The Many Shades of Soviet Dissidence

Abstract

In the preface to her field-transforming study The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, first published in 1981 and currently in its third edition, Katerina Clark described the embarrassment she felt when revealing to colleagues the subject of her research. Are you delving into Platonov or Bulgakov, they would ask, or perhaps Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn? No? You mean ... you’re analyzing the Soviet Soviet novel? Those unreadable texts that slavishly follow the conventions of socialist realism? At this point, she wrote, her incredulous interlocutors would either “back out of the conversation or ... mutter words of sympathy and amazement.” “It is considered far more worthy,” Clark noted, “to write on dissidents.”1 What a difference 40 years make. To write about Soviet dissidents today is to risk seeming naive or, even worse, in thrall to a version of what the musicologist Richard Taruskin called “the Great Either/Or”: in this case, the Cold War view that in the Soviet Union an unbridgeable chasm separated gray, mendacious official culture from the vibrant, autonomous, truth-seeking