In Russian the phrase for ‘border’, granitsa, carries a variety of meanings which blur its definition as a territorial and administrative demarcation line. They embrace boundary, borderland, restrict, margin, confine, threshold, littoral and frontier. The primary syllable, gran’, translated as ‘edge’, additionally hyperlinks granitsa to a state of being ‘on the brink’.
Taking account of those associations, the Moscow-based journal Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 3/25 (New Literary Assessment) explores concepts about borders and limits in a wide range of contexts: geographical, social, psychological, historic, ideological, philosophical and aesthetic.
Erasing boundaries
Stalin dominated by the quite a few maps displayed in his workplace, observes Evegeny Dobrenko (Ca’ Foscari College of Venice) in an article on the rhetoric of kinship between the peoples of the USSR. Propaganda offered the world past Soviet borders as hostile and divided by nationwide enmities, inaccessible languages and damaged communication codes. Inside the Soviet area, nonetheless, cultural and territorial boundaries have been declared to have been erased. On the identical time, the social dividing line between the nomenklatura (ruling class) and the remainder of Soviet society was camouflaged.
Because the Stalin regime sought to implement an solely Soviet model of socialism, it repackaged the Marxist notion of the brotherhood of the proletariat for home functions. There have been about 130 totally different languages within the USSR, however the ‘rainbow of friendship’ uniting its peoples was stated to transcend communication boundaries. Soviet territory was handled as ‘a single acoustic space’ that would soak up linguistic variation amongst nationalities purportedly united by shared expertise and ideological dedication.
Shared phrases have been seen because the path to homogeneity. Paeans to a ‘super-language’ that will wipe away linguistic variations grew to become dominant in poetry all through the USSR, alongside praises to ‘the immortal beacon of Comrade Stalin’ and the ‘universal compassion of the Russian people’.
The merging of propaganda and literature peaked throughout World Battle II because the nation’s exterior borders misplaced their earlier stability. Any nationwide or ethnic individuation was interpreted as dissent. The Ukrainian poet Volodymyr Sosyura’s poem ‘Love Ukraine’ (1944), translated into Russian in 1951, enraged the press in Moscow. Sosyura was accused of making a boundary the place none ought to exist.
‘The essence of nationalism lies in the aspiration to stand apart and enclose oneself in one’s personal nationwide shell, within the aspiration to see solely what divides’, wrote Pravda. The Ukrainian Writers’ Union was compelled to situation an instantaneous response declaring that, ‘with attention and love we continue to learn the great art of literature … from Russian writers.’
‘The rhetoric of friendship was used to hide classic imperial practices’, Dobrenko concludes. ‘Although Soviet poetry insisted that “the friendship of peoples knows no borders”, when new nations rose on the ruins of the Soviet empire, borders appeared and put an end to the friendship.’
Metaphysics of oil
The ideological message that permeated and contained Soviet society created a gulf between its imagined universe and the world wherein folks lived and labored. In an article on the interior cultural and financial results of the Soviet oil trade, Ilya Kalinin (visiting researcher at Humbolt College, Berlin) writes that the obvious stability of the years between the top of the Khrushchev Thaw in 1964 and glasnost within the late Eighties ‘hid a dynamic that was eroding the very foundation of the Soviet order’.
Siberian oil assets stored Soviet Union afloat, however did little to serve its inhabitants. The oil, initially found within the Nineteen Fifties and 60s, was largely bought overseas and utilized by the Soviet management to preserve an unwieldy, ageing system and conceal technical failures, poor manufacturing, insufficient distribution and dangerous administration. ‘The dependence of the Soviet superstructure on oil was too significant to be acknowledged. Consequently, oil extraction was presented as production, hiding the truth about the industry … As economic dependence on oil grew, greater effort was put into its denial by the official economic and political narrative.’
The properties and potential of untapped oil reserves – fluidity, potential vitality and an astonishing capability for transformation – conferred on them ‘a magical connection with affluence and the transboundary qualities of the contemporary world’, Kalinin suggests. As information in regards to the trade have been more and more repressed, oil grew to become culturally mythologised. It featured as a theme in poetry and, most notably, in Andrei Konchalovsky’s acclaimed epic movie Siberiade (1979). Right here, the oil picture ‘spins the fibres of the story, linking its broken narrative treads’ towards the backdrop of the Siberian area and its suppressed colonial historical past.
The area’s huge, forbidding however in the end penetrable boundaries are revealed to be much less horizontal than vertical. They lie in geological strata the place the bounds of time are overstepped. To dig down is to dig into the previous, however it’s also to launch hidden shops of liquid treasure, manifest as pillars of fireside reaching into the cosmos.
The Nineteen Seventies have been marked by indicators of backtracking from the communist mannequin: a better curiosity within the shopper ethos, nationwide id, faith, folks custom and New Age spirituality. By the top of the last decade, Konchalovsky was permitted to launch an epic with overtly metaphysical dimensions, representing ‘a transgression of the normative boundaries of Soviet culture’. Mixing documentary with artwork cinema, Siberiade combines a socialist realist model with the displaced custom of the Russian avantgarde. Class battle is seen by the optic of elemental forces and a seek for the origins of the universe. Social identities dissolve as shared human origins are acknowledged.
‘The search for oil becomes a search for meaning,’ Kalinin says. ‘Political economy breaks into ontology… A narrative about production transgresses into a tale about the manifestation of the sacred.’ Oil connects. It turns into the picture of a precept that strikes nature and matter, a ‘magical operator catalysing transitions between the four elements … the final link in the chemical and symbolic processes of transmutation which absorb and transfigure organic matter from the ancient past, and the collective memory it holds’.
Self-discipline and delinquency
Within the Soviet cultural context, the road between ‘the acceptable and the unacceptable, the establishment and the underground, was constantly in flux,’ writes Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia College). The results of crossing an ideological boundary have been by no means predictable. Between 1955 and 1961, Andrei Sinyavsky (pseudonym Abram Tertz) wrote a collection of satirical tales that earned him a seven-year jail sentence. His closed trial in 1966 – held alongside that of his fellow dissenter, Yuli Daniel – reportedly targeted on the overlap between the author’s views and people of his characters.
Lipovetsky provides a comparability between Sinyavsky/Tertz’s Improbable Tales (Pantheon, 1963) and the work of French thinker Michel Foucault, who wrote barely later. The similarities lie notably of their views about authorship, ‘delinquent’ behaviour and panopticism. In Sinyavsky’s story, ‘Graphomaniacs’ (1961), the impulse that generates an underground tradition of obsessive scribbling is put right down to the artistic limitations imposed by the Soviet censor. ‘Thanks to censorship…we spend our lives in a fool’s paradise,’ one ‘graphomaniac’ says within the story. ‘We flatter ourselves with hopes…The state (curse it!) gives you the right to spend your life imagining yourself as an unacknowledged genius.’
Inside the USSR, writing was ‘the main manifestation of agency’, Lipovetsky says, although it was additionally ‘paradoxically focused on an author’s withdrawal, which fulfilled the philosophical aspiration to overstep one’s personal existence and transfer into another (transcendental) dimension’. Within the Soviet Union, the manufacturing of transgressive literary texts was seen as a type of social ‘delinquency’.
Sinyavsky depicts the compulsion to put in writing as a launch of suppressed vitality mixed with an urge to ‘eliminate’ the self within the creation of a textual content. Foucault expresses an identical thought in a 1969 lecture, remarking {that a} author creates an area wherein he consistently disappears, enjoying ‘the part of a dead man in the game of writing’. Equally, for Foucault, any disciplinary system incites the urge to cross its boundaries. At a systemic degree, exterior social management penetrates particular person consciousness and works to impose its personal ‘truth’ on the character. The internalized sense of surveillance it provokes can result in a ‘delinquent’ response.
Inside the Soviet system, which cultivated an phantasm of panoptical omniscience, the formally recognised author was a central functionary, whereas the unpublished scribbler emerged as his ‘delinquent double’. Sinyavsky devises an creator who’s ‘radically powerless but liberated into a liminal space inhabited by the marginalised and the excluded’, Lipovetsky writes.
The story Pkhents (1957) progressively unmasks a narrator who seems successively as a hunchback, a determine of blended ethnicity, as gay, a migrant, a spy and in the end an extraterrestrial. Sinyavsky’s hero is freed from typical id. When Pkhents commits suicide, for worry of dropping his important self by assimilation into the human race, he shakes off the boundaries of normal perspective and perceives himself ‘from all sides, all angles at once’. The alien represents Syniavsky’s ‘prototype of the ideal author’, Lipovetsky suggests, ‘endowed with a gift of absolute disengagement, which is the foundation of literary creativity’.
Assessment by Irena Maryniak
