Carnival Culture and the Soviet Modernist Novel (St Antony's Series)

This book examines the work of five Soviet prose writers - Olesha, Platonov, Kharms, Bulgakov and Vaginov - in the light of the carnivalesque elements of Russian popular culture. It shows that while Bakhtin's account of carnival culture sheds considerable light on the work of these writers, they need to be considered with reference to both the concrete forms of Russian and Soviet popular culture and the changing institutional framework of Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s. "The subversive side of carnival culture and its influence on the modern novel has become well known with dissemination of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin in the West. However, it is only in relation to the concrete forms of popular culture and the changes in the institutional framework of society that the political significance of the carnivalesque can be assessed. In this study of the relationship between Russian popular culture and the work of five Soviet prose writers, Olesha, Platonov, Kharms, Bulgakov and Vaginov, Dr. Brandist shows that while in the late 1920s carnivalesque popular culture was utilized by these writers to resist the increasingly dogmatic official culture, as the 1930s developed the carnivalesque became an anti-hegemonic resource to facilitate a critique of the deeper assumptions of the new social order. It is also shown that Western European carnival traditions were combined with indigenous cultural forms to give the Soviet modernist novel a distinctive character."--BOOK JACKET Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction: Carnival and Cultural Politics....Pages 1-25 Front Matter....Pages 27-27 Literary Engagement with Urban Popular Culture: Blok’s Бaлaƨaнчuк and Bely’s ∏emepбypƨ....Pages 29-51 Revolutionizing Social Life from a Base in Art: The Avant-Garde and Mass Culture, 1917–28....Pages 52-80 Cultural Cleavage and the Soviet Modernist Novel....Pages 81-102 Front Matter....Pages 103-103 The Festive Revolutions of Yurii Olesha....Pages 105-134 Carnivalization and Populism in the Central Work of Andrei Platonov....Pages 135-164 Daniil Kharms, the Soviet Menippea and the ‘Medieval’ Grotesque....Pages 165-195 Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and the Devil’s Carnival....Pages 196-220 A Note on Vaginov: The Novel as a Compensatory Realm....Pages 221-225 Conclusion....Pages 226-228 Back Matter....Pages 229-264