the newness of modernity in new ways

• Embraced new artistic techniques and new ideas about what constituted art

• Expressing Socialist values

Socialist Realism

• Sole method for producing Soviet literature and art

• A method to produce art that is a “truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its historical development”

Proletarian

• Accessible, easily understandable, and relevant

• to workers and peasants

Typical

Scenes of everyday life of typical people

Realistic

Not abstract or non-representational

Partisan

Supportive of the State and the Party

Practical Results

• Art is teleological, with everything leading to a bright future.

• Art is didactic, teaching Party-sanctioned lessons.

• Art lacks ambiguity.

• Art is monumental.

Social Realism in the West:

• Diego Rivera Sugar Cane, 1931

• Aleksandr Gerasimov, Stalin and Voroshilov at the Kremlin (1938)

• Boris Vladimirskii, Roses for Stalin (1949)

• Vera Mukhina, Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937)

• Aleksandr Deineka, Goalie (1934)

• Iurii Pimenov, New Moscow (1937)

Clark’s Master Plot & Fall of Berlin

• Katerina Clark’s Master Plot

  • Clark’s The Soviet Novel (1981) changed the way that Socialist Realism was studied

  • Socialist Realism combines realistic and utopian elements, “the most matter-of-fact, everyday reality and the most heroic prospects.”

  • This, of course, makes Socialist Realist narratives like fairy tales

Daniil Kharms

• Born Daniil Yuvichov (“Kharms” is a pseudonym)

• 1905 (“St. Petersburg”)-1942 (“Leningrad”)

• Participated in poetry movement called zaum.

• A founding member of OBERIU, The Union of Real Art.

• Often wrote children’s literature with an

• absurdist twist.

Minimalism

• “LESS IS MORE”

• Economy of words, focus on surface details

• The reader fills in the rest -- collaboration

• One of many Modernist modes

• Flash fiction

• Tweets?

Kharms’ Minimalism

• If there’s no point to anything, then why go on and on and on in order to say so? The point of pointless can, and should, be made very briefly and directly.

• His stories diverge from most minimalist fiction: even when meaning is present, he snatches it away

Absurdism

• In philosophy:

  • the conflict between the human tendency to seek intrinsic value in human life and existence and the fact that humans are ultimately unable to find anything that satisfactorily passes for transcendence in a meaningless, purposeless world.

  • Links to nihilism and existentialism

• In literature:

  • works that focus on the experiences of characters who can’t find any meaning in life, works that often represent meaningless actions or events that don’t seem to lead in any sensible direction.

Kharm’s Aesopian Language

• Language designed to evade or avoid the censorship or punishment of a subversive author by a repressive government or regime

• Language that uses the strategies of fables (allegory and symbolism) or subtle meanings in order to critique a repressive government or regime

• But also: he’s mocking us

Today I Wrote Nothing

• Minimalism

• Absurdism

• Aesopian Language

• Fairy Tale elements

Daniil Kharms Important Works

• “Blue Notebook #10”

• “A Fable”

• “The Four-Legged Crow”

Death and Legacy

• “Tyrants would appear to be more comfortable with outright sedition, which they can at least understand, than with deliberate silliness.”

• Arrested 1941 for spreading “libelous and defeatist

• mood.”

• “simulated” insanity, died of starvation in mental ward during 1942 German siege of Leningrad

• Largely unknown until 1960s

Yuri Norstein (1941-)

• Internationally-recognized animator: Hedgehog in the Fog; Tales of Tales; The Overcoat

• Worked in three-person team

• Developed distinct style using cutouts and glass panes

  • Atmospheric Perspective

  • Depth of field

• Worked at Soyuzmultfilm for 25 years

• Fired for being too slow

• The “Golden Snail”

• The Overcoat - Longest film production in history (1981- )

Hedgehog in the Fog (1975)

• “Based on a Slavic folktale”

  • OR is it?

• Widely revered masterpiece

• Innovative “fog” effects

• Hedgehog figure part of Russian popular culture

• Consider allegorical meaning of creatures

  • Specifically Bear and Horse

Soviet Theatre, Youth Culture, & Fairy Tales

• Lenin realized the propaganda value of theatre, especially for children.

• State theatres received enormous subsidies; all theatres were required to offer performances especially designed for children.

• Despite Nadezhda Krupskaya’s skepticism about fairy tales, they proved useful as propaganda tools.

• As Katerina Clark observed, propaganda and fairy tales have comparable elements.

Yevgeny Shvarts (1896-1958)

• Associated with Soviet avant-garde movement during the 1920s

• Helped to legitimate fairy tales as vehicles for socialist education: ex. His version of Little Red Riding Hood

• Wildly popular among theatre audiences in the USSR

• Highly prolific: 25 stage plays, plus other works

Enter: The Dragon

• First published and performed during World War II.

• All promotional and design elements hinted that “The Dragon” was Hitler.

The Dragon: One night only!

• Despite the skill and cleverness of Shvarts and his director, Nikolai

• Akimov, the play was banned after a single performance: The parallels between Hitler and Stalin were strong, in life and on stage.

• Shvarts and Akimov were never punished.

• Restaged in 1962, during Krushchev’s Thaw and after de-Stalinization, to rave reviews.

Three Major Stalinist Traumas

• Shift from Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) to collectivization.

• The Great Purges of the late 1930s

• Soviet participation in

• World War II

The Great Purges of the late 1930s

• 1937-1938

• Estimated 1-2 million killed

Let’s talk about the word “Gypsy”

• An inaccurate term, from “Egyptian” … similar to calling indigenous North Americans “Indians”

• European population Indian descent

• A persecute population -- multiple genocide attempts

• Many prefer “Romani” or “Roma”

• NEVER say “gypped”

Soviet Participation in World War II

• WILSON: “Perhaps the broadest traumatic historical event in the Stalinist era. Despite the fact that the USSR was a member of the victorious Allied powers, their losses were approximately twenty million, more than all the other combatant nations combined. The blame rests largely with Stalin and his failure as tactician and manager of the army. ...

• WILSON: “Stalin assumed that the Soviet state would be fighting an offensive war to expand Marxism across the continent in support of workers’ uprisings in capitalist countries. As such, the prewar Soviet strategy ignored the possibility of conducting a defensive war and assumed that, with the aid of proletarians in revolt in adversarial nations, Russian losses would be minimal. …

• WILSON: “Additionally, since Stalin intended to fight a war in foreign territory, he had disassembled much of the country’s defensive fortifications in 1939. Thus, when Hitler violated the Nazi/Soviet nonaggression pact in 1941 and invaded the USSR, the only capital that Stalin had to spend was human ...

• WILSON: “An earlier action exacerbated the blunder. During the Great Purge, Stalin executed large numbers of older Bolshevik commanders of whose loyalty he was suspicious, with the result that when the war started, 75% of the Red Army officers and 70% of its rank-and-file soldiers had less than one year of military experience. Thus, Stalin’s mismanagement of his military resources set the stage for the massive slaughter of an entire generation of young Russians. He was sending untested troops to the front where they would serve as little more than cannon fodder. Of the total Russian casualties, six hundred thousand occurred during the first three weeks of the Nazi invasion. Such ineffective strategic leadership was tantamount to genocide as the country lost an entire generation of young people in the war effort.”

The Post-Soviet Era

• History

  • 1953 - Stalin Dies

  • 1953 - Khrushchev’s Rise

  • • De-Stalinization & Thaw

  • 1964 - Brezhnev Elected

  • • Stagnation

  • 1985 - Gorbachev Elected

  • • Perestroika & Glasnost

  • 1991 - Collapse of USSR

  • 1991 - Yeltsin Elected

  • 1999 - Putin Elected

De-Stalinization & Thaw

• Complete Renunciation of Stalin and his legacy

• Greater openness in political and artistic expression

  • Consider “The Dragon” -- a play that was once censored is now brought back and celebrated

Stagnation (1975-1985)

• Flaws in the planned economy, high expenditure on defense

  • Term coined by Gorbachev to describe the failures of the Gerontocracy

• Still better than the Stalin era, still some of the highest industrial and agricultural outputs in the world

• Why did this happen?

  • Worker “discipline” decreased

  • Negative effects of collectivization

  • Stability itself

  • International Oil Crisis

  • Failure to access global markets

  • Increased military expenditure

    • Reagan and the US

  • Failure to expand consumer economy

    • Growth of underground economy

Perestroika

• “Restructuring”

  • Economic reform. More capitalist economic models and global trade

  • Still controlled by Soviet government

Glasnost

• “Openness”

  • Exposure of Soviet crimes and horrors

  • Arguably, too much information all at once; leads to widespread anger

  • Greater freedom of artistic and political expression

Russia Under Yeltsin

• At the urging of the US and the West generally, rapid liberalization of the economy

  • A huge new market opened for exploitation by Western companies

Economic and social catastrophe through the ‘90s

• GDP tanked, the ruble fully collapsed twice, massive unemployment

• Oligarchy established

• Public health crisis: alcoholism, AIDS, tuberculosis, drug addiction, crash in life expectancy

• Marriage and birth rates plummet, divorce, abortion, and suicide rates skyrocket

• Overnight end of state support for education, healthcare, and the arts, with no private replacements available

• Shocking flood of Western cultural commodities into the country

Russia Under Putin

• Steady GDP Growth

• Historic Inequality

  • National Priority Projects launched to improve healthcare, education, housing, and agriculture

    • Things improved! Some!

  • Stabilized population

  • Incredible corruption, rampant bigotry, human rights abuses, various violent foreign interventions, etc.

Byt & Bytie

• Bytie: Spiritual and Intellectual life

• Byt: The everyday world

  • Poshlost: Vulgar, banal, materialistic, crass

Byt & Women’s Lives

• Recurrent tasks of running a household and caring for others

• Ateleological: no progress toward higher goals, associated culturally with the mundane, the unintellectual, the repetitive

• Compare to the teleology of Bolshevik ideology: rational, progressive, masculine, questing for intellectual perfection, building the bright and problem-free communist future

Separate but (un)equal

• Russia and the West both view ”women’s work” as small in scale, unintellectual, and restricted to the limited space of the home

• Russian culture views byt as a marginal but essential realm, the path to bytie

  • Conversely, it is simultaneously a barrier to bytie, that which “gets in the way” of higher pursuits

• Chiefly a “problem” for the intelligentsia, before and after the revolution

• Women writers tend to emerge from this embattled intelligentsia

• Women’s writing until glasnost tends to be confined to the world of byt: novels of the everyday female world, additionally constricted by socialist realist requirements of partisan optimism

Russian Magic Realism

• Introduction of magical elements into realism

• Estrangement of familiar objects

  • “Making what was formerly accepted as obvious into a problem” - Franz Roh (who coined the term “magical realism”)

• Typically viewed as a Latin American phenomenon, magical realism has echoes in Russian art and existence

  • Gogol’, Bulgakov, Pelevin

• The magical real must not merely mingle the commonplace and the strange, but transcend the boundary between the two

  • The irreducible element of magic: nothing in the text points to hallucination or delusion

  • The unproductivity of an allegorical reading

  • The combination of the inexplicable with the mundane

• RFT elements: One-Dimensionality?

Nina Sadur (1950-)

• Playwright as well as a prose artist

• Has described her own style as magical realism

• Lives with her mother and daughter in Moscow (as of 1994)

Sadur’s Realm

• Women’s sexuality in a squalid and unromantic world

• Characters are often physically/mentally disabled, on the edge of madness

  • No distinct or important boundary between sanity and madness in her stories’ worlds

• Recourse to the magical, fantastic, and especially gothic

  • Gothic tropes and trappings: inscrutable villains, menaced maidens, intense nighttime encounters, hauntings, magic, cruelty; gusts of winds, screams, strange shadows, cramped and trapping spaces, malevolent and inhuman forces

  • The haunted house is replaced by the claustrophobic communal apartment

• Ambivalence obscures meaning for the reader; evil is unpredictable

Lyudmila Petrusheskaya (1938-)

• Also a playwright

• Considered one of the greatest living Russian authors

• Work, mostly in the theater, was closely monitored by the KGB prior to glasnost

• Wrote “Tale of Tales” for Yuri Norstein

• Also an accomplished painter, starting at the age of 61(!) a cabaret singer

Petrushevskaya and Feminism

• Motherhood

  • Upending traditional ideas about maternity and its benevolence

  • Mothers and children love each other, but this love can’t produce happiness or psychological health

• “On the side of children”

• All of Petrushevskaya’s women … experience the sense that they live in a magic circle, ringed by a magic boundary ... that cannot be crossed.”

Petrushevskaya and Realism

• Shortage

  • Glasnost and post-glasnost period: a shortage of everything: physical goods, spaces, and services; compassion, relief, kindness

• Written on the body

  • Resolutely atheistic and materialistic: since the spiritual does not exist, traditionally spiritual experiences and transformations play out on and in the physical bodies of the characters

Petrushevskaya and the Supernatural

• Another indirect way to express spiritual devastation

• The fairy tale (or the urban legend, or other fantastic genres) reveal in their symbolism society’s fears, anxieties, and fantasies

• Petrushevskaya pushes the dissolution of the post-Soviet family into the light of the magic tale to disrupt static, empathy-numbing narratives surrounding women’s domestic trauma

The Cabbage-Patch Mother

• The post-Soviet world

  • Divorce, abortion

  • Homelessness

• Abortion and motherhood denied

  • Unresolved trauma and guilt

  • The droplet and her dream (projection)

  • The magic helper/donor/holy fool: ”you knew how to sin“

  • Remediation

    • Motherhood manifests bodily

• Why turn trauma over abortion and subsequent pregnancy into a fairy tale?