Princeton Conjunction - 2014
An Annual Interdisciplinary Conference

ROMANTIC SUBVERSIONS OF SOVIET ENLIGHTENMENT:
Questioning Socialism's Reason

http://www.princeton.edu/res/princeton-conjunction/

One year after Nikita Khrushchev's famous "secret speech," Voprosy
Literatury (Literary Issues), a new Soviet journal dedicated entirely
to topics in literary theory, history, and criticism, published an
essay that initiated a long-term intellectual discussion. In her
article, Anna Elistratova, an expert on the English romantic novel,
directly challenged the aesthetic doctrine of the post-Stalin period
by asking, "When it comes to the artistic perception of the world, can
we really say that realism is historically the only effective method
we should rely on?" Was it not time to admit, the essay continued,
that the legacy of romanticism, with its humanistic dreams and
rebellious outbursts, could still offer an important source of
inspiration for progressive socialist art?

This initial challenge to the hegemony of realist art was followed by
a series of heated debates in 1963-1968 and 1971-1973. Drawing on
European and Russian aesthetic traditions, participants of the debates
highlighted such characteristics of romanticism as its propensity "to
stare at the darkness in order to discern new directions" and its
emphasis on the "absolute autonomy and uniqueness of the individual."
Within a few decades, the status of romanticism had radically changed.
From "literature's ballast," romanticism evolved into a symptom of
"social emancipation." By the 1980s, dismissive descriptions of
romanticism as "passive, conservative, and reactionary" had ceded to a
vision of it as a "revolution in arts" that privileges dynamism,
becoming, and spontaneity.

Today it is hard not to read these literary debates as an attempt to
reframe the role of the humanities in the USSR in the wake of the
Terror, World War II, and Stalinism. Ostensibly an esoteric
philological enterprise, these late-Soviet discussions used
romanticism as a historically available framework that could generate
alternative versions of identity, spiritual values, social
communities, and relations to the past.

Philological explorations of romantic tropes, of course, were only one
expression of a broader interest in reclaiming romanticism. In the
1960s, newly publicized texts by Isaak Babel, Andrei Platonov, and
Boris Pilniak helped to reframe the Bolshevik Revolution, giving
Communist Utopia one more chance. The reappearance of revolutionary
romanticism was paralleled by a host of other trends. Late Soviet
cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare and the theatrical productions of
Alexander Vampilov and Viktor Rozov highlighted the figure of the
"problematic hero," deeply attuned to psychological nuance and the
complications of being in the world. Interest in the occult and the
mystical (facilitated by the publication of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master
and Margarita in 1966) provided yet another ground for destabilizing
normative socialist-realist canons. A structurally similar escape from
the rationality of Stalinist neoclassicism was manifest in various
attempts to articulate a feeling of kinship with the natural world:
from the vagabond aesthetics of 'tourism in the wilds' and the
bardovskii chanson to the village prose movement, with its insistence
on cultural rootedness and national belonging. Throughout the Soviet
Union, romantic nationalists offered alternatives to the unifying and
universalizing notion of the "Soviet people" via reinterpretations of
folkloric motifs (in Sergei Paradzhanov's films), revitalization of
the historical novel (through the novels of Vladimir Korotkevich),
revisions of ancient history (in Lev Gumilev's exploration of
ethnogenesis), or reconceptualization of Marxism (in Yulian Bromley's
theory of ethnos). The rhetorical force of romanticism had a profound
impact on such key late-Soviet phenomena as the communard movement in
education, major construction projects in Siberia (e.g. in Bratsk), or
Soviet fascination with taming the atom and conquering the cosmos.

Instead of reducing these romantic interventions to the status of
non-conformist versions of dominant Soviet aesthetics, our conference
proposes to view sotsromantizm as an autonomous (and relatively
coherent) form of historical imagination. This politico-poetical
configuration brought together dispersive impulses, anarchic
inclinations, psychological introspection, and metaphorical
structuring in order to repudiate the basic Soviet conventions of
normative rationality and mimetic sotsrealism. In short, this
conference will approach the romantic imagination in the late Soviet
period as a form of critical engagement with "actually existing"
socialism.

While many recent studies of late socialism are structured around
metaphors of absence and detachment, we want to shift attention to
concepts, institutions, spaces, objects, and identities that enabled
(rather than prevented) individual and collective involvement with
socialism. Sotsromantizm offers a ground from which to challenge the
emerging dogma that depicts late Soviet society as a space where
pragmatic cynics coexisted with useful idiots of the regime. The
romantic sensibility sought to discover new spaces for alternative
forms of affective attachment and social experience; it also helped to
curtail the self-defeating practices of disengagement and
indifference.

We invite historically grounded and theoretically informed submissions
from anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and scholars of art,
architecture, cinema, literature, music, media, theater, and popular
culture, and all those interested in investigating social and cultural
practices made possible by the late socialist appropriation of
romanticism. In particular, we welcome submissions that analyze the
double nature of sotsromantizm, understood both as a critique of the
Soviet Enlightenment and as an alternative form of Soviet socialism.
We especially encourage submissions that explore instances and
practices of romantic subversions in non-Russian cultural and
linguistic contexts of the socialist world.

Abstracts (300 words) and short CVs (no more than two pages) should be
sent to sotsromantizmgmail.com by January 20, 2014.

Those selected to present at the conference will be contacted in early
February 2014. Final papers will be due no later than April 15, and
will be posted on the conference website.

We may be able to offer a number of travel subsidies for graduate
students and participants from overseas.

Program committee:
Serguei Oushakine, Chair (Princeton University)
Marijeta Bozovic (Yale University)
Helena Goscilo (The Ohio State University)
Mark Lipovetsky (The University of Colorado at Boulder)
Vera Tolz-Zilitinkevic (The University of Manchester)