Collective Subjects and Soviet Subjectivities: The Counterplan, A Severe Young Man, and the Paradoxes of Socialist Realism

“The history of ideas is the history of the spite of certain solitaries.”

– E. M. Cioran, All Gall Is Divided

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It was at the 1934 First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers that Maxim Gorky lionized the burgeoning principles of socialist realism, first articulated two years earlier by the literary hack Ivan Gronsky at the 1932 Union of Soviet Writers. For Gronsky, the Stalinist mode of realism – really a folk romanticism that melded rustic and industrial motifs – would bring to Bolshevism the lifelike aesthetic of the Dutch Masters. For Gorky, who proclaimed the litterateur a noble laborer like any other, the Soviet revolutionary would invent narratives about heroes who did not reflect, suggest, or symbolize the common man but who were in fact common men. The proponents of socialist realism sought to renew egos poisoned by Romanticism and rebuild them as the quotidian organs of a centralized State. As aesthetics acquiesced to ideology, socialist realism claimed what all propagandas eventually profess: once purged of ambiguity and eccentricity, we can rediscover a heroism long held captive to apolitical “decadence.” Soon enough, even the author of The Lower Depths discovered this heroism was the predicate of (and camouflage for) a greater farce. Those artists who were forced to submit their egos to the State fell victim to a genuine form of decay – one rooted not in suspect individualism or degenerate taste, as the Stalinists had claimed, but in grotesque obeisance.

Stalin, who believed himself a music connoisseur, who believed artists would legitimate him, enforced an aesthetic that could never be rebuked, only accommodated. In one of history’s great ironies – an irony consciously refuted by the Maoists – the Stalinists claimed to advance new art by reincarnating the familiar, especially in the realm of music. Seeking a modernity without modernism, composers had to fit politically correct themes into exhausted styles – those of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov.1 Under socialist realism, artists were afforded an unwelcome luxury: they could abandon the trials of originality and embrace C-major banality, undeterred by straying accidentals. By demanding that art cater to a lower-common-denominator of folk sentimentality, Soviet aesthetics rescued the pursuit of immortality from the clutches of Romantic genius. Immortality was now reified in the shape of a utopia that would live on indefinitely, long past the decay of any single artist’s bones. Like the spiteful Hebrew God, however, Stalin could never be satisfied or sufficiently entertained, and his punishments, if not fatal, took the form of permanent exile – perhaps this is why the Soviet sense of humor is so close to the Jewish one.

Occasionally, an artist might momentarily shame Stalin’s censors. Despite the tonal ambiguities of its opening movement, Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata (1942) was awarded a Stalin Prize – a Second-Class Prize, to be sure, but its vitality transcended any formalist wrongdoing. Bristling at the notion of compromise, Shostakovich split his conscience in two, writing propagandistic works to order (such as 1949’s Song of the Forest) and other works (such as his First Violin Concerto) designated “for the drawer” – that is, for anticipated performance after Stalin’s demise.2 Sometimes vainly, sometimes insightfully, observers in the West would scan every product of Soviet art for vestiges of irony and coded resistance, an exercise that halfheartedly continues today. When Brezhnev came to power – when irony could hardly account for the sentimental lunacy of Soviet life – mourning finally came into fashion. Shostakovich’s Fifteenth String Quartet (1974) was nothing more (nor less) than a row of six bleeding adagios. One finds no shortage of ascetic dirging in the chamber works of his disciple Mieczysław Weinberg. If the expression of stagnant pain had become acceptable, even ubiquitous, naming its obvious sources was still forbidden.

The abstractions of music – at least nonprogrammatic music – created a dilemma for Soviet authorities. How can one declare a string sextet or a bassoon sonata to be either revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, unless it abided by certain established harmonies, evinced familiar melodic content, stirred impressions of modern life, or was inspired by a revolutionary text? The criteria used to judge or censor music, therefore, were as arbitrary as they were historically conservative. In Soviet literature, the criteria could be far more blatant: heroism, optimism, and guilelessness became the literary equivalents of musical consonance. As it scrubbed away the scum of Western individualism, socialist realism not only neutered artistic ferocity but advanced its own strain of romanticism – ludicrous, quasi-idealistic, as phony in its visions of happiness as any American ad for bundled insurance or wrinkle serum. Gorky failed to realize that every consonance, when both gratuitous and imposed by rigid principles, becomes equally offensive.

Of course, the Soviet realists, blinded by encroaching progress, saw nothing gratuitous in their doctrines. For Gorky, literary socialist realism would “not only . . . present critically the past in the present” but also “contribute to the strengthening of the present [through] what the revolution had achieved” and would achieve.3 This was an oversimplification of history, but, for the dedicated, a necessary one. In establishing the tenets of Soviet aesthetics, Gorky had to demote nearly the whole history of Western literature, populated as it was by depraved kings, neurotic princes, and a gallery of moneyed egotists, fraudulent antiheroes, and self-interested reprobates:

From the figure of Till Eulenspiegel, created at the end of the fifteenth century, that of Simplicissimus in the seventeenth century, Lazarillo de Tormes, Gil Blas, the heroes of Smollett and Fielding, down to the “Dear Friend” of Maupassant, to Arsène Lupin, to the heroes of “detective” literature in present-day Europe, we can count thousands of books the heroes of which are rogues, thieves, assassins and agents of the criminal police. This is what constitutes genuine bourgeois literature, reflecting most vividly the real tastes, the interests and the practical “morals” of its consumers.4

Gorky does not spare even Dostoevsky, who somehow sympathized with – rather than reviled – the ressentiment of his underground man. Only a vanguard realism, Gorky argued, could supersede the dominant realisms of Dickens and Zola, who exposed social injustices without endorsing class warfare. The real problem stemmed from the worldviews of artists who saw themselves as romantic individuals embedded in history but divorced from the problems of ideology:

It should be realized that critical realism originated as the individual creation of “superfluous people,” who, being incapable of the struggle for existence, not finding a place in life, and more or less clearly realizing the aimlessness of personal being, understood this aimlessness merely as the senselessness of all phenomena in social life and in the whole historical process.”5

Did these “superfluous” artists of the past, swamped in ennui or “aimlessness,” really see the world so narrowly, so superficially? Wasn’t there, in Zola’s compassions, in Dickens’s social critiques, and even in the Romantics’ posturing and hermitage, a cultural revolution as pointed as Bolshevism? For Gorky, only a decadent could answer this question in the affirmative. While Zola and Dickens might retain their canonical places, only a dilettante would proffer liberality and lyricism as panaceas for a long-suffering, still-illiterate mass. But it is a perverse line of reasoning that leads from the erasure of personal “aimlessness” to state-enforced homogeneity. We can surmise that, for the true believer, every subtle step between those two poles was timid or treasonous. Impatience became the virtue of the vanguard, who needed to grasp the end result immediately – unless, of course, one had to continually dilate one’s Five-Year Plans.

Gorky continues:

Without in any way denying the broad, immense work of critical realism, and while highly appreciating its formal achievements in the art of word painting, we should understand that this realism is necessary to us only for throwing light on the survivals of the past, for fighting them, and extirpating them. But this form of realism did not and cannot serve to educate socialist individuality, for in criticizing everything, it asserted nothing, or else, at the worst, reverted to an assertion of what it had itself repudiated.6

Another fugitive grain of truth. What Gorky criticized as implicit in romanticism would become an overriding problem of postmodernism – the negative value of “asserting nothing” by “criticizing everything.” To find fault with everything is, of course, a common temptation of the unimaginative. Suffering from their own paucity of imagination, the Soviet culturalists compensated with foolish audacities. Against all odds, socialist realism sprang from a bold seed – the search for a collective subjectivity, the antithesis of Romantic individualism and its bastard stepchild, Hollywood. In its doctrinal extremity, however, socialist realism wound up “criticizing everything,” not least because the caprices of the Stalinists could never be satisfied, because even the most submissive art could never be submissive enough. The Russo-Georgian composer Vano Muradeli discovered as much when Stalin lambasted his opera The Great Friendship (1947) for its “misuse” of folk material, despite the work’s vapidly heroic idiom and Muradeli’s reputation as a sycophantic hack.7 The same perverse fate befell Prokofiev when his last opera, The Story of a Real Man (1948), was preposterously denounced as “unmelodic,” even though a quarter of its score derives from lovely folk songs from northern Russia.

Of course, even Eisenstein could not escape the fate that befell every Soviet artist of merit. His Bezhin Meadow has become a preeminent case study in Stalinist censorship and cinema non grata. After a stalled production, the film was aborted in 1937 for the usual cryptic crimes – formalism, deviationism, creating art “alien” to the people, and so forth. What remains of the film – a thirty-nine-minute slideshow with intertitles taken from Eisenstein’s shooting script – in many ways adheres to the propagandistic demands of the era. Despite some politically incorrect religious imagery, the film exalts the Komsomol and repeats the generational theme at the heart of much Soviet ideology: ascendant, secular youth will displace decadent, pious elders who refuse to submit to modern times.

Bezhin Meadow: The secular future and the orthodox past

The story concerns a blond, cherubic boy, Stepok, who suffers under the iron fist of his Bible-quoting father, a Tsarist sympathizer who beat his wife to death. “How come your father always beat her?” a neighbor asks Stepok. “Because she understood me,” he answers portentously. The father and his comrades – whom the son says “belong in a museum” – are counterrevolutionary kulaks, landed peasants who prey on their unlanded fellows. The kulaks do not take kindly to the Orthodox church being transformed into a “worker’s club,” but Stepok, representing secular futurity, has little desire to honor his father. Before Stepok can be martyred, the peasants proceed to tear apart the church, an especially ogreish one pulling down columns like Samson upending the temple.

Bezhin Meadow: The Soviet Samson

Shortly after Eisenstein was forbidden to finish the film, he wrote an essay, “Montage 1938,” that fits squarely within the absurdist rhetorical genre of coerced self-criticism.8 “There was a time in our film art when montage was proclaimed ‘everything,’” he writes. “In the present sense (now ending) it is proclaimed nothing.”9 In Eisenstein’s mea culpa, montage no longer acts – it is rather proclaimed as something, reduced to the status of the objects it once synthesized. Such were the revolutionary tides. Like Cubo-Futurism and Constructivism, montage once had proposed techniques to render the clay of materialism into dialectic futures. History would be no longer an abstract burden to bear but a plastic reality to reconstruct and redirect. But montage, as impotent as any other intellectual movement, had no means to withstand reactionaries. Montage soon revealed itself as too esoteric for the quasi-realists, pragmatists, and propagandists. They wanted a simplified modernity, shorn of the anti-realist games so often at the core of modernism. But how could modernity be pried from modernism? How could manifestos be reduced to blueprints? The answer resided in a superficial conception of collective subjectivity, a “pragmatic” abstraction that, while retaining the aura enjoyed by all abstractions, promised to take power from elite artists and deliver it to proletarians enmeshed in the real problems of materialism. As part of this bargain, the proletariat and intelligentsia alike would enjoy a new abstraction, immortality. The individual’s spirit would be subsumed within the material mass and perpetuated through utopian “progress.”

Unsurprisingly, the best examples of Soviet collective subjectivity preceded the reductions of socialist realism. In his 1926 adaptation of Gorky’s tendentious novel Mother (1905), for instance, Vsevolod Pudovkin produced a dramatically effective image of “public” subjectivity, one subtler than that envisioned by Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925). Set during the 1905 revolution, the story follows a mother whose son is killed by Tsarist forces. Eventually, she discovers a revolutionary political consciousness and climactically stands down a phalanx of imperial horsemen. As she hoists a communist banner and marches toward a certain death, the camera affords her dramatic close-ups, rhythmically intercut with the onrushing cavalry. Once she is trampled to death, a new montage begins, a time-traveling apotheosis that deindividuates her through superimposed images of factories and other public institutions that, after 1917, would raise the banner more enduringly. Rather than birthing a revolutionary spirit, she only inherits it momentarily (that is, mortally) before it continues to ramify throughout a folk consciousness. Vaporized into a phantom immortality, the woman – and her tear-stained face – is lost in a Soviet culture that brands overt individualism as bourgeois affectation.

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Pudovkin’s Mother: Martyrdom in montage

Before the tenets of socialist realism – later rebranded as Zhdanovism – fully took hold, some films addressed rather than denied the tensions inherent in a “classless” society where class hierarchies persisted. When embedded within narrative, not signified through discrete montage episodes, those tensions sometimes did have a chance to expand and breathe. Consider Friedrich Ermler and Sergei Yutkevich’s The Counterplan (1932), unsubtly subtitled “The Work of a Shock Brigade.” The film depicts tensions within a factory, centering on three key figures: a disgruntled yet skilled old-timer, representing the uneducated proletariat; a counterrevolutionary saboteur determined to preserve his privileged position; and a handsome young engineer, representing the ideological vanguard (even more than Hollywood, Soviet cinema forbade unhandsome youth). An illiterate alcoholic known for his habitual grumbling, the old-timer complains that proletarians are worked like horses but reap few benefits. Nevertheless, he has seniority and thirty-eight years of experience and is therefore entrusted with preparing the factory for the coming wave of electrification. During a celebratory event marking the plans for a massive turbine, he mutters bitterly, “We have no pants, but we have music. . . . We’ve collectively gone mad.” While the old worker is eventually redeemed, the mere expression of such discontent – even from the mouth of an alcoholic – would be nearly unthinkable under Zhdanovism.

The film’s true villain – he’s only missing a mustache to twirl – is a middle-aged saboteur who still lives with his mother. A grandfathered member of the old aristocracy, he worries that the factory’s full electrification will displace his lingering power, and that, in his old age, he’ll have to “beg for alms . . . at some cultural center named after the twenty-fifth Five-Year Plan.” He thus schemes to sabotage the turbine and lay the blame on the old-timer, whose wavering work ethic already makes him suspect. Indeed, after the turbine fails, he not only faces blame but discovers at his workstation a placard that reads “Shame.” In a strikingly expressionistic montage sequence distinct from the bulk of the (lethargic) narrative, the old-timer, drunk and enraged, clutches the flag and marches through the factory while Shostakovich’s score accrues a bitter dissonance.10 Placard in hand, he bursts into a closed party meeting and castigates the young vanguard, who plan to shutter the factory given the failure of the turbine. Here, the embittered veteran, not the valiant youth, emerges as the true hero. Although not a party member, he calls for solidarity and encourages the young intelligentsia not to abandon hope; he reminds them that only through the sacrifices of the proletariat did they receive their educations and attendant vanguard status. In the film’s emotional highpoint, the old man symbolically shatters his “Shame” banner, in the process shaming the youths for their technocratic timidity.

The Counterplan: The old worker and the banner of shame

After demonstrating that the faulty turbine can be restored rather than replaced wholesale, the old-timer proclaims, “I have the honor to report that we are reviving the dead!” Within the universe of the factory, life and death function not merely as metaphors for industrialist rhetoric but as prearranged ideological signifiers. While the old-timer inspires the reticent youths, the film’s “vitality” is ultimately transferred from the old man to the undying (or at least revivable) machines – the ethos of Futurism. An ill-conceived, half-hearted coda attempts to rescue this symbolic trajectory from complete dehumanization. Earlier in the film, the old-timer was gifted a cat – a token of gratitude from the State for his years of service – to help clear the rats from his infested apartment. In the coda, the cat gives birth to a purring kitten, an organic sign of generational renewal. “Do not fear the machine age,” the cat seems to cry. Such is the dusting of sentiment added for the masses, to remind them that, as much as they will be eclipsed by turbines, humans and their domesticated animals can enjoy a reciprocal, rodent-free fellowship.

The Counterplan: Soviet electrification triumphant

In an early 1930s film such as The Counterplan, we still find unresolved ideological hostilities between the old proletariat and new intelligentsia, the symbolic eradication of parasites notwithstanding. (Interestingly, the saboteur is never discovered; when the turbine finally springs into action, he merely slinks away – a warning to audiences that counterrevolutionaries hide in their midst.) Following the quasi-realist doctrines issued by various state organs in the mid-1930s, the Soviet aesthetic would ideologically stiffen. Ambiguities would be clarified, contradictions suppressed. The kinds of internal tensions seen in The Counterplan – particularly those between the old-timer’s individual initiative and the collective will-to-power – were flattened into a binary opposition of revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. Even then, Soviet cinema struggled to envision the abstraction of collective identity. Without an anti-realist style or strategy (e.g., montage, formalist aesthetics, satire, travesty, Brechtianism), it is difficult to transform narratives centered on individual personages into depictions of collective identity. Even Georgi and Sergei Vasilyev’s Chapayev (1934), the “model” propaganda film, cannot overcome the paradox. Whereas Eisenstein’s Potemkin forewent individually named heroes in favor of mass subjectivity, Chapayev deifies its titular Bolshevik. The justification is that Chapayev embodies the people en masse, and thus the film (supposedly) deifies the people’s innocence. In the Vasilyevs’ film, the hero is a barely literate naïf who has never heard of Alexander the Great – his ignorance is noble, untarnished by the auras of “great men.” But his symbolic rusticity does not mitigate his actual materiality – he is still an iconic individual, albeit an unpretentious one.

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Within the mid-1930s Soviet regime of censorship, it is all the more remarkable that Abram Room’s A Severe Young Man (Strogiy yunosha, 1935, sometimes translated as A Strict Young Man) was even completed. Scripted by the forward-thinking novelist Yuri Olesha (1899-1960), the film centers on the ideals and tribulations of the Komsomol. Soviet authorities nevertheless accused Room and Olesha of ideological insincerity, suspecting (correctly, in fact) that the filmmakers were ridiculing the shortcomings of the worker’s utopia while paying lip service to a Bolshevist worldview. The double-talk Olesha sprinkles throughout the film’s philosophical dialogues doubtless parodies Stalinist jargon. The double-talk is at times so thick that it presages the satire of Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (1965), whose bubbleheaded capitalists speak in the marketing lingo of television ads.

Room’s deviations from realism shouldn’t have been surprising. Room did contribute some propagandistic works to the Bolshevik cause, such as the seventeen-minute documentary Jews on the Land (1927), which extols once-itinerant Hebrews who settled collective farms in Crimea, and the pioneering (if dull) Soviet talkie The Plan for Great Works (1930), which celebrates the Five-Year Plan. Nevertheless, Room’s predilections were primarily modernistic. Before his venture in cinema, Room had directed theater under the tutelage of Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose pioneering using of mobile, multitiered, and subdivided sets manifested a “living” theatrical analogue to the dialectics of montage. Room’s early films, such as The Traitor (1926) and The Ghost That Does Not Return (1930), clearly reflect the influence of German expressionism in lighting, staging, and décor, and his comedy Bed and Sofa (1927), still his best-known film outside of Russia, might surprise contemporary viewers with its chic story of an unusually liberal love triangle.

While it centers on the Komsomol and includes dialogues about dialectical materialism, A Severe Young Man, like Bezhin Meadow, harbors expressionist qualities that chafe the party line. Room invests the film’s political and romantic entanglements with ironic dialogue, stylized sets, and, as Ian Christie observes, a “fantastic dream counterpoint” rare in Soviet films “before the 1960s.”11 Investigating class divisions and the moral integrity of Soviet youth, the film centers on the complex relationships among a wealthy, middle-aged surgeon, his parasitical yet truth-speaking friend, and a proud young communist enamored of the doctor’s wife. When Room refused to revise the finished film, it was banned in June 1936 by the Ukrainfilm studio, reappearing only in 1974 “for a month at a repertory cinema.”12 While Maria Belodubrovskaya has argued that the film was “banned for political and not for aesthetic reasons,” this distinction becomes murky, if not irrelevant, given that Soviet ideology politicized pseudo-realist aesthetics and aestheticized nationalist politics.13 Only in 1989, when perestroika was reaching its pinnacle, was the film belatedly legalized for archival screenings, and only in 1994, “as part of the director’s centenary celebration,” was it “finally broadcast on Russian television.”14

For A Severe Young Man, Room found an ideal partner in screenwriter Olesha, who won fame for his 1927 novel Envy, an acerbic send-up of Bolshevism’s mechanized utopia. Perhaps realizing his largely satirical scenario would jolt the authorities, Olesha attempted to preempt criticism with a party-line proclamation at the 1934 All-Union Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, where Gorky had codified the tenets of socialist realism. Mouthing creedal platitudes, Olesha declared that he was now “dedicating himself to the theme of youth,” would advance “plays and stories in which the characters would decide problems of a moral character,” and would demonstrate his “conviction that Communism is not only an economic system, but also a moral system.”15 Nevertheless, as Belodubrovskaya observes, Olesha’s “screenplay was subjected to a public debate” while the film labored in preproduction, and “between July 1934 and September 1935, at least fifteen responses to what Olesha called his ‘play for the cinema’ appeared in the central press.”16 Officials not only objected to Olesha’s anti-realist scenography but also faulted him for portraying Soviet youths as effete intellectuals who “used as their role models not Communist Party leaders” but wealthy elites and “fundamentally bourgeois figures.”17 Soviet censors also took issue with early scenes in which characters often assume unnatural postures, as if wax figures in a tableau, and mouth polemics in an affected manner – the antithesis of heroic dynamism. But these “static” scenes were part of Room’s dramaturgical strategy. Room in fact had criticized Potemkin for what he believed was the “schematic” approach of Eisenstein, whose phony objectivity turned characters into mechanistic ciphers.18 Room intended to contrast the youths’ initially inert, complacent lifestyle with the anxious struggles they face in the film’s second half – a graphic representation of a standard narrative arc.19 As the film’s class issues become more pronounced, the young heroes become less stilted and more dynamic, adopting rhythmic, swinging motions with their limbs – a technique influenced by the biomechanics of Room’s mentor Meyerhold, who invented an entire repertoire of anti-realist gestures for stage actors.

The story begins surreally. In an opening montage filled with disorienting, dreamlike chiaroscuro, the film envisions the dacha of famed Dr. Stepanov, who receives special favors and privileges from the Soviet authorities. Living a luxurious life unknown to rank-and-file Bolsheviks, Stepanov is the idolized, “fundamentally bourgeois figure” to whom the censors objected. He lives with his young wife, Masha, and his irritating friend, Fyodor, a parasitic freeloader who delights in pointing out the contradictions of an allegedly classless society that nurtures elites such as Stepanov. They are visited by Grisha, a young Komsomol who worships Stepanov’s genius and secretly lusts after his wife. Humbly, Grisha remarks that there are many like himself and precious few like the great Stepanov, prompting Fyodor to darkly joke, “See . . . even the socialist system has its ‘few’ and ‘many!’” Acceding to Fyodor’s point, Grisha affirms that “there shouldn’t be any arbitrary leveling” among members of a socialist society. Apparently, the key word in Grisha’s response is “arbitrary,” for in his eyes Stepanov is a man of singular merit.

The film’s “ethical” discourse continues when Grisha returns home to his mother and sister. Grisha asks his sister why she always stares sadly into a vanity mirror. “Because I am ugly,” she blankly replies. Without missing an ideological beat, Grisha responds, “Beauty is a dialectical concept [that] occurs between two people,” implying that another is required to recognize the beauty in the self (a mirrored reflection won’t do). Turning the gaze on himself, Grisha asks, “Mother, am I handsome?” Suddenly, to the cartoonish music of Gavriil Popov’s score, we cut to a gymnasium, where Grisha’s virile friend Kolya throws the discus, leads a team of charging horses, and engages in many manly feats.

A Severe Young Man: The bathhouse

In an adjoining, mixed-gender bathhouse, filled with neoclassical statues of male nudes, Grisha expounds on a set of moral doctrines he’d written for the Young Communist League. During the exchange, the assembled youths pose artificially in idealized, pseudo-Greek tableau that, like sections of Olesha’s Envy, lampoon the Soviet obsession with physical culture – particularly the GTO, a Komsomol-affiliated fitness program that awarded badges of merit.20 The values set forth in Grisha’s doctrines are typical Komsomol propaganda: one must possess clear goals, avoid ambiguity, and embody ideals of sentimentality and magnanimity (“to uproot the idea of property”). To this list of virtues Grisha curiously adds “chastity,” to which Kolya replies, “Really? Chastity is a bourgeois quality!” “No,” Grisha responds,” these are all human qualities.” When Kolya asks, “What do you mean . . . human?” a young female Komsomol intervenes. Contributing to an exchange likely viewed by Soviet censors as ideologically hollow, she declares, “The bourgeoisie has distorted these concepts through the power of money.” These qualities, she explains, “will regain their pristine nature” once the toxin of capital is eradicated.

A Severe Young Man

When Stepanov and his wife Masha visit the gymnasium, however, Grisha’s grandiose ideals come into question. As a lovestruck Grisha stares reticently at Masha through the window, Kolya chides, “Which moral qualities . . . are you developing now? Shyness? Cowardice, perhaps?” Believing a good Komsomol should express himself openly – according to Grisha’s own credo – Kolya rushes outside, stripped to the waist, and informs Masha that his friend is too shy to confess his love. Observing from his car, Stepanov is both astonished and amused: “How odd! Like in a dream . . . a naked man approaches and says that someone loves my wife!” Affronted by Grisha and Kolya, the doctor sends Fyodor, the parasite, to disinvite Grisha from his forthcoming gala. Fyodor mocks Grisha’s lowly status, once again reminding the young man that class divisions will persist even in an ostensible utopia. “So, you must agree,” Fyodor laughs, “that socialism is [tantamount to] inequality!” Angered, Grisha and Kolya physically eject the parasite from the apartment in a comic scene. Fyodor might act as an irritating foil for both Grisha and Stepanov, but, like the Elizabethan clown, he speaks discomfiting truths, exposing the rifts in a system pretending to unity.

In an elaborate fantasy sequence, Grisha dreams that he has invaded the doctor’s soiree, awash in shadowy compositions that recall Man Ray more than Soviet aesthetics. Earlier, the doctor had remarked that Kolya’s half-naked appearance before his car resembled a dream; now, the dream plays out. Dressed in glowing white, Grisha glides down an incredibly long white staircase surrounded by pools, as if a Busby Berkeley extra, and then romances the doctor’s wife in hazy, unfocused images. At the same time, Kolya, clad in a revealing loincloth, intrudes on the party, throwing cream pies like discuses at Fyodor, as if he were Harpo Marx terrorizing the gentry.

A Severe Young Man: Dream sequence with thrown pies

Awakening from his reverie, Grisha encounters Kolya, who warns him that Stepanov abuses his elite power and betrays the ideals of the emergent Soviet utopia. Offering apologias for Stepanov, Grisha still insists that the Leninist vanguard, indispensable for the success of the nation, is entitled to special privileges. At this point – when Grisha and Kolya’s ideological dispute reaches a stalemate – plot mechanics intercede. Suddenly, their young Komsomol friend is rushed to the hospital with a mysterious disease only Stepanov can cure. Before performing state-of-the-art surgery before worshipful followers, he ritualistically dons an operating gown as a priest dons his vestments – the irony is palpable. In the postoperative room, Stepanov gives a nationalistic speech to the young woman’s Komsomol friends; when one Komsomol tells Stepanov that his speech echoes Grisha’s own Marxist homilies, the doctor becomes awakened to Grisha’s inconspicuous wisdom. In fact, Stepanov declares himself “a professional humanist” and claims that “suffering regains its purity” when the corruptions of money are removed, echoing the very claims Grisha and the Komsomol girl had made in the gymnasium bathhouse. Having realized Grisha’s finer qualities, Stepanov puts aside his jealousy and invites Grisha to his home, trusting that the ethical youth and his wife will be no more than platonic friends.

On the surface, Stepanov’s magnanimous invitation to Grisha concedes a tenet of Soviet dogma: Stepanov has overcome the jealousy and possessiveness that were regarded as artifacts of bourgeois ideology. However, as Stepanov and Masha finally return to their palatial dacha, an implicit class divide still separates the guileless proletariat from a decadent member of the intelligentsia. There is no indication that Stepanov will renounce his government-funded lifestyle or that the “toxin of capital” will be sifted systemically from culture at large, even if Room’s own working notes claimed that “the film recounts how the moral and ethical outlook of an old member of the intelligentsia is transformed under the influence of the new young people.”21 Although Stepanov is humbled in the postoperative scene, he remains an individualistic “great man” bloated with ego and addicted to luxury. Grisha, though having won the doctor’s respect, apparently must accept that some things lie beyond his reach, much as the Komsomol’s proficiency in the long jump cannot substitute for medical expertise, or as neoclassical posturing at a gymnasium cannot manifest an authentic immortality of the spirit. Fyodor’s claim that class differences will persist in an allegedly classless society turns out to be prescient. Surprisingly, Grisha seems to be resigned to this tenuous situation at the film’s end – never do the filmmakers allow Grisha an enlightened moment in which he critiques an imperfect Soviet bureaucracy for subsidizing Stepanov’s luxury or for fostering class resentment.

The film’s lack of closure surely maddened Soviet censors. Unlike The Counterplan, another film that pits age against youth, skeptics against idealists, the proletariat against the intelligentsia, A Severe Young Man offers no apotheosis in which factions are united.22 The status of Stepanov remains problematically ambiguous: he is not a one-dimensional villain, like the aristocratic saboteur in The Counterplan, but a socially “necessary” member of the elite.

If the ending of A Severe Young Man implies that Soviet politico-sexual mores have yet to be perfected, Room’s Bed and Sofa (1927) already had provided a telling counterpoint, treating the topic of marital infidelity as the stuff of ironic farce. Bed and Sofa begins as a virile, somewhat loutish proletarian invites a visiting friend to sleep on his sofa. When he discovers that the friend is having an affair with his long-neglected wife, he gruffly lets the adulterers indulge one another – at which point he, having nowhere else to sleep, resigns himself to the sofa. Presumably, the trio can entertain such a revolutionary, non-possessive approach to marriage because the male rivals, both pragmatic proletarians, lack the class tension that stands between Grisha and Stepanov in A Severe Young Man. Meanwhile, Bed and Sofa’s moral climax, set in an abortion clinic, allows the wife a sense of agency unknown to the more or less objectified Masha. In the end, the wife leaves the two men, who are now resigned to live – asexually – with each other.

Bed and Sofa’s comic scenario – as bohemian as it is Bolshevik – would become unthinkable in the subsequent period of “chaste” socialist realism. The unrequited love story of A Severe Young Man nevertheless highlights a question that recurs in Soviet ethical discourse. Will love – along with infatuation, obsession, erotic passion, and so on – become yet another commodity, subject to the rules of property, exchange, and exclusivity? Stepanov poses a form of this question to the gathered Komsomol in his climactic speech: “Could there be unreciprocated love in a class-free society?” In light of this question, Grisha and Stepanov overcoming their respective jealousies represents not only a personal achievement but a political one – particularly for Stepanov, whose unreformed elitism amplifies his association with exclusive “property.”

Doubtless, turning love into a utilitarian algorithm is as absurd as it is ideologically provocative. If unreciprocated love – an entirely subjective injustice – can exist in a classless society, one must also ask if love is an unlimited resource; whether dispensations should be given to those who are psychically weaker and unable to brook rejection; or whether one should receive amounts of love proportionate to the amounts of desire exuded or affection given. How much easier it is to deal in reifications and impossible abstractions, redirecting one’s ardor to the unvacillating justice of Bolshevism itself!

In her analysis of A Severe Young Man, Belodubrovskaya argues that Room “disregarded political purpose and produced an anticommunist work.”23 Unintentionally, this line of argument accedes to the Stalinists’ overriding point that anything skeptical of communism must be anti-communist, that anything ambiguous must be inherently negative. The Soviets could not conceive of ambiguity as a positive force because they did not believe progress would arise naturally from reason, as did the Enlightenment philosophes. Progress, in its meandering, Marxian form, had to be torn forcibly from the graves of history and put through paces as contrived as socialist realism turned out to be. The artless optimism we associate with socialist realism, though idiotic in practice, sprang from an intelligible need to reject Western traditions that exalted or aestheticized suffering, from Judeo-Christianity and Greek tragedy through the novelistic traditions Gorky condemned. There have been few societies that did not, at some point, command artists to serve state interests. This was as true in ancient Babylon, Egypt, and Greece as it was in 18th-century France, when monumental operas glorified monarchic rule, or in mid-twentieth-century America, when the Hays Code censored anti-government sentiment. Normally, we distinguish true artists from the fakes by the degree to which they remain innocent and rebellious, even (or especially) to the point of self-destruction. In the Soviet case, where innocence and rebellion were equally improbable, suffering became a primary index not only of artists’ authenticity but also of their reason. In the ultimate irony, the Soviets aestheticized suffering more acutely – more unambiguously – than Gorky’s despised Romantics could ever imagine.24

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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.