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4.7 - The New Person

from History 4 - Heroes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Emma Widdis
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 proclaimed its goal as the creation of ‘new people’: the transformation of human bodies and minds to correspond to the transformation of society. Literature became a space in which this new model of human life could be explored. This chapter traces the genealogy of the ‘new person’ from the nineteenth century to the figure of the ideal worker in Socialist Realist texts of the 1930s and beyond. The temporal focus of the chapter lies in the decade following 1917, when urgent but often contradictory political imperatives shaped the new person in literary texts. The chapter focusses on three key tensions: the relationship between the individual and collective; competing ideals of spontaneous energy and iron discipline; and the ideal of the transformation of body and mind. It shows how texts explore the relationship between abstract ideals of humanness and their lived reality.

Keywords

ironproletariatfolkcollectivityindividualityspontaneityconsciousnessutopiaconceptualismSoviet literaturepost-Soviet literature
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 788 - 805
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Borenstein, Eliot, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Clark, Katerina, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Dobrenko, Evgeny, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Hellebust, Rolf, Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Kelly, Catriona, ‘The new Soviet man and woman’, in Dixon, Simon (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Russian History, online edn (Oxford: Oxford Academic, 16 Dec. 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199236701.013.024.Google Scholar
Mathewson, Rufus W., Jr, The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, 2nd edn (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Naiman, Eric, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Paperno, Irina, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
Soboleva, Maja, ‘The concept of the “new Soviet man” and its short history’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies 51.1 (2017), 64–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steinberg, Mark D., The Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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