Language and Metaphors of the Russian Revolution takes on the ambitious task of tracing images of storms, floods, sowing and reaping—“metaphor clusters” (13)—from the early nineteenth century on. These metaphor clusters are united by operating within a framework of struggle with nature and rebirth from that struggle. The book does not seek to be a compendium of metaphors but rather an overview of Russian cultural history for “general readership” (viii). In this capacity, the book will be useful to any class dedicated to cultural history or survey of Russian literature.
The book is split into two parts, the first on prerevolutionary culture and literature and the second on post-revolutionary. Part 1, “Sow the Wind,” consists of four chapters designed to give the reader both a history of the Russian intelligentsia before the 1917 revolution and the use of flood and storm metaphors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Chapter 1 gives a broad overview of “metaphors of displacement, alienation, and lack of control” (20) that contain the promise of rebirth—the Biblical flood and ark, sowing and reaping, and the myth of the founding of Petersburg, dipping more deeply into examples from major figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Aleksandr Pushkin, Aleksandr Herzen, and Vladimir Maiakovskii.
Chapter 2 in large part leaves the “metaphor clusters” aside to provide an overview of the formation and development of the intelligentsia, with sections on Aleksandr Radishchev, Nikolai Novikov, the Decembrists, the raznochintsy, Vissarion Belinskii, Petr Chaadaev, and the Civic Critics. This chapter provides an excellent overview of the intelligentsia that will prove illuminating to any reader interested in the Russian nineteenth century.
Chapter 3 examines images of the Russian people as an anarchic force through close readings of the storm imagery in Andrei Belyi (Petersburg), Aleksandr Blok (The Twelve), and Aleksei Remizov (Whirlwind Russia). This chapter concludes with the storm metaphors of Maksim Gor΄kii, whom Larry Harrison views as a bridge connecting the intelligentsia, the people, and the Bolsheviks. In a final section Harrison discusses Gor΄kii's struggle to accept the Bolsheviks and his eventual return to Stalinist Soviet Union.
Chapter 4 opposes two visions of modernity: “bourgeois” and “cultural.” Bourgeois modernity centers on progress and the promises of technology, whereas cultural modernity is a “revolt against the past” (108) and mistrust of the peasants. Harrison argues that the Bolsheviks used the latter, as reflected in avant-garde art, to gain support of the workers and that this evolved into the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm of Socialist Realism.
Part 2, “Reap the Storm,” also consists of four chapters. Chapter 5 discusses the “weaponization” of language by the Bolsheviks. This chapter and the previous four seem to be an introduction for the close readings of the three closing chapters. Chapter 6 focuses on Mikhail Bulgakov's White Guard, home and hearth vs snowstorm in the Civil War. Chapter 7 examines three Soviet Novels with different takes on Civil War: Aleksandr Serafimovich's The Iron Flood, Leonid Leonov's The Thief, and Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don. Chapter 8 is on Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Harrison frequently discusses Socialist Realism in these chapters, relying mostly on Katerina Clark's The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (1981), which makes sense given her focus on spontaneity and consciousness and the association of spontaneity with elemental entities such as floods and storms. For example, in the discussion of Dr. Zhivago, Harrison reads Zhivago's attraction to the revolution as “an unleashing of an elemental force (stikhinost΄)” (203). It would have been good to see some reference to more recent books on Socialist Realism such as Regine Robin's Socialist Realism: an Impossible Aesthetic (1992), Irina Gutkin's The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic (1999), or Evgeny Dobrenko's Aesthetics of Alienation (2005) and Political Economy of Socialist Realism (2007).
Nevertheless, Language and Metaphors of the Russian Revolution: Sow the Wind, Reap the Storm is an excellent introduction to Russian culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is well written, easy to read, and its historical and cultural details thoroughly explained, even to the uninitiated.
