KEVIN M. F. PLATT, DAVID BRANDENBERGER, editors. Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature and Stalinist Propaganda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 355. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.95
2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr.112.2.620
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Eastern European Communism and Reforms
ResumoIn their introduction to this book, Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger state directly: “[T]he Stalinist revival of great names from the Russian past was a defining feature of Soviet public life during the 1930s.” This new collection of essays, mostly by American scholars but also including contributions by historians from Russia and from Britain, acts as both a demonstration of that assertion and an illustration of how the Soviet political and cultural establishment created and employed what these scholars, following Henry Steele Commager and others, term “a usable past.” William Nickell looks at the centenary of Leo Tolstoy's birth in 1928, which was at once an opportunity for Soviet writers and apparatchiks to press their own view of the author, based on a refraction of V. I. Lenin, and the cause of anxiety lest Tolstoy's politically suspect followers also benefit. In similar vein, David Powelstock deals with the controversies surrounding the centenary of the poet Mikhail Lermontov in 1941; Stephanie Sandler addresses the much better-known, but absolutely crucial, instance of the Pushkin jubilee in 1937. Other essays in the book concern historical figures other than writers: thus, Brandenberger and Platt show how the history textbook imposed on Soviet schools from 1936 was rewritten in order to strip out discreditable information about Ivan the Terrible and to reshape his image in accordance with Joseph Stalin's own views of developing central control by the Russian state, and Platt contributes an essay on Aleksei Tolstoy's alterations to his fictional portrait of Peter I, who became progressively more rational and farsighted as the multivolume novelistic biography advanced. Other contributions (Andrew Wachtel on Nikolai Leskov as reworked by Dmitri Shostakovich in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and Susan Beam Eggers on Mikhail Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar, renamed Ivan Susanin) discuss the reshaping of prerevolutionary artefacts to make them suitable for the new context, and popular reception of the new hero figures (an article by Brandenberger assembles vivid reactions from nonspecialist viewers as well as critics to Sergei Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky).
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