The Books of My Life: Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets

The Russian literary tradition, of course, is one of the great literary traditions in the world. In the book Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets (New York: Columbia University Press, Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University, 1962) Maurice Freidberg explores what happened to the Russian classics in the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, after the October Revolution of 1917.

Friedberg explores the history of publishing in the late Tsarist era and in the USSR to the 1960s. He explores the publication of books that became classics in 19th century Russia, their afterlives in the USSR, the attitude to and use of them by the Communist powers that be, how Soviet readers responded to or may respond to the Russian classics, and the impact the reading of the Russian classics may, in the future--for Friedberg the future was post 1960--on the survival of the USSR as an autocratic state.

I found a lot to admire in Friedberg's Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets. Friedberg is sensitive to history exploring how political changes and economic changes such as cosmopolitanism and nationalism affected the official interpretations of the Russian classics. He is sensitive to the dynamics and contexts of, in some cases, hypothetical readings of the Russian classics by the intelligentsia and the middlebrow and low brow masses. He makes several apt observations on the cross cultural similarities and differences between book publishing, literary genres, and reading habits in the USSR and in the West. He nicely uses quantitative data to explore the publication numbers of the Russian classics in the Soviet Union and the reading habits of Soviets and comparisons of Soviet reading habits with those of the West, though these would probably have been more useful had they been put in per capita terms. Additionally, one has to wonder about how, particularly when the data is derived from interviews with dissidents, representative the data is.

There are a few qualms I had about Friedberg's book. While Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets is still essential to an understanding of publishing in the USSR--Jeffrey Brooks's When Russia Learned to Read updates the story in late 19th century Russia and the years before the Revolution--the publication of Russian classics in the USSR, and reading of Russian classics in the USSR to the 1960s, it is now somewhat outdated. Friedberg, for example, mentions that detective and science fiction literary genres had not become widespread in the USSR. They did, however, become prominent and popular in the 1960s--science fiction had actually been popular earlier, Aleksey Tolstoy's Aelita, for instance, was popular in its literary and film forms in the 1920s--thanks to the Yulian Semyonov and the Strugatsky Brothers. Friedberg rightly notes how formulaic, paternalistic, puritanical, and moralising Soviet realist fiction was. Much of the popular fiction of the West, however, is as formulaic and both Soviet and Western children's literature is formulaic, paternalistic, and moralising as their Soviet counterparts. Friedberg only limitedly explores the differences between official and unofficial Soviet popular literary cultures, something that problematises, as Friedberg seems to admit at times, the totalitarian top down theoretical understanding of the Soviet Union. Friedberg reflects some of the cultural prejudices of his time as when he characterises Soviet mass culture in the same way that Frankfurt School Marxists and Conservative cultural critics in the West saw mass culture in the West, as the opiate of the masses and bread and circuses with little artistic merit. Instead, of course, as many have come to increasingly realise, beauty and value are in the socialised eyes of the beholder.

Reading Russian Classics and Soviet Jackets was an enlightening experience. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in late Tsarist and Soviet highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow culture, Russian literature, Russian reader dynamics, and literary cultures.