Engineers of the Soul and Shock Workers in Search of a Contact Zone: Class Relations in the Soviet Production Novel

Abstract

Industry, factories and construction sites, were one of the principal themes of Soviet fiction; it might even be described as a sub-genre in its own right, what they never liked to call, and nevertheless kept on calling, the ‘production novel’. Depictions of manual work as something pleasurable, something that is carried out with enthusiasm, are a cliché in novels of this kind. Rarely, however, is a factory worker the leading character here: in the plot the central role is assumed by engineers, directors, Party organisers, while the real workers appear as occasional figures, more often than not as a sort of noble savage, somebody whom the writer might have met during visits to the factories (the only worker-hero achieving fame, Gleb Chumalov, from Gladkov’s Cement, is in fact a worker turned Party functionary). The birth throes of the “production novel” emerge during the turmoil of the first five-year plans, when the dictatorship of the Proletariat was approaching its demise, and all “proletarian” literary organisations had been shut down by the CC decree convening the first Soviet writers’ congress (in which their Union was to be founded). These organisations, in any case, were mostly comprised of writers of petty bourgeois origins – the repeated “call-ups” of factory workers into literature had little or no effect. In the same years engineers and technicians, previously stigmatised as “bourgeois specialists”, were being rehabilitated in the Soviet discourse. In Stalin’s Soviet Union workers were seen as the Other; this came to be at the end of a particularly interesting debate. Among the alternatives, Sergei Tret’iakov’s avant-garde proposal of a “literature of fact”, in which the redefinition of the social function of the writer implied a totally new idea of literature, wherein, in Walter Benjamin’s reading, “work itself has its turn to speak”.