Дискурс желания в ранней советской культуре

The Soviet culture of the twenties and the thirties i.e. the period of the avant- gardes and of Stalinism, has been explored and studied in numerous occasions and continues to be a topic of recurrence in the academic sphere. There is a tendency to approach to it from its ideological and propagandistic specificity. The by-product of this approach is that of the negation of the ideological qualities, which though unconscious are also inherent, of every culture. Culture, in general and the arts, in particular, have always been devices though which the values of a specific society express themselves, and also the tools to promote new ones. Among these values stand the ideal subject and the ideal image of the society he lives in; what should people strive to be and build. The promotion of these ideals in culture is the mediation and how should be this mediation in terms of representation and identification is the discourse of desire. The relevance of this research stands in its innovative way to approach Soviet Culture: instead of addressing the issue through its specificity, it ascribes all the specific elements of Soviet Culture into a general existing theoretical cultural and philosophical frame.
In this field can be found great contributions by academics like Boris Groys who in his book The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond makes a unique and clever analysis of the Stalinist period as a continuation and realization of the avant-garidist project, in addition, in the field of literary theory it is worth noticing Katerina Clark’s book The Soviet novel: History as Ritual where the Australian academic describes the main characteristics and methods of representation of the Socialist Realist novel. The theoretical frame of this research is based on the ideas of René Girard in his book Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Giorgio Agamben in Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, Thomas Pavel La Pensée du Roman, and Walter Benjamin in his article The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Furthermore the book Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917-67 by Mark Slonim has been of great use to understand the literary context. The book, though written long time
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ago still has one of the best insights in Soviet literature. To understand the cinematic context I have used The Russian Cinema Reader vol.I 1908 to the Stalin Era edited by Rimgaila Salys. It is a volume which contains articles by renowned academics like Denise Youngblood or David Bordwell. In addition, multiple articles written during the twenties and the thirties as well as other articles written by contemporary academics have been used to complement the information.
The main purpose of this thesis is to determine and analyse the different discourses of desires that were elaborated during the first two decades of the Soviet Union in the novel and cinema, and also establish the differences between the NEP and the Stalinist period. The research aims to explain that in the first decade, there was the common goal: to build a collective consciousness but the result was singular multiplicity of various artistic trends that did not perform the function of forming a single collective desire and consciousness, but acted as an intermediary of these. The second part of the thesis dwells on the major change that supposed the Stalinist period, and how cultural and artistic objects, though they retained its mediational function, they started to operate as fetishes as well. The second aim of this thesis is to show how the novel that, unlike cinema, found itself constricted by tradition, was not able to offer a polished discourse of desire that would work on a formal and ideological level. To do that the reasearch will analyse different novels and films from those periods, namely, The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov, How the Steel was Tempered by Nikolay Ostrovsky, The Man with the Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov and Battleship Potemkin as well as Aleksandr Nevsky by Sergey Eisenstein.
Finally, though the intention of this research is to bring some light on how desire was approached and mediated in the early Soviet culture, here are only described the general tendencies through a small sample of books and films. An extensive look would require also the study of poetry, theater, plastic arts as well as other forms of representation. Nonetheless, it is my opinion that this thesis opens a path for it t in future endeavors.