Magical Labor and Industrial Modernity: Non-Synchronicity in the Tales of Pavel Bazhov

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Method IV: Uneven and Combined Development: Keywords for Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Culture

Abstract

Pavel Bazhov wrote his Stalin Award-Winning Tales in the Soviet 1930s but passed them off as authentic “workers’ folklore” (rabochii folklore) that represented the authentic culture of a key socialist precursor, the factory serf (krepostnoi rabochii). New, but pretending to be old, the stories encode within their plots, and especially in their language and use of skaz narrative techniques, a sense of overlapping time structures. Capitalist exploitation maps onto a world of enchantment where feats of Stakhanovite labor are conjured through fairytale logic. Borrowing from Ernst Bloch’s exploration of the non-synchronous, this presentation argues that Bazhov’s tales advance a theory of magical labor as an essential element in the Stalinist vision of industrial modernity.

Author

• Bradley A Gorski, Georgetown U