The birth of socialist realism out of the spirit of radiophonia : Maxim Gorky's project "Literaturnaja ucheba"

Abstract

Totalitarianism has been an object of extensive research since the days of its appearance: already in 1930s the visual and verbal languages of Stalinism and Nazism attracted simultaneous attention of writers and scientists (eg. Orwell, Arendt, Adorno, Kracauer, Fromm and Burke). In the post-war intellectual context the group of scholarly disciplines incorporated such approaches to cultural practices as Begriffsgeschichte, Ego-Documentology, Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis.Nevertheless, the integration of historical, sociological and linguistic knowledge about totalitarian society on a firm factual ground is still the thing of the future. This book is the first step in this direction. By using history and theory of communication as an integrative device for other approaches to totalitarianism, it reaches out to those properties of totalitarian society which appear to be beyond the grasp of specific disciplines.More importantly, this functional approach allows to extend the analysis of communicative practices commonly associated with fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, to other locations (France, United States of America and Great Britain in the 1930s) or historical contexts (post-Soviet developments in Russia or Kyrgyzstan). This, in turn, leads to the revaluation of the very term »totalitarian«: no longer an ideological label or a stock attribute of historical narration, it gets a life of its own, defining a specific constellation of hierarchies, codes and networks within a given society.