Dirt was an important force in Russian realism. It may seem obvious that dirt should serve a mimetic function in representing the everyday realities of Russian rural life, yet as modern readers we must be reminded that its presence in Russian literature was contested from its first appearance. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Russian authors consciously introduced dirt into their literary works as a means of challenging existing aesthetic and generic codes that restricted the representation in the verbal arts of nature, the peasant, and the material conditions of rural life. Nikolai Gogol’s remarkable novel of provincial life, Dead Souls (1842), transformed the landscape of Russian literature with its unidealized representation of the countryside, no longer extolled as a pastoral paradise but critiqued as a morass of filth. Dead Souls was reviled by critics not only for its representation of material dirt (griaz’), but also for its “dirty jokes” (griaznye shutochki) and its exposure of the moral filth (griaz’) of the landowning class.1 The critics’ conflation of the mimetic, metaphorical, and metonymic uses of dirt in Gogol’s novel shows the many ways in which dirt “spoke” and served to expand the borders of literature and to endow it with new critical potential. Griaz’ became a keyword as important to the literary sphere as pochva was to discussions of Russian identity in the sphere of publitsistika. Indeed, the two terms exemplified rival interpretative frameworks for writing and reading Russian nature and nation.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas defines dirt as “matter out of place.” In Russian literature of the early nineteenth century, dirt was indeed out of place: prevailing aesthetic codes and literary conventions discouraged the depiction of the low, base, and dirty, preserving art as a sphere of purity. Douglas argues that pollution taboos are translated from the material domain into such “symbolic systems of purity” that create boundaries between clean and unclean elements. Dirt is a disordered element that implies “a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt, there is system.” When dirt entered the Russian literary system, it signified disorder in the material, sociological, and aesthetic domains. Indeed, Gogol and his nineteenth-century descendants embraced the tactics of what Belinskii called “dirty literature” as a political and aesthetic intervention in the prevailing order. Their conscious act of polluting literature was a means of branding Russian naturalism and, later, the field of Russian realism: dirt, which had once been an extrasystemic element, became integral to Russian realism, effecting a complete reorientation of literary norms.
If we accept Douglas’s assertion that dirt is a symbol of disorder or a “by-product of a systematic ordering,” then we might expect the discourse of pollution to intensify during important moments of literary systematization and change, when the boundaries of literature and its institutions are under re-evaluation.2 This chapter argues that indeed the discourse of pollution and the associated representation of dirt in literature emerge during such periods of negotiation, and these moments of literary crisis coincide with periods of sociological and political disorder in the countryside. This chapter reads Russian realism through that dirty lens, focusing on two phases in its development: first, the formation of naturalism and realism between the 1840s and the 1880s, coinciding with the crisis of serfdom and the Great Reforms; and second, the theorization of socialist realism in the early 1930s, during the crisis of collectivization. Régine Robin has highlighted the central role of the ambiguous term “realism” in drawing together these two polemical phases into a discursive complex that “endlessly reworks the same argumentative structures, the same polemical logics, the same discursive contours.” The antagonists in debates about the literary representation of rural life were many of the same Slavophiles, pochvenniki, radical materialists, and Old Bolsheviks who were also involved in the polemics about the relationship between soil and society with which the first two chapters are concerned, and involved the same blurred lines between science, social science, politics, and aesthetics.3 In these two periods we see how the literary representation of dirt and the critical discourse of aesthetic pollution together serve to focus debates on the hygienic boundaries between art and life; between culture and nature; and between peasant subjects, their writers, and readers.
In Russian literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, representations of rural life were shaped by the values of the pastoral. Following the classical idylls of Theocritus and Virgil, the pastoral was defined by the topos of the locus amoenus (pleasant place), a schematic idealization of the countryside, whose pleasant beauty mirrored the amorous pursuits of the shepherds who lived in ease amid its green meadows.4 As J. R. Morgan notes, “the unreality of the pastoral countryside constitutes it as a space of the imagination, accessible only through the literary act.”5 The pastoral landscape was an aesthetic topos autonomous from the sociopolitical realities of Russian life and unmarked by the material facts of dirt and agrarian labor. Joachim Klein notes that although Aleksandr Sumarokov had produced a large volume of pastoral verse in the late eighteenth century, the genre was not taken up by many Russian writers, perhaps because of the jarring disjuncture with the realities of Russian rural life. Klein writes that “the sharp contrast of the pastoral world with the reality of peasant life is striking. This is the problem of the gallant pastoral: it is incompatible with the classic principle of imitation of nature.”6
Although the pastoral genre was not taken up as such, Arcadia cast a long shadow over Russian depictions of the countryside, and pastoral values persisted in other genres of literature.7 Thomas Newlin has discussed the limits of the pastoral imagination in the case of the gentry memoirist Andrei Bolotov (1738–1833). On the basis of Bolotov’s prolific diaries, prose works, and verse, Newlin shows how Bolotov’s pastoral vision depends upon the suppression of the anxieties and violence of serfdom.8 The peasant laborer, for example, is absent from Bolotov’s pastoral vision of his own estate; the serf is a character that the genre cannot accommodate and the author cannot admit into Arcadia. As Bolotov’s case shows, the conventions of the pastoral allowed gentry writers to create an internally coherent mythology of Russian rural life that obscured its socioeconomic basis. Russian soil, apostrophized as a mythical source of fertility, could stand in for the actual source of superabundance that the pastoral did not have the resources to represent—namely, enserfed labor.
As the Russian gentry developed a new sense of their social commitments in the early decades of the nineteenth century, new aesthetic resources were needed to depict the realities of both nature and peasant life. Pastoral values were increasingly incompatible with the emerging political conscience of the Russian intelligentsia and with a changing “structure of feeling,” in Raymond Williams’s terms, which resulted in an increasing variety of counterpastoral works and new literary methods for “imitating” nature and rural life.9 Gogol was the literary author most responsible for disassembling the pastoral myth of the countryside in Russian prose. His story “Old World Landowners” (1835) is a parody of the pastoral idyll of Baucis and Philemon—what Renato Poggioli calls an “inverted eclogue.”10 Poggioli argues that the parodic distortion of the pastoral results from Gogol’s attempt to translate its conventions from verse to prose, a form that was becoming increasingly important in Russian literature.11 Poggioli makes the intriguing suggestion that the pastoral was edged out not only because of changes in the mood of the intelligentsia but also because of the internal needs of literary form: prose, with its capaciousness and demand for observational detail and narrative, “broke” the pastoral and its fossilized conventions.
But Gogol did more than deconstruct the pastoral as the primary mode of representing the countryside; he innovated new literary tools for depicting the countryside and the gentry estate in the first volume of his novel Dead Souls. By the time of its publication in 1842, Russian literature was undergoing rapid expansion and change as a social institution. A new generation of socially mobile déclassés, raznochintsy, made careers for themselves working for the newspapers and thick journals of Moscow and Petersburg, producing stories, sketches, and reviews. The appearance of such authors from the nongentry estate, with diverse social and educational backgrounds, coincided with an expansion of literary themes, attitudes, and genres. This growth in print journalism and a brief relaxation of censorship correlated with a growing sense of civic responsibility among intelligentsia readers and interest in the life of the peasantry. In Belinskii’s formula, Russia needed a literature not of “society” but of the “people” and thus, implicitly, a literature of the countryside.12 As Belinskii asked rhetorically in a private letter, “What do I care if some genius lives in the clouds, when the crowd is wallowing in the dirt?”13
Under the influence of Gogol and Belinskii, and in step with broader changes in literature and society, then, the so-called natural school emerged in the 1840s. The natural school label had been intended as a smear by its creator, the conservative editor of the Northern Bee, Faddei Bulgarin, who regarded the naturalistic method of representation in literature as excessively raw, devoid of artistic refinement, and obsessed with the unsystematized minutiae of daily life, especially the low, base, and dirty (terms that collapsed the mimetic, metaphorical, and moral). Dirt and griazefil’stvo—or love of dirt—came to define Gogol and the natural school. Nikolai Polevoi, for example, wrote that, “by choosing from nature and life only the dark side, selecting from them only dirt, dung, debauchery, and vice,” the natural school failed to capture the higher essence of “nature and life.”14 Belinskii embraced and reappropriated the natural-school label, just as the natural-school writers would embrace dirt as a brand for their movement.
In Dead Souls Gogol directly addresses the changes that were taking place in Russian literature and the charge that he was polluting the field of literature with low and dirty subjects: “The author is most ashamed to occupy his readers for so long with people of low class, knowing how reluctantly they make acquaintance with the lower estate.”15 What follows is a description of the antihero Chichikov (a speculator of dead souls) at his weekly toilet, having washed and “wiped himself from head to foot with a wet sponge” before being accosted by orphans in “soiled shirts” as his open carriage races over the “soft earth.”16 Like the reader, Chichikov attempts to maintain sanitary boundaries between himself and the soiled villagers, but the “soft earth” underneath his carriage is a metonym for moral quagmire. As the britska travels to the second landowner in the tale, bouncing over a plowed field turned to mire by the rain, it flips over, dumping Chichikov in the mud.17 He is again marked by mud when a peasant girl is sent to help him find the way back to the high road: the mud is caked so high and thick on the girl’s bare legs that that it is mistaken for boots. Scrambling onto the box beside the coachman, the girl puts her foot on the “master’s step,” soiling it just before Chichikov places his own foot on it.18 Chichikov is literally marked with dirt by the village where he is a social and generic outsider. His attempts to stay clean (and conceal his own moral filth) are in vain.
Dirt has more than a mimetic function here: Gogol uses dirt to signal aesthetic and generic contamination. Gogol’s “dirty” subjects, from his orphans in soiled shirts to the peasant girl caked with mud, signal the generic pollution of a countryside that had previously been under the jurisdiction of pastoral codes. Gogol further pollutes the old order by interpolating between the landowner and the peasant a character type entirely new to Russian literature: the speculator. Gogol’s representation of Chichikov as a speculator of dead souls carries a socioeconomic critique of new modes of capitalist exchange entering the feudal countryside, but it is also a pollution of literary space and the idealized bond between the gentry and peasantry. The mutual contamination of Chichikov and the village shows that elements are out of place; there is a new (dis)order in the literary domain and in the sociopolitical system of the Russian countryside.
Gogolian dirt is associated with narrative disorder, or what critics would consider a cluttering of the narrative itself with the meaningless detritus of everyday life. What we expect to be an insignificant encounter in Gogol’s novel—for example, the scene with the girl in mud “boots”—is given unusual narrative emphasis in the hands of this author. Belinskii notes that it is a virtue of Dead Souls that life is “dissected down to the smallest detail and that detail is given broader significance.”19 It appears that Gogol’s dirt and detritus have the function of training readers in a new method of observation and reading, training them to see the insignificant details in the narrative—the dirt of nature and everyday life—and to understand their meaning.
In the second book of Dead Souls, Gogol shifts his parody from the pastoral to the georgic mode, with a new interest in agricultural labor. On his travels Chichikov visits the disordered estate of Colonel Koshkarev, which he contrasts with the model estate of the hard-working neighbor Kostanzhoglo, who “knows soil” and “works like an ox.”20 Koshkarev, despite his grand designs and his rhetoric of improvement, becomes the target of Gogol’s satire: Koshkarev brags that despite the widespread ignorance he encounters, someday the peasants of his village will “at the same time as walking behind the plow, read a book about Franklin’s ‘thunder rod’ [sic] or Virgil’s Georgics, or the chemical study of the soil.”21 As Bella Grigoryan has discussed, Gogol’s second volume was a response to the growing body of Russian advice literature on agriculture, as well as a parody of his rival Bulgarin, who had disparaged the natural school.22 Bulgarin’s popular advice literature and his novel Ivan Vyzhigin (1829) presented the reading public with a model of the ideal Russian landowner and a set of behavioral codes that were didactic and politically conservative. Bulgarin voiced an idealist approach to art, writing that “in nature there is so much that should never enter the domain of the arts and literature, and from which a genteel person averts his eyes.”23 Bulgarin’s attitude clarifies the relation between dirt and the Gogolian narrative detail: both elements pollute the pure order of art. Although Bulgarin actively managed his estate and wrote on matters of agriculture, he regards art as an autonomous domain, one in which idealized, not mimetic, images should reveal a higher reality of the spirit, free from the limitations of external reality. Comparing Bulgarin to Gogol brings the latter’s values into sharper relief and suggests that Gogol’s attention to the trivia of life exemplifies the new structure of feeling among the reading public, a commitment not to avert one’s eyes from the “low” and insignificant facts of life in the material world.
Following Gogol, the writers of the natural school opened dirty literature’s second front of the assault on conventions. Belinskii and Nikolai Nekrasov edited two publications (intended to be a serial) with which the natural school was primarily identified: The Physiology of Petersburg (1845) and The Petersburg Miscellany (1846). In these works the natural school appropriated the narrative techniques of the French physiological sketch, which trained an “objective” and protoethnographic gaze upon the colorful hodgepodge of urban street life and sundry character types, recording the minutiae it observed in studiedly neutral and dispassionate prose.24
Dmitrii Grigorovich and Ivan Turgenev had contributed to these volumes and would transfer the narrative techniques of the physiology from the urban milieu to the Russian countryside.25 The influence of the physiological sketch can be seen in Turgenev’s collection A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), specifically in the narrative attention given to apparently trivial detail and the use of social typing (as in “Khor and Kalinych”). But more notable was Grigorovich’s adaptation of the physiological sketch to critique the moral and material filth of Russia’s countryside. A year after the appearance of his physiological sketches of the city of St. Petersburg, Grigorovich published his short story “The Village,” which offered a counterpastoral and protoethnographic vision of life in the countryside.26 As in Dead Souls, the narrator of “The Village” apologizes to the reader for the necessity of writing “dirty” subjects into literature: “Although the narrator of this story takes indescribable pleasure from talking about people who are enlightened, educated and higher class, although he is quite convinced that the reader is far more interested in them than the crude, dirty, and, furthermore, stupid peasant men and women, he must nonetheless move quickly to the latter as the individuals who are—alas—the main subject of his narrative.”27 Grigorovich makes an ironic moral rebuke of his imagined reader, to whom he imputes moral revulsion. Grigorovich’s “dirty” heroine, Akulina, is born “in a dirty, stinking hut in a barnyard.” She lives a brief, cruel life first with a resentful foster mother, then with a bitter husband whom she is forced to marry by the landowner. In his description of Akulina’s childhood, the narrator fixes on griaz’ (which may be translated as dirt or mud) as a site of contagion, illness, and early death, exclaiming, “How many times a poor child, left to its own devices, has crept in the middle of the street, covered with dirt and muddy puddles, and paid for such pleasure with vile illnesses and death!”28 Dirt is not only mimetic and metaphorical, it is also a metonym of the insalubrious moral environment and bad morals of the villagers, who allow the child to wallow in disease-carrying filth. Real filth, in short, invariably reveals moral disorder. As a grown woman, Akulina passes a field as empty as a “wasteland” abutting the graveyard where her mother is buried, and the young woman throws herself on her mother’s bare grave (toshuiu mogilku).29 For Akulina, the earth that should give life is associated with desolation, disease, and death, and the story ends with Akulina’s burial in Mother Moist Earth, her fate rhyming with the folk song that Grigorovich quotes as an epilogue:
Oh, open up, Mother Moist Earth,
Swallow me, unhappy one [fem]!
Russian song
Grigorovich does not depict dirt, then, simply for verisimilitude. Dirt and mud were certainly facts of Russian life, but they were also strongly marked in the symbolic systems of moral and aesthetic purity in which Grigorovich made an active intervention. Dirt in the story is also an inversion of soil, pochva, with its idealization of the Volksgeist and peasant life. The “dirt, dung, debauchery, and vice” that Polevoi reviled in the physiological sketch were not strictly urban phenomena but were endemic to the Russian countryside. The natural school appropriated the critical tools of the French physiological sketch but adapted them to Russian conditions by applying them to the disorder of the countryside, challenging the myth of the physically and morally healthy peasant working the fertile soil. The peasant in this new dirty literature is covered not in soil, but in dirt, and is morally contaminated by it, as is the reader.
The publication of “The Village” triggered a polemic in the thick journals. In the comic journal Eralash, the artist M. L. Nevakhovich published a caricature of Grigorovich that suggested a perverse interest in filth. In his memoirs Grigorovich described the cartoon: “I was portrayed as a dandy, digging in a dunghill, while a woman pours a tub of slops from a nearby window; below was a caption, something like: ‘An unsuccessful search for the Akulinas in the village.’ ”31 Grigorovich misremembers the caption; in fact, it was drawn from Ivan Krylov’s fable “The Cock and the Pearl,” in which a cock finds a pearl while scratching in the dung but scorns it as a useless object, declaring that it would rather have found barley, which “is not so showy, but is satisfying.” Krylov spells out the intended meaning: some people “do not value what they do not understand.”32 In Krylov’s version, the target of the fable was widely understood to be philistinism, although here it is also charged with topical meaning as a critique of philosophical materialism. Nevakhovich implies that Grigorovich satisfies himself with filth because he is incapable of genuine aesthetic discernment or appreciation. The juxtaposition of dirt and pearls would become a recurring trope in the debates on dirty literature.
Belinskii, who had rather fulsomely praised “The Village,” came to his protégé’s defense. He ventriloquizes and then criticizes the judgment of Grigorovich’s opponents, the so-called aristocrats: “ ‘How could you debase literature by depicting the dirt and stench of the life of the common people? How could you bring to the stage the mob, the rabble, the peasant clods, the country wenches, the village lasses?’ This aristocratic aversion to the dirty literature [griaznoi literatury] of the villages was very cleverly expressed by one cartoonist-aristocrat, who portrayed the young author of a splendid story of peasant life rummaging in a garbage pit.”33
The critiques of the Russian natural school anticipate to an extraordinary degree those of French naturalism decades later. Émile Zola would be referred to as the “Homer of sewage” and caricatured as writing on a chamber pot, while his novels were variously referred to as a “puddle of mud,” “filth,” and a “collection of scatology.”34 Long before Zola claimed the term “naturalism” in 1868, Russian authors had polluted their own literature with similar goals and effects.35 While it is generally the consensus that there is no genealogical connection between the Russian natural school and French naturalism, pollution is the central method, theme, and metacritical term in each movement. Jennifer Tanner argues that Zola used dirt strategically to mark his own literary brand: by “reappropriating his dirt from critics,” he was able to assert control over its meaning in his works.36 The Russian natural school, like Zola decades later, consciously branded their form of naturalism with dirt; this branding was a provocation, a reappropriation of literature, and a reorientation of its norms.
Zola also attempted to theorize and practice a literature that oriented itself to the scientific methods of “observation and analysis.”37 In Russia the dirty literature of the natural school was associated with an amoral scientific or materialist worldview, in opposition to an integrated artistic vision guided by elevated moral and aesthetic principles. Dirt was a figure for the low stuff of nature and everyday life that had previously been beneath the notice of high art. In correspondence with Turgenev, Belinskii broaches this relation between dirt and the materialist worldview, addressing the charge that Nekrasov is steeped in “dirty positivism” [griaznoi polozhitel’nosti].38 This association between dirt and positivism helps to unravel one of the most common critiques of the natural school. Many readers and critics were alienated by a lack of narrative economy, or even an empiricist reporting of apparently meaningless detail in the works of the natural school. Such representations of material life with all its unassimilable and unprocessed data were thought to rely on observational and reporting techniques more appropriate to science or reportage than to art. This accumulation of disordered verbal “waste” appeared to many critics as a failure of artistic method rather than a success of scientific method.
The term “dirty positivism” suggests, then, that dirt is not only matter in the wrong place, as Douglas suggests, but that it symbolizes the disorder that is surplus to art. It is here that the metaphors of pollution and purification enter the foundational discourse of dirty literature. Belinskii, for example, defends Gogol from the charge that he offers the reader unpurified nature: “It is always the same thing: he depicts dirt, he presents unwashed nature [neumytuiu naturu].”39 Positivism has polluted art with its focus on the representation of the material world instead of an “ideal” realm of higher values, refined sentiments, and ordered meanings.
The “washing” of dirt was one figure for the ritual purification of literature and the moral redemption of both gentry reader and peasant subject, and alchemical transformation was another figure. In his comic vaudeville play “The Natural School” (1847), Petr Karatygin creates a parodic character resembling Belinskii, who declares that “gold is visible in the mud! (zoloto vidno v griazi!)”40 Karatygin refers to Belinskii’s frequent use of the trope of dirt-into-gold in his criticism.41 Belinskii writes that everything that Gogol touches turns to “pure gold,” or that in the work of the poet Aleksei Koltsov, “dirt turned into the pure gold of poetry.”42 Karatygin explained that his play was directed only at cynics who “in their dirty works stooped to revolting disgrace,” again anticipating later critiques of Zola.43 In Belinskii’s “Literary Conversation Overheard in a Bookstore” (1842), two friends discuss an “aristocratic” reviewer’s offense at the garbage-eating pig in Korobochka’s courtyard in Dead Souls. One of the friends (presumably Belinskii’s mouthpiece) remarks, “I find this dirt exquisite—‘elevated to the pearl of creation,’ I find it a million times more exquisite than the gold leaf of the poets of the middle classes.”44 Superficial “gold leaf” is contrasted with the “real” gold that has been alchemically transformed from the dirty raw material of life. Although Belinskii defends dirty literature, his aesthetic system, fundamentally shaped by Hegel, still demands a purification of material reality.45 On these grounds, Belinskii criticized Gogol for depicting the material dirt of Russian life without its necessary artistic purification. Reacting to Gogol’s bleak Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, Belinskii condemns Gogol for leaving the Russian peasantry “lost in dirt and manure.”46 It is here that Belinskii’s aesthetics come into focus: art is the space in which we witness transformation from the material to the ideal—from dirt to gold, from matter to meaning. It is not that dirt must be excluded from art but rather that it must be properly purified in the service of a positive ideal. Although Belinskii argues that art should be grounded in empirical reality, he also firmly believes in the purifying function of art, which gives meaning and order to otherwise disordered material phenomena.
The tropological transformation of dirt/manure to gold/pearls suggests the ritual purification that characterizes the artistic process. If dirt is that which is grossly material, insignificant, and unsystematic, then it must be elevated, processed, and systematized by the artistic process. In Belinskii’s criticism, dirt is dialectical: it is the extrasystemic element that is assimilated by the system, altering it in the process. Dirt is no longer aesthetically extrasystemic—indeed, it plays a mimetic role in “dirty literature”—but it also functions as a central metaphor for the artistic process itself. Belinskii writes that Shakespeare’s works were disparaged by critics as a “dung-heap into which pearls had accidentally fallen.”47 But the juxtaposition of dung and pearls in Shakespeare’s art is no “accident” at all for Belinskii: the pearls have not fallen into dung so much as they have been transformed from its very substance into something of value. Pollution and purification, then, are recurring metacritical figures for the successful aesthetic and cognitive systematization of the low and meaningless facts of life in the material world.
It was a shift in the attitude to artistic purification that differentiated Belinskii from the second generation of literary “dirt lovers,” the village writers of the 1850s through the 1880s, including Nikolai and Gleb Uspenskii, Aleksandr Levitov, and Aleksei Pisemskii.48 Although these writers pollute literature, it is not in the service of higher aesthetic aims, perhaps because they choose to leave their readers in filth in order to propel them to acts of moral purification beyond the text.49 A survey of the second wave of dirty literature reveals entire villages suffused with griaz: every street, every home, every household object, and every body is covered in dirt, mud, and manure. The uses of dirt range from mundane verisimilitude (houses made from “earth and dung”)50 to the faintly comic (the reader must “pass through heaps of some sort of manure” to reach the door of a home),51 and throughout their work, manure confers only odor, not otium, on scenes of rural life. This is not an idealized pastoral landscape. It is hard to imagine that peasants have dirt thrown at them as punishment for offenses (as in a Pisemskii story), given their everyday subjection to the relentless insult of dirt.
The radical critic Dmitrii Pisarev, as the chief defender of the second generation of dirt lovers, extolled Pisemskii’s portrayal of the corrupting filth of the countryside in the novella “The Simpleton” (“Tiufiak”). He explains that the characters are not to blame for their moral failures, rather it is simply an effect of the dirt and soil that cling to the Russian people: “the soil [pochva] will always remind you of itself with its strong odor, its Russian spirit [russkim dukhom], from which the characters don’t know how to escape, from which even the reader sometimes gets sick at heart.”52 Pisarev punctures the elevated discourse of pochva and its associations with the organic nation. Against conventional usage, he ironizes pochva by attributing to it not abstract values but odor and materiality, echoing Chernyshevsky’s discussion of “real” and “putrescent” soil (as discussed in chapter 2). The soil is not a spiritually nourishing source of connection to the Volksgeist, but the material cause of the characters’ abject enslavement as well as their moral failings. Pisarev further punctures the discourse of the soil by playing on the resemblance of spirit [dukh] and perfume [dukhi], recalling Pushkin’s phrase, “There is the Russian soul … it smells of Russia!” [Tam russkii dukh … tam Rus’iu pakhnet!]53 Pisarev suggests ironically that the filthy smell of soil is the “perfume” of the Russian soul.
Pisarev focuses on soil as milieu, that is, as the environment that forms the individual subject, psychologically and otherwise. This determinism evokes the Herderian discourse of the organic nation, which seeks material causes for national difference, hence the “perfume of the Russian soul” is soil. But the influence of milieu is not unidirectional. Individuals also shape their milieu in turn; they “increase their layer of dirty soil, just as last year’s plants increase the layer of black soil.”54 In Pisemskii’s story, as Pisarev writes, the filthy milieu produces morally corrupt individuals who then “increase” the corrupting soil in which they and others live. Just as the weak organism cannot survive in an unhygienic environment, the morally weak cannot get out of the mire of the Russian countryside: “What is wonderful about Pisemskii’s story is that it shows us not exceptional people who are above the level of the masses, but dozens of people, wallowing in the mud, smeared from head to toe, smothering in a stinking atmosphere and not knowing how to find a way out. To really appreciate all the filth of our daily lives, we need to look at how it affects weak people; only then will we fully understand its poisonous effect; a strong man easily gets out of it; but the weak are smothered or overcome.”55 Pisarev associates the material filth of the countryside with moral filth. The weak succumb to this dirty environment—and then further pollute it. This is more than a metaphorical association; it is an attempt to find a material basis for abstract or psychological phenomena, a method common to nineteenth-century positivism.
By the end of the century, the tactics of dirty literature had become fully absorbed by the mainstream of Russian realism. Realist writers no longer needed to aggressively brand their work with dirt to show their political or aesthetic orientation or their affiliation with any particular school of literature. Dirty literature had successfully “polluted” Russian literature, and the literary system had responded, in turn, by absorbing and routinizing these new elements.
The nineteenth-century debates around griazefil’stvo became a resource in themselves for theorizing and codifying literary norms in the Soviet period. We can explain this both genealogically and structurally. In the first place, the intelligentsia tastes and values of the old Bolsheviks had been shaped fundamentally by the civic literature and literary criticism of the nineteenth century. The critical perspectives of Belinskii, Dobroliubov, and Pisarev established many of the terms of the debate. But the discourse of pollution also had a similar structural function in the development of socialist realism in the early Soviet period, as it once had in the development of naturalism and realism in the nineteenth century. While the symbolic discourses and biopolitical metaphors of purification, hygiene, and cleansing (or purging) were present from the beginning of Bolshevik power, they took on force in the literary domain in the concentrated period of the codification and canon formation of socialist realism in 1934.
In 1934 there were over 250 articles in the central newspapers and journals on the question of “purifying” the Russian literary language.56 This thickening of the discourse of pollution was triggered by Maxim Gorky’s attack on Fedor Panferov’s multivolume novel of collectivization, Bruski (1928–1929), which was filled with dialecticisms, regionalisms, and markers of peasant speech.57 The story of the virulent campaign against “Panferovism” (panferovshchina) is discussed in canonical accounts of the establishment of socialist realism, but in this chapter, I situate the episode in the transhistorical recurrence of literary dirt as an object of Russian critical polemic.58 This intensified discourse of pollution and purification is an index of a literary system under strain. Hans Gunther argues that the attack on Panferovism was intended to bring the literary establishment under ideological control on the eve of the First All-Union Writers’ Congress.59 And as Katerina Clark observes, language debates are often fundamentally about “authority and system.”60 Both of these views refract Douglas’s assertion that dirt is the figure for what is extrasystemic while purification is the framework for systematization.
What perhaps bears further remark is that—as in the case of nineteenth-century dirty literature—the charge of pollution in the case of Panferov’s Bruski was attached to a literary work that is dirty on multiple levels. Manure and mud pervade the villages that surround the former estate of Bruski. There is, furthermore, an unmistakably Freudian association of feces and private property in Bruski, at a moment when Freudianism in the Soviet Union had come to be associated with ideological impurities, whether Trotskyism, bourgeois decadence, “naturalism” (semantically negative), or “biologism.” Just as Panferov was guilty of coprolalia, or speaking filth, the kulaks in Bruski are guilty of Freudian coprophagy.
As the novel opens, the frozen Volga river, which we might expect to be a source of purification, is described as a pustule “soiled with liquid manure.”61 The origin of all fertile soil is continually revealed to be manure, and the novel posits an equivalence of excrement and land. The peasant Chukhliav cares for the ailing landowner Sutiagin in the final years of his life, expecting the heirless bachelor will sign over the Bruski estate to him. Cajoling Sutiagin to sign, Chukhliav exclaims in markedly colloquial speech, “Was it for nothing that I cleaned up your shit?” [Za chto pro chto ia za toboi der’mo chistil?].62 Chukhliav believes that he can transfigure the landowner’s shit into land, but Sutiagin fails to sign the crucial document before expiring. Deprived of the land he believes to be rightly his, Chukhliav steals 2000 rubles that Sutiagin has set aside for burial, reasoning that the money should not be buried in the earth, but should circulate among the living. Chukhliav’s own hoarding is consistently associated with feces. When looting bandits enter the village, he repeatedly pours manure over his horse to make her look like an old decrepit nag.63 When the bandits enter his yard, they find Chukhliav himself squatting in a privy in a corner of the stable, clutching his guts. Chukhliav points downward and announces to the Tatar bandit in simplified foreigner talk that his belly “gurgles little-little” [treshchit malo-malo].64 Chukhliav’s consciousness and internal life are also compared to excrement, as he sits with his private thoughts, like a “chicken in manure … empty manure, senseless.”65 The private thoughts of the peasant are akin to the fecal matter he hoards.
The hoarding of private property in Bruski and the related actions of saving and spending are further linked with defecation, constipation, and diarrhea. Chukhliav’s friend and ally against the village communists, the former village elder Plakushchev, is likewise associated with this perverse economy of excrement. In the days of prerevolutionary graft, Plakushchev bragged to his friends, “We can make candy out of shit” [My iz der’ma konfetku lepim].66 The miserliness of his family is correlated with their anal retentive habits and their confidence that their feces are exceedingly valuable, indeed precious. Panferov suggests that Chukhliav and his associates are stuck in the anal stage of capitalism. But Panferov’s message is that you can’t eat your own shit any more than you can hoard land as your private property. Shlenka, another supporter of the old order, taunts the poor peasant collective that has spontaneously organized to take over the neglected Bruski estate, joking ironically that their wheat must have reached the height of an arshin (28 inches). The poor peasants sarcastically respond that Shlenka’s private land also grows bountiful nourishment: “pies of dung” [pirogi ot korov]. These cow pies, they joke, have been sitting in the field since autumn, presumably meaning not only that Shlenka is lazy but that the private manure on his property shamefully remains outside the system of social and soil exchange that purifies excrement into soil.67 (This passage was redacted from later editions of the novel, part of the ongoing sanitization of the text.) The kulaks want to keep their manure circulating in a private economy. The symbolism of soil, though, is multivalent. While excrement is the private (and therefore semantically negative) form of waste, soil is its semantically positive form—collective and cleansed. Manure is the “golden food for the soil” that will feed the village, but the kulaks persist in trying to eat their private raw manure rather than allowing it to cycle back into the earth and into collective ownership.68
The first volume of this dirty novel ends with half the village peasants dealing each other blows in a free-for-all in the mud. The peasants have just completed the collective labor project of a dam and canal to irrigate the drought-stricken fields of the village. But the elemental energies that have been unleashed cannot be contained, and tragedy strikes when the initiator of the project, Stepan Ognev, is trampled to death in the mud: “Stepan almost no longer felt their heavy boots and bast shoes striking his back and face, and his head was half sunk in the liquid mud. He spat out a mouthful of mud and dug his fingers deep into the slime.”69
Although Gorky’s attack on Panferov was first waged on linguistic grounds, it was hinted that there was a broader disorder in the text, an unseemliness that suggested ideological deviation. Gorky reads the pollution of the Russian literary language with peasant speech as a hostile takeover of Soviet literature by the muzhik. Panferov’s ear was too attuned to peasant speech, and perhaps to the peasant mentality as well, in Gorky’s view. Rather than going to work on the peasant’s consciousness and transforming it from dirt to gold, showing it in its revolutionary development, Panferov gives the unreformed consciousness of the peasantry too much narrative space for Gorky’s taste. The raw material of peasant experience is improperly processed and transformed in Panferov’s work; this is the quality that opened him to critiques of “naturalism” (in continuity with nineteenth-century literary debate) or, a newer smear, “biologism.” Aleksandr Serafimovich, the author of The Iron Flood, was one of several writers who defended Panferov publicly. He observes that Panferov and Sholokhov both use regionalisms and other markers of peasant speech, and he wonders why they are tolerated or even praised in the work of the latter but viciously critiqued in the former. Marietta Shaginian also responded publicly to the “so-called pollution” (zagriaznenie) of the Russian language with provincialisms and dialecticisms.70 Her intervention questions Stalinist-era notions of purity that underwrote discourse and policy in multiple domains, from the linguistic to the national. She uses her defense of Panferov to reflect on hybridity as a feature of multilingual, multinational contact zones. Contamination is the creative principle of the Sprachbund, a fact that was obvious to Shaginian as a Russophone Armenian in the era of Soviet national delimitation. Gorky’s fear of the pollution of literary language was founded on the same ideological and philosophical principles that generated Soviet nationalities policy from the 1920s into the 1930s. Hybridity is now read as a category error, a violation of the essence of type that went back to Herderian organicism in political philosophy and literary debates on national type in Gogol’s time.
This debate over the pollution of language and literature carried over into the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in the summer of 1934. Fedor Gladkov notes that the language of socialist people “has all kinds of layers and dirt, such as thieves’ cant, swearing, old mutilated words.” This language needs to be handled “with great care” and artistically “smelted.”71 His metaphor is metallic, but nonetheless shows the ruling concern with the purification of raw material. The minor writer Kuzma Gorbunov gives a similar recommendation to young writers to purify their material: “When making use of the folk lexicon, a beginner should act like a gold digger, carefully washing out what is of real value from the dirt and rubbish. The prospector sometimes chips off from literature a block of dubious origin with unpolished strata of obsolete eras, and slams it on the table in front of the reader and says: ‘This is a gold nugget.’ ”72 Here the inexperienced writer mistakes naturalism for realism, and Gorbunov’s juxtaposition of dirt and gold recalls Belinskii’s comparison of the artistic process to alchemical transformation. Iurii Olesha responds to the more significant issue that Gorky raises about the possible contamination of the author by the mentality of his or her subject: “The artist’s relations with the good and the bad, with vices and virtues are not at all simple … You raise up the bad and the dirty from the depths of the soul, that is, you are convinced that it is in you—the bad and the dirty—and therefore you take upon your own consciousness a very heavy psychological burden.”73 Olesha leaves open the question of whether a writer can fully maintain hygienic psychological and ideological boundaries with his or her “dirty” subjects. As Régine Robin notes, such a line of speculation was an implicit threat to writers, who could be accused of ideological impurity at any time.74
At the Writers’ Congress Freudianism also newly animates the well-worn discussion of dirt-and-realism, remapping it onto feces-and-psychological realism, with James Joyce as the focal point. In his lengthy speech on contemporary world literature, Karl Radek throws out a common barb at Joyce for pursuing his characters “into the toilet.”75 But this is part of a systematic critique not of Joyce’s morals but of his narrative methods. The outhouse is the outer limit of semiosis in the literary text. It is the site of nature and naturalism, and Joyce stands accused of failing to confer any meaning on the biological act of defecation. Radek’s memorable final judgment of Joyce is “a pile of manure, in which maggots are stirring, filmed by a movie camera through a microscope—that is Joyce.”76
The German writer Wieland Herzfelde polemicized with Radek on this point in his own speech two days later. “A Marxist,” Herzfelde says, “can and should study every detail, including piles of manure.”77 He continues: “To deal with manure is certainly not very pleasant, and a person with healthy inclinations does not take the slightest pleasure in witnessing such an activity. But this does not yet serve as evidence that manure does not exist at all, that a microscope is a useless invention, and studying manure is harmful.”78 Radek makes his objection to Joycean manure explicit, returning to the terms of the debates on dirty literature in the nineteenth century: “It isn’t realism to include everything indiscriminately. That would be the most vulgar naturalism. We have to select phenomena. Realism means making choices from the standpoint of what is important, from the standpoint of our guiding principles.”79 The kernel of Radek’s objection, then, is that the unfiltered human psyche and the unprocessed material of everyday life are disordered and dirty. In the sense that Douglas posits, dirt is extrasystemic at multiple levels. Panferov’s kind of dirt does not belong in socialist reality, nor does it belong in the “depiction of Soviet socialist reality in its revolutionary development.” Aleksei Tolstoi sums up this central problem in the Radek-Herzfelde polemic in the form of an anecdote: “The other day, in a conversation about art, Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich gave a successful example illustrating the difference between naturalism and realism. A man walks through the mud. A person can experience a joyful sensation of overcoming a difficult road, a sense of his own strength…. A photographer fixing him with a camera from the sidewalk will only capture a person splashed with mud. The photographer who clicks the shutter on the sidewalk is a naturalist. An artist who understands the internal state of man is a realist.”80 Naturalism, then, is best described as a photograph of manure or mud. It is a mechanical inscription of a disordered empirical reality that remains outside the reach of signification—especially outside socialist realist signification, defined in the formula “the depiction of socialist reality in its revolutionary development.”
The discussion of Joycean manure is removed from Panferov by one degree: both Radek and Herzfelde refer to Panferov in their speeches but not in relation to the charges of impurity raised against him. Yet the discourse of purity and pollution in the literary domain seems to have thickened into a political and aesthetic imperative in 1934 that touched all writers, many of whom were compelled to acts of ritual self-purification inside and outside the text. The writer Efim Permitin reacted to the debates on linguistic purity by performing an auto-da-fe in Literaturnaia gazeta. In an open letter to Gorky, Permitin confesses that he was “tormented” after reading Gorky’s public response to Serafimovich and immediately went to work revising his own story “Enemy” (1933). He reports that he “burned out of it” all the “verbal regional trash” (slovesnyi oblastnoi musor), took out a number of “dirty sayings” (sal’nye slovechki), and “significantly toned down the odor of cynicism.”81 At the Writers’ Congress, in a speech that is both self-excoriating and sentimental, Aleksandr Avdeenko tells how he felt after seeing the Young Pioneers at the Congress the previous evening: “I have a lot of dirt. I’m sure that you too are not clean. That evening I felt all of your dirt. I could feel it like a growth on myself, and suddenly I really wanted to be like the pioneers.”82 The sentimental cult of youth jars against the discourse of pollution in Avdeenko’s speech, pointing to the broader cultural logic that produced such phenomena as Pavlik Morozov. But Permitin and Avdeenko’s responses also point forward to the time when self-purification was a matter of life and death for writers in the Soviet Union. Many turned to cleansing their texts, including Panferov himself as the central figure in the language purity debates of 1934. Panferov purged later editions of Bruski, but not necessarily of dialecticisms. Linguist Evgeniia Basovskaia identifies some of the dialecticisms Panferov uses, including robiaty, pokazh’te, and zybka, noting that some are not only attributed to peasant characters but are in the authorial voice.83 These dialecticisms remain in both quoted speech and authorial speech in later revised editions, and it is the scatological Freudian scenes discussed above that have been excised.84 Authors understood that the debate about language purity extended beyond the linguistic sphere but stood for a broader pollution of literature—with Freudianism, ideological disorder, and political deviation. A catastrophic period of cleansing, or as it is more commonly translated, purging (chistka), was approaching for Soviet literature and its practitioners.
Writing requires both mess-making and cleaning up, the production of narrative surplus and its aesthetic and cognitive organization. It is for this reason that dirt—that most central material fact of rural life in Russia—was not only an object of literary mimesis but also a symbol of the values and methodology of realist representation from the age of Gogol to the birth of socialist realism. Dirt was a limit case for the aesthetic systematization and representation of the low, base, and insignificant. If dirt could be made to signify, then Russian realism could epistemologically conquer the material conditions on which it was based. The branding of Russian realism with dirt was also an effort to reterritorialize national identity, grounding it in the real material conditions of peasant life, rather than the idealizing discourse of soil inherited from German Romantic nationalism. In the hands of these literary dirt lovers, it was dirt rather than soil that captured the order of the agrarian economy and the condition of the peasant. Finally, pollution and purification served as central metaphors for the artistic process and the organization of the literary canon. For all these reasons, dirt was central to Russian realism and its philosophical, political, and aesthetic brand. The very act of representation necessarily brings symbolic systems into play, and each of the metaphorical and symbolic uses of dirt discussed posits a relationship between matter and its meanings. Dirt challenged the existing literary codes that limited how the peasant, the village, and the material conditions of rural life could be understood and represented. In cleaning up the resulting mess, Soviet critics and writers hoped to capture or construct an agrarian reality that was, in its revolutionary development, finally emerging from the deep and intractable mud of the Russian countryside’s wretched past. The following chapter considers this temporal dimension of soil, the accumulation of the dirt of the past and Soviet attempts to clear it away.