Nature, For and Against II: Some Versions of Soviet Pastoral

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

“Good proletarian art,” observed William Empson, "is usually covert pastoral.” What occasioned Empson’s remark was the 1934 Writers Congress and the codification of socialist realism. In it, he noted the furtive presence of pastoral values, and the curious conjuncture of a novel program for Soviet literature with a mode that stretches back to antiquity. Other scholars, too, have also noted this convergence of modernity, industrialization, and the pastoral: Leo Marx, for example, writing in his Machine in the Garden, could even find in the certain representations of factories, the “abstract residuum of the pastoral.” This panel takes up the resurgence of the pastoral in early Soviet culture, exploring versions of its expression in a range of works: It will examine the influence of Karl Wittfogel’s “geographical materialism” on the landscapes of the disurbanists; the melodramatic pastoral of Ol’ga Preobrazhenskaia and Ivan Pravov’s Quiet Don; and the tension between what Lovejoy and Boas called “hard” and “soft” primitivism that the pastoral helps to mediate in the work on Andrei Platonov.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Joan Neuberger, U of Texas at Austin

Papers

• Political Morphologies of the Land: Karl August Wittfogel and the Paradox of Disurbanist Architecture - Devin Fore, Princeton U

• Primitivism and Pastoralism, ca. 1935 - Michael M. Kunichika, Amherst College

• The Quiet Don: Searching for a Soviet Pastoral - Emma Widdis, U of Cambridge (UK)

Discussant

• Daniel Paul Schwartz, McGill U (Canada)