Metabolic Modernities: Digestion, Energy Transformations, and the Making and Unmaking of the World in Early Soviet Literature

Abstract

Early Soviet society featured clear nutrition guidelines and a robust plan for streamlined logistics in food processing, distribution, and consumption, all of which was aimed at building a stronger state through a virtuous transformation of calories into labor power. Such rhetoric appeared even in children’s illustrated books, such as Vladimir Maiakovskii and Nikolai Kupreianov’s Story of Petia, Fat Boy, and of Sima, Who is Skinny (1926). This paper shows how in the 1920s authors such as Viktor Shklovskii and Iurii Olesha turned that rhetoric on its head and pushed back against the early Soviet obsession with planning and mastering nature and the human body by employing metaphors of food, digestion, and agriculture. In Shklovskii’s memoirs A Sentimental Journey (1923) and Knight’s Move (1923) and Olesha’s novel Envy (1927), the October Revolution itself emerges as a metabolic process on a vast scale: prerevolutionary aesthetic threads, motifs, and concepts are broken down and processed, reassembled, and repurposed into a seemingly new society and worldview, in which the individual original components are still recognizable.