Katerina Clark

The sixteenth-century monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the Third Rome. By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals sought to establish their capital as the Fourth Rome—a cosmopolitan post-Christian beacon for the rest of the world.

Moscow, the Fourth Rome

A new Afterword brings the history of Socialist Realism to its end at the close of the 20th century.

History as Ritual

The Soviet Novel

Evgeniĭ Aleksandrovich Dobrenko

Leaders of the Soviet Union, Stalin chief among them, well understood the power of art, and their response was to attempt to control and direct it in every way possible. This book examines Soviet cultural politics from the Revolution to Stalin’s death in 1953. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the archives of the former Soviet Union, the book provides remarkable insight on relations between Gorky, Pasternak, Babel, Meyerhold, Shostakovich, Eisenstein, and many other intellectuals, and the Soviet leadership. Stalin’s role in directing these relations, and his literary judgments and personal biases, will astonish many. The documents presented in this volume reflect the progression of Party control in the arts. They include decisions of the Politburo, Stalin’s correspondence with individual intellectuals, his responses to particular plays, novels, and movie scripts, petitions to leaders from intellectuals, and secret police reports on intellectuals under surveillance. Introductions, explanatory materials, and a biographical index accompany the documents.

A History in Documents, 1917-1953

Soviet Culture and Power

1917-1932

The Image of the Intelligent in Soviet Prose Fiction

In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today-transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin. Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941

Michael Holquist

Traces the life of Bakhtin, a Russian literary critic recently rediscovered, and discusses his major works on Freud, Dostoevsky, Rabelais, Marxism, and the philosophy of language

Mikhail Bakhtin

Katerina Clark recovers the story of leftist world literature, a massive project that united writers from the Soviet Union, Europe, Turkey, Iran, India, and China to create a Eurasian commons: a single cultural space that would overcome national, cultural, and linguistic differences in the name of an anticapitalist and anti-imperialist aesthetic.

The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919–1943

Eurasia Without Borders

One of the most creative periods of Russian culture and the most energized period of the Revolution coincided in 1913-1931. Clark focuses on the complex negotiations among the environment of a revolution, the utopian striving of politicians and intellectuals, the local culture system, and the arena of contemporary European and American culture.

Katerina Clark

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