UC Berkeley

This dissertation traces the charged dynamic of mimetic characterization in late Soviet literature though a study of the works of Yuri Trifonov, Andrei Bitov, and Vasilii Belov. Emerging from the Stalinist era and its socialist realist doctrine of the “positive hero,” Soviet writers faced the daunting opportunity of returning a human face to literary characters. This study argues that writers in the era of “developed socialism” were drawn towards this prospect of writing “living people” into their works, only to be stymied by the incompatibility and obsolescence of mimetic modes of characterization inherited from the Russian literary tradition to individuals shaped by both the horrors of the recent past and a nonheroic present. This ultimate failure of mimetic characterization led writers to reference the late Soviet individual through novel means: unable to adequately represent verisimilar characters in words, the authors explored in this dissertation wove the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas surrounding this impossibility into the structure of their texts themselves.The dissertation’s three chapters examine the specific ways each author responded to this mimetic challenge through close readings of the narrative structure and character systems of texts like Trifonov’s Dom na naberezhnoi [House on the Embankment], Bitov’s Pushkinskii dom [Pushkin House], and Belov’s Privychnoe delo [A Typical Matter]. These readings are informed by the theoretical writings of both Western and Soviet literary scholars such as Lidiia Ginzburg, Gyorgy Lukács, James Phelan, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Despite the diversity of their literary styles, all three authors participated in official literary culture, and as such particular attention is given throughout this dissertation to the reception of these writer’s characters by the Soviet critical apparatus. Late Soviet writers not only had to navigate the newly opened landscape of a “socialist realism without shores” but also engaged with the legacies of 19th century Russian realism, whose model of character greatly informed understandings of mimetic characterization for a revived Russian literary culture. The limitations of this model encountered by late Soviet writers and the innovations these encounters produced have implications far beyond the field of literary history. Recent decades have seen a widespread critical reevaluation of the field of “Soviet subjectivity,” with a particular focus on the Stalinist era. A flood of new information, in particular pertaining to the routine or “everyday life” was made available after the fall of the Soviet Union, which saw the opening of historical archives and a flood of non-fiction documents, diaries and memoirs. Valuable insights can be made from a study of accounts both narrated by and about fictional persons, and this study of characterization in the late Soviet era aims to recover notions of selfhood among the writers, critics, and readers of late Soviet literature.