UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the new place of material objects and commodities under socialism as a productive social and aesthetic problem for early Soviet literature. Why was the literature of the Russian revolution so preoccupied with material things? How did writers respond to, or compensate for, the volatility of the object world amidst revolution, war, and economic transformation? In what ways was the formal innovation that characterizes the literature of this period reactive to the changing relationships between people and things? Soviet objects emerge in my study as the necessary but neglected counterpart to the much-studied Soviet subject, from the vantage point not just of cultural history, but of literary studies: I argue that literature took inspiration from the contested postrevolutionary world of things to map new relations between manufactured objects, on one hand, and social life and human perception on the other. Through close readings that operate at the intersection of formalism and historicism, I trace the development of innovative literary forms across distinct aesthetic tendencies—from the Futurist avant-garde (Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky) to proto-socialist-realism (Fyodor Gladkov) to fellow-traveling modernism (Yuri Olesha)—in response to Russia’s material crises and shifting modes of production during the early twentieth century. Neither the achievements nor the unresolved questions of this early Soviet “old materialist” poetics, I suggest, have yet been resolved or transcended by contemporary “new materialist” thought.

Chapter One considers the trope that lends the dissertation its title: the Futurist motif of the “revolt of things” [vosstanie veshchei], referring to scenes of manufactured objects rising up in self-willed rebellion against their human masters. Velimir Khlebnikov coined the trope in his 1909 long poem The Crane an industrial reworking of Russian literature’s Petersburg myth. In the poem, factory infrastructure transforms into a monstrous bird, a dystopian neo-Romantic vision of modern society overtaken by products which seem natural and inexorable despite their human origins. Khlebnikov’s protest against Russia’s rapid late imperial industrialization was then refigured by Vladimir Mayakovsky, for whom the revolt of things was an anti-bourgeois semiotic rebellion in which commodities, vocalized by the poet, speak and act for themselves as revolutionary agents. Mayakovsky’s poetic focus on things that speak, including through commercial branding, anticipates his work in an advertising agency in the 1920s; moreover, I argue that the poet’s expansive and militant lyric persona was in fact developed through a politicized apostrophic address to the commodities circulating around him.The rest of the dissertation moves from the avant-garde—a movement which, though esoteric in its own time, has come to dominate scholarly discussion of materialism as an early Soviet aesthetic concern—to more popular literary currents that, as I aim to show, developed their own poetics of the object world. Chapter Two takes up Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement (1925), a text usually described as the first Soviet “production novel,” even though the ruined factory at its center cannot produce anything until the book’s end. The process of making cement through the mixing of diverse raw materials functions as an allegory for both the conscious remaking of post-revolutionary society and the genesis of the new Soviet novel. Though critical accounts of approved canonical Soviet literature often focus on the forging of ideal Soviet subjects, the model of cement production better captures the motley stylistic texture of the books meant to advance official Soviet ideology in practice. Written at a transitional point between 1920s proletarian literature and the top-down proclamation of “socialist realism” in the 1930s, both Cement’s ideology and its formal construction, I propose, are modeled on the cement production process itself.

Chapter Three turns to Yuri Olesha, an author whose wry and stylistically intricate work responds to an altogether different side of post-revolutionary material culture. Like many of his heroes, Olesha is often regarded as a petty-bourgeois escapist from material reality. In contrast, I argue that Olesha’s flamboyant images channel Soviet commodity culture—not through the brand names that so interested Mayakovsky, but through decorative metaphors which mirror the dynamics of market exchange, an economic principle that Soviet planners disdained but on which the Soviet economy still relied. Georg Lukács’ criticism of Olesha’s style as “reified” (that is, fatally distorted by the commodity form) is in fact anticipated by Olesha himself, whose work, particularly the novella Envy (1927), formally enacts the disintegration of revolutionary epic narrative by the lingering effects of commodity fetishism. Olesha’s ambivalent modernism, like Gladkov’s monumental proletarian prose and Mayakovsky’s agitational avant-garde lyrics, constitutes a formally distinctive artistic response within the fractious world of early Soviet letters to the fluctuating relations between human subjects and manufactured objects after the revolution. These readings offer a new perspective on the history of early Soviet literature by tracing the volatile status and meaning of manufactured things during the transitional economy of the 1920s, whose rapid shifts and dislocations enabled new figurations of everyday materiality.