Publication date:
15 August 2013Length of book:
238 pagesPublisher
University of Delaware PressISBN-13: 9781611494563
Soviet Heroic Poetry in Context discusses key issues surrounding the composition and recording of folklore as well as its often intensely political aspect and its preoccupation with chimerical cultural authority. These issues are dramatically displayed in Soviet epic compositions of the 1930s and 1940s, the so-called noviny (“new songs”), which took their formal inspiration largely from traditional Russian epic songs, byliny (“songs of the past”), and their narrative content from contemporary, political, and other events in Stalinist Russia. The story of the noviny is at once complex and comprehensible. While it may be tempting to interpret the excrescences of Stalinism as unique aberrations, the reality was often more complicated. The noviny were not simply the result of political fiat, an episode in an ideological vacuum. Their emergence occurred in part because of specific trends and controversies that marked European folklore collection and publication from at least the late eighteenth century on, as well as developments in Russian folkloristics from the mid-nineteenth century on that assumed exaggerated proportions. The demise of the noviny was equally mediated by a host of political and theoretical considerations. This study tells the story of the rise and fall of the noviny in all its cultural richness and pathos, an instructive tale of the interaction of aesthetics and ideology.
The present volume looks at the study and collection of Soviet epic songs from the 1930s and 1940s; these songs were called noviny, following in the tradition of the Russian epic bylyny songs of the past. The majority of the book summarizes and analyzes the politics and methodologies among folklorists compiling and interpreting bylyny and noviny from the pre-revolutionary period to the late- and post-Soviet eras. Chapter 1 provides a history of folklore in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe; chapters 2, 3, and 4 are devoted to the theory and practice behind the gathering of folklore in the pre-revolutionary and Stalinist periods. In chapter 5, the author looks at the poetics and politics of the noviny; it will be most useful to those interested in concrete examples from Soviet heroic poetry. Ziokowski asserts that the bylyny represent a diverse collection of narratives with varied concerns and argues that the diversity of these folk poems was especially neglected in the early twentieth century in favor of a patriotic Soviet narrative. Through a close reading of selections from different noviny in chapter 5, the author demonstrates how poetics and politics operated together at the textual level of the poems. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.