In Russian, the word “border” is granitehas various meanings that blur the definition of territorial and administrative boundaries. They include boundaries, border zones, restrictions, margins, confinements, thresholds, coastal and frontiers. The first syllable, Gran’, Translated as “edge” and also has a link granite Being “on the brink.”
With these associations in mind, a Moscow-based journal Nobozrenie 3/25 (New Literary Review) explores ideas about boundaries and boundaries in a variety of contexts, including geographical, social, psychological, historical, ideological, philosophical, aesthetics.
Erase boundaries
Ruled by numerous maps on display in his office, Stalin observes Ivegeni Doblenko (Foscari University, Venta) in an article on the rhetoric of relatives among the Soviet people. Propaganda introduced a world that was hostile across Soviet borders and separated by state hostility, inaccessible languages, and broken communication codes. However, within Soviet space, cultural and territorial boundaries were declared to have been erased. at the same time, Nomenclature The rest of the (ruling class) and the Soviet society was camouflaged.
When the Stalin regime tried to implement only Soviet socialism, it repackaged the Marxist concept of brotherhood in the proletariat for domestic purposes. There were about 130 different languages in the Soviet Union, and the “rainbow of friendship” that unites the people was said to transcend barriers to communication. Soviet territory was treated as a “single acoustic space” that could absorb linguistic variation between nationalities, allegedly bound by shared experiences and ideological commitments.
The shared words were considered the route to uniformity. The praise of “super language” became dominant in poetry throughout the Soviet Union, with praise of “super language” that wiped out differences in language, with praise for “Stalin’s immortal beacon” and “universal compassion for the Russian people.”
The fusion of propaganda and literature peaked during World War II as the country’s external borders lost its previous stability. The individualization of a country or ethnicity was interpreted as objection. The poem “Love Ukraine” (1944) by Ukrainian poet Volodymyr Sosyura, translated into Russian in 1951, infuriated the media in Moscow. Sosyura was accused of creating a boundary that had nothing to exist.
“The essence of nationalism lies in the desire to surround yourself and surround yourself in your own national shell, in the desire to see only the divided things,” he wrote. Pravda. The Ukrainian Writers’ Union was forced to issue an immediate response, declaring, “With attention and love, we continue to learn the art of great literature from Russian writers.”
“The rhetoric of friendship was used to hide classical empire practices,” Dobrenko concludes. “The Soviet poem claimed that “people friendship does not know borders,” but when a new country rises to the abolition of the Soviet Empire, the border appears and puts an end to the friendship.”
Metaphysics of Petroleum
The message of ideological permeation and containment in Soviet society created a bay between the imagined universe and the world in which people lived and worked. In an article on the internal cultural and economic impacts of the Soviet oil industry, Ilya Kalinin (a visitor to Humboldt University in Berlin) said that the clear stability of the year until the end of Krushev’s melting in 1964 was glasnost In the late 1980s, it hid the dynamics that had eroded the foundations of the Soviet order.”
Siberian oil resources brought the Soviet Union to the surface, but were of little use to its population. Originally discovered in the 1950s and 1960s, oil was sold mainly overseas and used by Soviet leaders, saving on awkward and dilapidated systems, hiding technical obstacles, poor production, poor distribution and bad management. “The Soviet superstructure’s dependence on oil was unrecognised. As a result, the oil was extraction was presented as productionhiding the truth about the industry… As economic dependence on oil grew, greater efforts were denied by formal economic and political narratives.
The properties and possibilities of undeveloped oil reserves – liquidity, potential energy, and the incredible ability to convert – have given them a “magnificent connection between richness and the flashy qualities of the modern world,” suggests Kalinin. Just as facts about the industry are increasingly suppressed, oil has become culturally mythologized. As a theme of the poem, and most notably, it was featured in Andrei Konchalovsky’s acclaimed epic film Siberian (1979). Here, oil images “wivel the fibre of the story, linking the untreatment of the broken narrative to Siberian space and the history of the restrained colony.
It becomes clear that the vast, banned, but ultimately permeable boundaries are less horizontal than vertical. They are located in the geological layer where the boundaries of time are trampled. Drilling is to dig into the past, but it is also to release a hidden store of liquid treasures that appear as pillars of fire that reach cosmos.
The 1970s were characterized by signs of backtracking from the communist model. It is a greater interest in consumer spirit, national identity, religion, folk traditions, and New Age spirituality. By the end of the decade, Konchalovsky was allowed to free an epic with an explicit metaphysical dimension, representing “a violation of the normative boundaries of Soviet culture.” A blend of documentary and art cinema, Siberian It combines socialist, realistic style with the tradition of refugees in Avangard, Russia. Class conflicts are seen through the vision of elemental forces and the quest for the origins of the universe. Social identity is dismantled as a shared human origin is recognized.
“A search for oil is a meaningful search,” says Kalinin. “Political economy invades ontology… a story about production violates a story about the manifestation of the sacred.” Oil connection. It becomes an image of the principles that move matter in nature. “The magical operator that catalyses the transition between four elements… the final link to the chemical and symbolic processes that absorb and transform organic matter from the ancient past, and the collective memory it holds.”
Discipline and delinquency
In the Soviet cultural context, “the line between what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, the establishment and underground was constantly fluid,” writes Mark Lipobetsky (Columbia University). The outcomes that crossed ideological boundaries were by no means predictable. Between 1955 and 1961, Andrei Sinyavsky (pseudonym Abram Tertz) wrote a series of satirical stories in which he was sentenced to seven years in prison. His closed trial in 1966 was held alongside that of his fellow opponent, Yuri Daniel – reportedly focusing on the overlap between the writer’s views and the views of his character.
Lipovetsky provides a comparison of Sinyavsky/Tertz Amazing story (Pantheon, 1963) and the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. He wrote a little later. The similarities lie in their views on the authors, the behavior of “delinquents” and panotistism in particular. In the story of Sinyavsky, Graph Maniacs (1961), the impulse that creates an underground culture of obsessive graffiti is left to the creative limits imposed by Soviet censorship. “Thanks to censorship… we live our lives in a fool’s paradise,” Graph Maniac says in the story. “We praise ourselves with hope… The nation (cursed!) gives you the right to spend your life imagining yourself as an unapproved genius.”
Within the Soviet Union, writing was “the main manifestation of the agency,” says Lipobetsky, which “focused paradoxically on the withdrawal of the author. In the Soviet Union, the production of violated literary texts was considered a form of social “delinquency.”
Sinyavsky depicts the coercion to write as a release of restrained energy combined with the impulse to “exclude” the self in the creation of text. Foucault expresses a similar idea in his 1969 lecture, saying that the writer creates a space where he constantly disappears, playing “part of the man who died in the game of writing.” Similarly, for Foucault, a disciplinary system incites the urge to cross boundaries. On a systematic level, external social control permeates individual consciousness and acts to impose its own “truth” on the character. The internalized sense of surveillance that it causes can lead to a “delinquent” response.
In the Soviet system that cultivated the panoptical omniscience of illusions, officially recognized writers were central functionalists, and unpublished scribes appeared as his “delinquent double.” Sinyavsky devises the author “funny, but liberated in the marginal space inhabited by those who were marginalized and excluded,” writes Lipovetsky.
story pkhents (1957) gradually reveals the narrator who appears in succession as figures of mixed ethnicity, gay, immigrants, spies and ultimately extraterrestrials. The heroes of Sinyavsky have no traditional identity. Fearing that when Pkhents commits suicide, he will lose his essential self through assimilation into humanity, he shakes the limits of a standard perspective, recognizing “from all aspects, all angles.” The Alien represents Senior Vsky’s “ideal author prototype.” Lipovetsky suggests that he is “blessed with the gift of absolute liberation, the basis of literary creativity.”
Reviewed by Irena Maryniak
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
