Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets

The Reception of East Slavic Literatures in the West and the East

“…What was this research field like before the turn to Stalinist culture began in the late 1980s? In addition to traditional Sovietology, which, needs to be said, had a lot of first-class works -I would refer to the books of Edward Brown on RAPP (Brown 1953), German Ermolaev on the theoretical premises of Socialist Realism (Ermolaev 1963), Vera Dunham on Stalin's post-war fiction (Dunham 1976), Maurice Friedberg about Russian classics in Soviet jackets (Fridberg 1962). In contrast to impassioned anti-communist manifestos such as Max Eastman's "Writers in Uniform" (Eastman 1934), brilliant ironic pamphlets such as Andrey Sinyavsky's famous essay "What is Socialist Realism" and informative surveys of Soviet literature (Brown 1982;Simmons 1953;Slonim 1964), there was both a serious source base and a qualitative historical and literary analysis.…”

Totalitarian Communication

“…On the one hand, Hitler's talking about activity does not necessarily mean his being active by means of talk. On the other hand, millions of books with Stalin's name on a cover turn him into a high priority of a state publishing industry-in the same league as Alexander Pushkin who also had some 18,000,000 of his books published in 1934(Friedberg 1962-but fail to speak for his strategy of self-legitimation. Besides, it seems rather pointless to discuss any features of totalitarianism without comparing them to the non-totalitarian environment: some similarities between Stalin's and Hitler's political performance may well be, say, the common places of power self-representation in the 20 th century.…”