On Periodization of the History of Russian Literature of the 20th Century

Abstract

The present study examines the problem of periodizing the history of Russian literature in the Soviet era. The article focuses on the methodological approaches to the study of Russian literary history developed in academic scholarship during the 1910s–1920s, as represented in the works of V.N. Peretz, A.I. Beletsky, and P.N. Sakulin. These approaches have retained their scholarly relevance to the present day. Particular attention is paid to their understanding of the relationship between literary criticism and literary scholarship, which they regarded as fundamentally distinct forms of intellectual inquiry with different objectives. This distinction was most succinctly formulated by V.F. Pereverzev in 1928 through two complementary propositions: scholarship studies literature as a fact, whereas criticism studies literature as a factor. The emergence of the “synthetic criticscholar” (D.D. Blagoi, 1954) was subsequently regarded as a major achievement of Soviet literary methodology. The article also surveys the principal approaches and methods employed during the first Soviet decade to periodize twentieth-century Russian literary history, with particular attention to the monographs of E.F. Nikitina, V.L. Lvov-Rogachevsky, and P.S. Kogan. Drawing on periodicals, transcripts of editorial meetings, and other archival materials from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the study reconstructs the major stages in the preparation of the History of Soviet Literature during the second Soviet decade. Responsibility for this project was successively assumed by the Institute of Literature and Language of the Communist Academy, the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and the Union of Soviet Writers. The surviving editorial transcripts shed new light on the making of the first comprehensive histories of Soviet literature and demonstrate that the periodization of Russian literary history remained one of the most politically contested issues in Soviet literary scholarship.