UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores the emergence of Soviet sonic culture––a concept I define as a set of practices, expectations, understandings, and preconceptions surrounding audible phenomena––during the early years of the Stalinist era (1929-41). On a global level, twentieth–century sound reproduction technologies enacted a dramatic shift in listeners’ conceptions of attention, space, and community, and I contend that these technologies had a distinct impact on Soviet literature and cinema. Unlike their Western counterparts who aimed to capture, commodify, and sell sound, many artists in the USSR saw sound reproduction as a vital tool for the construction of state socialism. In case studies that investigate the work of Dziga Vertov, Valentin Kataev, Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Evgenii Cherviakov, and Andrei Platonov, I suggest that we can interpret these artists’ depictions of monumental construction, industrial development, and reformative incarceration as the imagination of new listeners for a new country. Accordingly, this dissertation problematizes an enduring binary in the Slavic academic field that associates official, state-sponsored art with Stalin’s repressive censorship, and which charts unofficial, unpublished art as a more legitimate site of artistic innovation. Contrary to a common narrative of the Soviet state’s ideological rigidity, sonic culture’s enthusiasm for incorporating sound into Soviet art suggests that Stalin’s uncompromising push for technological modernity led to officially sanctioned innovations in artistic form and expressivity. Ultimately, I argue that Soviet sonic culture significantly shaped the development of Soviet literature and film.

While critical in its assertions, this work is at its core a cultural history, and I have intentionally based my research on newspapers, rarely-cited technical publications, and memoirs from Soviet sound designers, inventors, critics, filmmakers, and writers. The project integrates a media archaeological approach into its method, but I expand upon the possibilities of media archaeology by exploring how technology is limited or emboldened by ideology. This analysis of Soviet sonic culture and the listeners it produced––both real and imaginary––offers more than a new lens for the Soviet ‘30s: it is a paradigm for determining how media technologies within non-capitalist modernity both established and overturned the relationships we may expect to find between art, culture, and power.