Petrified Utopia. Happiness Soviet Style

Life has become better, life has become merrier.—Stalin's 1935 slogan For those Soviet science fiction buffs out there, the title of Balina and Dobrenko's groundbreaking book, Petrified Utopia, might bring Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian masterpiece We (1921) to mind. Indeed Zamyatin used One State's attempt to bring about “mathematically infallible happiness” to critique policies implemented by Lenin's Communist Party after the revolution. Yet it is precisely this focus on the Party as the determiner of Soviet happiness that the book singles out as reductive. Certainly Party ideology mediated most of Soviet life, including the search for happiness. As the introduction states, Marxism had itself come about as a result of the failure of bourgeois revolution to bring happiness to the working class. But focusing on the Party reveals only imaginings of happiness on the level of the collective. This is the location of utopian dreaming, where the “pursuit of happiness” was promised and prescribed via socialist models.Balina and Dobrenko point out that happiness is, of course, also deeply personal. It is D-503's private longing for I-330, after all, that leads to his awareness of One State's sexual regulations as boundaries. It is that space between the public and the private spheres that Petrified Utopia targets, where “slippages” in meaning occur (xvii). It is important to recognize that the term slippage is not used as a synonym for subversive. This difference brings us to yet another primary aim of the book. For too long in studies of countries of the former Eastern bloc, the search for the subversive has remained the scholarly modus operandi. This methodology is a relic of Cold War politics. The implied political dichotomy (either with or against the Party) has kept many academics from seeing the complexity of interactions that determined everyday life both within and beyond the utopian totality of Marxism-Leninism. This slippage occurs between what the editors identify as the modal and spatial aspects of utopia and their reverse sides in reality: “As a social Utopia, happiness has for its reverse side the reality of living societal and personal experience, which at the same time is also the experience of consuming the ideological constructs of happiness” (xvii). That reality is also a function of history, whether during the postrevolutionary period, during Stalinism, or post-Stalin. The result is a dynamic relationship that can be viewed in the locations where the private, the public, and the ideological meet and change over time.The chapters in this anthology identify representations and realizations of happiness in literature, visual culture, and popular culture. They are broken up into three sections: “Utopics,” “Realities,” and “Locations.” Ironically, the first essay in the “Utopics” section, “A Joyful Soviet Childhood: Licensed Happiness for Little Ones” by Catriona Kelly, addresses the self-perception of Russians as “a people who suffer” (4). Kelly focuses on the countertrope of the “happy Russian childhood” and its adapted ideological narrative in the Soviet Union (5). Interestingly, her interviews with Russians about their childhood demonstrate a desire to remember past happiness despite the glaring difficulties of lived experience. Evgeny Dobrenko's essay “Utopian Naturalism: The Epic Poem of Kolkhoz Happiness” focuses on the genre of kolkhoz poetry, particularly the lubok. Dobrenko describes how this contradictory combination of socialist modernization and feudal folklore provided the newly urbanized former peasant class with a nostalgic utopian future. Pure aesthetics replaced the tragic reality that was Soviet-forced collectivization. The next two chapters focus on consumption, particularly of the culinary sort. Helena Goscilo looks at the promise of plenty and portrayal of the feast in Soviet art and advertising. “Luxuriating in Lack: Plentitude and Consuming Happiness in Soviet Paintings and Posters, 1930s–1953” points to the fantasy of happiness via consumption that never materialized for most Soviet citizens. Gian Piero Piretto's “Tasty and Healthy: Soviet Happiness in One Book” analyzes the gastronomic pleasures available to the New Man and Woman in the popular cookbook The Book About Tasty and Healthy Food.The book moves on to the “Realities” section with Marina Balina's chapter on orphans in children's literature. An expert in this genre, Balina analyzes Grigory Belykh and Leonid Panteleev's SHKID Republic (Respublika SHKID, 1926) and Anton Makarenko's Pedagogical Poem (Pedagogicheskaia Poema, 1933, 1936). She focuses on the trope of “reforging young criminals into productive laborers” that would later be adopted in Soviet literature for adults (100). Emma Widdis's chapter “Sew Yourself Soviet: The Pleasures of Textile in the Machine Age” is a thought-provoking study of the “sensory pleasure” that comes from handling textiles and the act of personalizing them via prefabricated appliqué in a time of economic shortage. By studying women's magazines from the late 1920s and early 1930s, Widdis artfully describes the overlapping discourses of personal creative happiness and the magazines' narrative of happiness for the Soviet woman in the area of home decor. Susan Reid looks at the narrative of domestic bliss promised to those moving into new apartment blocks in the Khrushchev era. Her chapter “Happy Housewarming” documents the transformation of the new Soviet person into “homemaker and consumer” in magazines and literature (138). The chapter “When We Were Happy: Remembering Soviet Holidays” by Albert Baiburin and Alexandra Piir historicizes the Russian term for happiness, schast'e, beginning with nineteenth-century Romanticism. It then goes on to juxtapose the Soviet “bright future” happiness with the personal, unofficial version. Via oral history Baiburin and Piir examine the intertwining of public display and private celebration during official state holidays.The final section of the anthology addresses utopian locations of happiness, primarily that of the “New Moscow.” That old utopian studies favorite, architecture, is the subject of the first chapter. Katerina Clark explores how the plans to rebuild Moscow in the thirties intersected with Soviet constructions of happiness in “The ‘New Moscow’ and the New ‘Happiness.’” Next, Philip Ross Bullock analyzes Andrei Platonov's unfinished novel Happy Moscow (1991), originally written in the thirties. Moscow refers both to the city and to the novel's heroine, Moscow Chestnova. Bullock sheds new light on Platonov's conception of happiness by identifying the influence of Tolstoyan happiness as well as Stalin's Five-Year Plan. The utopian location shifts to the silver screen in the next chapter. In the search for happiness during the Thaw era, this also signifies a rejection of Moscow for the periphery. Julian Graffy focuses on changing notions of happiness among young protagonists in the films made from 1955 to 1956. The focus on youth signals not only a generational shift but also a new focus on personal happiness in the era of de-Stalinization. The eminent film and theater scholar Maya Turovskaya rounds out the anthology with her essay “Easy on the Heart; or ‘Strength Through Joy.’” This study compares the promises of happiness of the Stalinist and Hitler dictatorships. Turovskaya compares the changing propaganda strategies of two popular illustrated journals: Ogonek in the USSR and the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung in Germany.For those interested in utopian studies, this book is a pleasure to read. Not only is it accessible to the nonspecialist, but it also provides a broad picture of Soviet society from the popular to high art, from the personal dreams of the kitchen to those of civil architecture, from the sewing machine to the camera. My one criticism would be the lack of an essay on happiness in the seventies and eighties. Certainly the search for happiness had not also petrified along with the utopia. However, the periods through the Thaw are well addressed, and all translations are well done

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Happiness · Literature · Sociology · Utopia · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Philosophy · Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition · Psychology · Social Psychology · Soviet and Russian History

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