Between Ideology and Authorial Class Consciousness: Another Look at Dmitry Blagoi’s Vulgar Sociology

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media II: Marxism, Poetry and Poetics

Abstract

Vulgar sociology was an early Soviet school of literary criticism and theory, defined by an adherence to orthodox Marxist principles, casting literature as a reflection of underlying materialist forces as part of the superstructure. Indeed, the very term “vulgar sociology” was applied to the movement by the far more famous Russian Formalists as a smear tactic. One of the most famous critics and theorists working with the vulgar sociological method into the Stalinist period was Dmitry Blagoi, a scholar who created the orthodox Soviet approach to literary studies. Blagoi’s scholarly career has recently received scholarly attention primarily as an example of High Stalinist literary criticism, at once overly ideological and overly careerist. While acknowledging the excesses of his method and noting the reductionist orientation of his later scholarship, this paper aims to draw key insights from Blagoi’s earlier works of Fyodor Tiutchev (1919) and Aleksandr Pushkin (1929), both of which exemplify the vulgar sociological method. Both monographs locate writer’s class anxieties as key constructive factors for their poetry. While one can critique the stagist and “vulgar” approaches to Marxist criticism, especially in the context of development in Western Marxist literary and cultural studies, revisiting Blagoi’s scholarship prior to its hardening into dogmatism in the context of more contemporary Marxist criticism by Fredric Jameson and the Frankfurt School can open new avenues for exploring the replication of sociological structures within the literary as well as the relationship between ideology and text.

Author

• Veniamin Vadimovich Gushchin, U of Southern California