First published 1990 by M.E. Sharpe
Published 2015 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Frank J.
Folklore for Stalin : Russian folklore and pseudofolklore of the Stalin era / by Frank J. Miller.
p.cm. (Studies of the Harriman Institute)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87332-668-7
1. FolklorePolitical aspectsSoviet Union. 2. FolkloreRussian S.F.S.R. 3. Soviet UnionHistory1925-1953. 4. Stalin, Joseph, 1879-1953. I. Title. II. Series.
GR202.M481990
398.094709041dc20 | 90-21540
CIP |
ISBN 13: 9780873326681 (hbk)
It is easier to swim with the current than against it, and in the same way it is easier to accept popular fashions than to criticize them. Stalinist Russia (as well as the entire Soviet Union) made a cult of folklore, and especially Russian folklore, since the Russians dominated the Union. But in that cult, real, authentic folklore hardly found a place; what was largely substituted for it were popularized adaptations of folk art. Countless phonograph records were pressed of popular songs or what Russians call romances, most of them stemming from individual composers and having little in common with folk sources and nothing in common with a folk style of interpretation. In the dance, the same lack of authenticity, characteristic of such ensembles as the Moiseevtsy, even won an international reputation.
This cult of folklore was sufficiently hegemonic that for much of the Stalin era no film could be made without a folklore episode. (The vogue seems to have begun with the film Chapaev, since the great Soviet films on the Revolution lack such episodes.) It might be argued that no real harm was done in this. Yet a principal implication of the cult was that folklore as such was a leading indicator of ethnicity and ethnic culture. Under the critical dogma of socialist realism, literature and indeed all art were supposed to manifest narodnost, a term that is untranslatable, at least in any simple way. Narodnost is a generalized abstract noun that derives from narod: the latter term has no fewer than three meanings: 1) nation; 2) people; and 3) folk. If art is to manifest narodnost, it must be national, popular, and folkloric. The opposite of the first meaning is rootless cosmopolitanism, anathema in Soviet literary and art criticism. The opposite of the second is bourgeois intellectualism, also totally rejected. But what, pray, is the opposite of the third quality, of folkloricism? It can only be nonfolk, a concept destined to be vague, partly because even a precise definition of folk would leave us without a very precise one for the negative nonfolk.
This paradox led to great difficulties and misunderstandings in Stalinist literary criticism. It was repeatedly argued that the language of Soviet literature should manifest narodnost, but it remained unclear what this chimeric ideal was to be. The lowest common denominator was the interpretation that narodnost in style was simply good style. But all artistic literature should presumably have a good style. A second kind of interpretative criticism argued that narodnost implied good Russian style, but this in fact advanced very little over the first interpretation. A third level of interpretation found narodnost in characteristically Russian locutions, but these overlapped, on the one hand, with good Russian, and on the other with folkloric expressions such as proverbs and sayings (song material could be used as well, but was not so well adapted for prose literary forms). But, just as the Stalinist film was sometimes uncomfortable with its compulsory folk songs and dances, the Stalinist story and novel could not always exploit felicitously, quotations excerpted from folklore. Indeed, no Soviet writer could outdo Lenin or, later, Nikita Khrushchev, in quoting Russian proverbs.
Blurring the boundaries between folklore and its popular reflections has done some harm both aesthetically and intellectually, but we might concede that this is probably minimal and that the Russian situation finds parallels in many lands and among many peoples, e.g., the celebrated French songs of the Auvergne. But greater harm may have been done in blurring the concept of folklore among performers, scholars and others involved in the performance of folk art or the collection and study of folklore. Professor Millers book contains many examples of this; perhaps the most celebrated case involves party intervention (in the form of coaching) in the works of the great performer of the White Sea littoral Marfa Kriukova. But countless cases, no doubt, could be found of collective farm choruses whose singers may be inspired little or not at all by the heritage of the pre-Revolutionary folklore tradition, but rather more from a need for the farmers to occupy themselves and relieve their boredom. This would not be harmful, of course, any more than it is harmful for any of us to sing folksongs; the damage is in the fact that a dilettantish imitation is taken for the real thing.
