On Russian Soil: Myth and Materiality 9781501755712

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ON RUSSIAN SOIL

A volume in the NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Edited by Christine D. Worobec For a list of books in the series, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

ON RUSSIAN SOIL MY TH A N D M AT E R I A L I TY

Mieka Erley

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS an imprint of Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2021 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2021 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Erley, Mieka, author. Title: On Russian soil : myth and materiality / Mieka Erley. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2021. | Series: NIU series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051001 (print) | LCCN 2020051002 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501755699 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501755705 (epub) | ISBN 9781501755712 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology—Russia. | Soils— Philosophy. | Cultural landscapes—Russia. | Soils— Mythology—Russia. Classification: LCC GF601 .E75 2021 (print) | LCC GF601 (ebook) | DDC 631.40947—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051001 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2020051002 Cover illustration: P. S. Danilov, Pervaia borozda, canvas and oil, 1957–58. A. Kasteyev Museum of Arts, Republic of Kazakhstan.

Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Note on Transliteration and Translation  xi

Introduction: Groundwork

1

1. Native Soil: The Roots of the Organic Nation11 2. Matter: Models of Soil and Society

34

3. Dirt: Dirty Literature

49

4. Sediment: Soviet Construction on Asian Soil

68

5. Wasteland: Platonov’s Dialectics of Waste and Recuperation

91

6. Virgin Land: The Libidinal Economy of Virgin Land Epilogue: Beyond Earth Notes 135 Bibliography 165 Index 181

113 130

Preface

In a family photograph from the 1920s, my grandmother and her sister, toddlers with bobbed hair, are sitting in a field encircled by chickens on the farm their mother owned in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. As children, they worked alongside their mother in this field, setting tobacco, planting strawberries, and picking beans for market through the years of the Great Depression. I have fond memories of childhood visits to the farm, where muddy cattle trails ran alongside the Little Elkhorn creek, and where a stunning variety of wildflowers grew—Solomon’s seal, stonecrop, and the quaintly named butter-and-eggs plant, which I collected and pressed in a botanical album. But by the 1980s there was already a decisive consolidation of industrial farming in the United States. With encroaching development, the decline of tobacco, and the rise of big agribusiness, few small family farms in Kentucky like my grandmother’s were sustainable by the close of the Reagan era. In 1996, after the passing of my great-grandmother, aged 101, on the farm she had lived on her entire life, most of that farmland was sold for suburban tract houses. In our private life it was the end of four generations of farmers on that Bluegrass land, and in America it was the definitive end of the great georgic myth of America as an agrarian republic of smallholders. In America as in Russia, many of us are only a few generations away from working the land and the constant attention to seasonal cycles, weather, fertilizer, and above all, the condition of the soil. The Green Revolution that enabled this demographic shift over the course of the twentieth century did not solve what nineteenth-century Russians called the “soil question” but rather rendered it invisible in many parts of the industrialized world. But the soil question has returned to visibility in recent years, from the growth of community-supported agriculture and the revival of small organic farms to internet discussions about the lack of micronutrients in industrially farmed food. As Wendell Berry writes, “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. . . . Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”1 vii

viii    P r e f a c e

This book is a historical study of a distinctive place and time, but it is motivated by a broader desire to understand how people make sense of the hard material realities of the human condition—in this case our dependency on the soil to feed ourselves—and how these material realities shape our dreams and myths. Agriculture has been our security against the state of bare life, but climate change has made us more aware of the fragility of our existence, our dependence on nature, and the limits of our ability to solve any problem with technology, and we are again urgently revisiting questions about how we use our limited arable land. Soil remains an ongoing source of material resistance in a world of frictionless data, where the immaterial dialectic of binary code seems to master all material flows. However virtual life may appear, “grain is still grain,” in the words of Leonid Brezhnev, and soil is still soil. One day we may indeed loosen our immemorial ties to the soil as technological innovations offer new means of food production, but for now our dependency on the soil is a universal condition that unites human societies across millennia. The story of Russia’s relationship to its soil may serve to remind us of the conditions of food scarcity that were once a central feature of human experience—conditions that still persist in the developing world and that, in the age of planetary climate change, may once again come to define our lives.

Acknow l e dgme nts

No book is produced by the author alone. I am indebted to everyone who supported this project or shared their time, energy, and ideas. Sam Hodgkin more than anyone else enabled this project to materialize and shared the burdens that it entailed over many years. My sincere thanks also go to my colleagues in the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program at Colgate University: Sergei Domashenko, Jessica Graybill, Carolyn Guile, Ian Helfant, Alexander Nakhimovsky, Alice Nakhimovsky, Nancy Ries, and Kira Stevens. I am especially grateful to Alice Nakhimovsky for staying on message about what it takes to finish a book. Language is the foundation of this project, and I thank those who taught me Russian language and literature at Hampshire College and Amherst College, especially Joanna Hubbs, Stanley Rabinowitz, Viktoria Schweitzer, Catherine Ciepiela, Tatyana Babyonysheva, and Jane Taubman. In the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, Lisa Little and Anna Muza supported my development as a teacher and ongoing student of Russian. It was a privilege to have such readers as Irina Paperno, Olga Matich, Eric Naiman, Harsha Ram, Anne Nesbet, and Viktor Zhivov, and I am further indebted to Joachim Klein for sharing his expertise on topics as varied as pastoral poetry and the history of the Belomor Canal. I owe Irina Paperno and Olga Matich a special debt of gratitude for their generous support and care. They have fundamentally and indelibly shaped how I think. Thanks go to all the editors and staff at NIU Press and Cornell Press, including Christine D. Worobec, Jennifer Savran Kelly, and especially Amy Farranto for her support through the life changes that occurred between the contract and final manuscript. I am grateful to Andy Bruno and Thomas Newlin, who reviewed this manuscript for NIU Press and who took time, in the midst of a pandemic, to generously share their ideas and discuss specific problems. Any shortcomings in this text are my own, of course. A formative influence on this book was the Eurasian Environments conference in 2011 at Ohio State University, organized by Nicholas Breyfogle. ix

x    A c k n ow l e d g m e n ts

This was my first encounter with environmental history, and my thanks go to the participants of that conference for having shared their work and welcomed a Slavist into their midst, with special thanks to Nicholas Breyfogle, Maya Peterson, Andy Bruno, Pey-Yi Chu, and Julia Obertreis. I am also grateful to Mark Bassin, Jane Costlow, Irina Sandomirskaia, and Jillian Porter for sharing ideas or reading parts of this material at various stages. In the course of working on this project, I received support from the US Department of State, the Slavic Department and Dean’s Office at the University of California, Berkeley, and Colgate University. The Summer Research Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University provided support for the use of their library collections. Having spent the final months revising this manuscript under the unprecedented conditions of the closure of every library in the United States, I am especially grateful to have had access to these and other wonderful library collections at earlier stages. Global quarantine is not the most felicitous time to seek image permissions, and I thank all those who helped me to obtain them where it was possible: Molly Brunson for sharing invaluable advice; Gainee Nurkabayeva, Christopher Baker, Gul’zira Moldasheva, Altynzhan Khozhamuratova and all the directors and staff of the A. Kasteyev Art Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Finally, while completing this manuscript, I received an unexpected letter from Professor Anvar Kacimov, a hydrologist and applied mathematician who worked in Kara-Kum Desert in the Soviet period and who now carries out work in the deserts of Oman. I am grateful to Professor Kacimov for sharing with me his thoughts about Platonov, Soviet engineering, and the nostalgia he feels for a country that no longer exists. May we, as Slavists, remain caretakers of the intellectual traditions, ways of reading, lifeworlds, and hopes of this phantom country. In this state of existential homelessness, let us be warmed by fellow feeling and united in the devotional act of reading.

Note on Tra ns l ite rati on a n d Trans l ati on

I have followed the Library of Congress system for transliteration of Russian. Soft signs have been omitted from personal names (Solovev rather than Solov’ev), and I have followed English convention in the case of names with established English spellings (Chernyshevsky, Gorky, Mandelstam, etc.). Unless noted, translations are my own. Where I use a preexisting translation, I have noted any alterations, often made to restore the original text’s precision in agronomic or soil terminology.

xi

Introduction Groundwork

The Russian-born journalist Maurice Hindus once declared that “one could write a history of Russia in terms of mud.”1 Hindus was born in the countryside in the famine year 1891, and he personally witnessed how the condition of soil in its many forms—from mud to black earth—dictated the terms of peasant life during his childhood in the Russian Empire and later, as he reported from the front lines of collectivization in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Historical accounts from below have enriched our understanding of the experience of Russia’s peasants, those who lived closest to the earth, but none has taken up Hindus’s suggestion to focus on the earth itself, either its specific agency in Russian history or its rich symbolic life. Inspired by recent biographies of natural objects in the environmental humanities and environmental history, this book sets out to tell the story of Russian soil as an object of both nature and culture that in the age of modernity inspired utopian dreams, reactionary ideologies, far-ranging social theories, and durable myths of the relationship between nation and nature.2 Soil is the material foundation of civilizations, economies, and lifeways, and the site of the most intimate and long-standing human exchanges with nature. Soil brokers between growth and decomposition, nourishment and waste, bios and thanatos. Soil is the material index of “place” and “home,” witnessed by the common practice among immigrants of taking a handful 1

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of soil from their native village, or from the graves of their ancestors, as they traveled to a new land.3 Maxim Gorky wrote about migrants who spoke of how “every handful of soil was the very dust of their ancestors and contained everything that was memorable, familiar, and dear—watered with their sweat.”4 Myths of soil have, above all, served to make sense of our material origins and limitations, the fragility of our bodies, and our abject materiality, exemplified in the biblical creation of human life from dust. How resilient were such long-established myths of this primordial matter in the age of modernity, with its disruptions to traditional agrarian life, its great human migrations, its new technologies, and its new biopolitical and necropolitical regimes? Max Weber argued that the entry into modernity demanded the rationalization and disenchantment of the traditional world, figured as an Edenic “enchanted garden.”5 Yet becoming modern was not exclusively a matter of disenchantment with myths, but rather, their re-enchantment for a new age.6 Departing from this idea, this book tells the story of how new Russian myths of soil were created in an age of modernization, nationbuilding, and revolution in Eurasia, when soil was understood to sit at the crux of all economic, social, and national problems. Many of the collective traumas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Eurasia directly concerned the relationship between people and the symbolically charged soil beneath their feet: serfdom and emancipation, settler colonialism, collectivization and forced resettlement, recurring harvest failures and famines, and territorial invasions in war and its aftermath. Under these conditions old myths were not dispelled so much as reconfigured: the peasant’s understanding of soil as the material foundation of human life was displaced by the political economist’s understanding of soil as the material basis of all social and economic relations; the modern rational human (from the Latin humus, soil) now walked alongside such ancient mythic figures as Adam (from the Hebrew adamah, red earth) and Mother Moist Earth (Mat’ syra-zemlia), the Slavic folk deity.7 In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams reflects on such coconstitutive changes in the myths and material conditions of the countryside over four centuries of agrarian change, arguing that the English experience was particularly significant because such transformations were so early and thorough.8 We find a similarly illuminating case for study when we consider the shocks to rural life in Russia and the Soviet Union and their assimilation in the cultural sphere over the course of two compressed centuries of dizzying modernization and revolution. This book tells the story of how the city made sense of such radical changes in the matter, space, and people of the countryside, focusing on soil as a crucial site for modernization and its fantasies.

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Matter and Myth This book is framed by two main questions: How is soil, as the site of traditional values and lifeways, remythologized in the modern age? And how does soil, as a material substance, resist what Stacy Alaimo calls the “dematerializing networks” of culture and the symbolic processes involved in making sense of our world? How does nature resist our attempts to give it meaning? I approach these central questions by providing a genealogy of key Russian and Soviet cultural myths of nation and nature rooted in soil, ranging from Fedor Dostoevsky’s “native soil” movement (pochvennichestvo) to the Soviet myth of the Virgin Lands. As many of the book’s episodes show, Russia’s soil was long considered the site of its backwardness and its “Asian” alterity vis-à-vis European modernity. Soil was consequently the site, along with the human body, of the most violent assaults of modernization in Russia and the Soviet Union. Among the stories that this book tells are those of the many Russian and Soviet intellectuals, politicians, writers, and scientists who imagined that their belated agrarian society could make a historical leap into industrial modernity.9 Their commitment to securing food production and improving the material conditions of millions of impoverished people is an essential context for understanding Soviet attitudes to nature. Nowhere did the drama of development have a more immediate impact on human lives than in the countryside, where it reshaped “the entire millennial pattern of peasant life.”10 In this turbulent age of modernization, new mythologies of soil developed in the cultural sphere even as the material substance itself frustrated utopian fantasies. Although this book focuses on modern myths, discourses, and metaphors related to soil, each episode also highlights the resistances of soil as matter. Often represented as primordial and formless, inert and abject, soil simultaneously attracts and frustrates attempts to give it form in our physical and cultural landscapes. It is among those material objects that, in Christopher Breu’s words, “refuse full socialization and resist symbolic manipulation.”11 I show how attempts to “socialize” soil—to theorize it as an object of social relations and to make it productive under socialism—were countered by the resistance of the material itself. Soil does not always behave as it is meant to, as various episodes in the book demonstrate. Finally, the stories told here show how key intellectual, political, and artistic figures respond to this resistant materiality and how their ideas are changed by this contact: Vladimir Lenin bases a key Bolshevik political concept on a model of nineteenth-century soil chemistry; writer and land-reclamation engineer Andrei Platonov retheorizes Marxist ecology in the arid landscape of the

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Kara Kum Desert; Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov questions the valorization of agriculture over pastoralism in the era of the Virgin Lands. On the basis of such stories, this work aims, on the one hand, to expand our understanding of the cultural processes that “write” nature and, on the other, to reflect on how nature inspires culture—from literature to social theory. This book is by no means a comprehensive study of soil in Russian and Soviet culture. It is a first attempt at excavating the matter of Russian soil from the layers of cultural myth that have sedimented around it. Readers may find expected myths, episodes, or figures missing from these pages. What I offer is a selection of key episodes: myths of soil that are richly and extensively ramified, that refresh our understanding of well-worn topics or texts, or that intersect with material history in striking ways. Although these are fragments from a broader history, I believe that they work together to show how matter and myth act upon each other, producing what Heather Sullivan calls an “energizing slippage.”12 Each of the six chapters reflects on a form of soil and its symbolic life: native soil, matter, dirt, sediment, wasteland, and virgin land. While each of these terms deserves its own Begriffsgeschichte, or conceptual history, what I offer instead is an applied case study that works through a specific historical event, body of work, discursive episode, or myth. These cases are arranged in chronological order and build upon each other, showing how discursive and symbolic resources accumulate within this culture over time, from serfdom through emancipation and the Great Reforms, to revolution, collectivization, and the late socialist friend­ ship of nations. The first three chapters are grounded in the nineteenth century and focus on debates about soil as a source of Russian national identity, while the final three chapters turn to the Soviet period and the place of soil in the development and building of a new socialist multinational state. The chapters also form transhistorical pairs. Chapters 1 and 4 address soil as the symbolic site of national specificity, whether this property is seen as a resource or a liability. Chapters 2 and 5 consider models of soil and society and how material exchanges between humans and nature are mediated through soil. Chapters 3 and 6 deal directly with the symbolic and political functions of soil in the cultural domain during moments of transformation in agrarian life. This book interrogates the very notion of “Russian” soil, and thus a note on the title is warranted: while the cultural myths explored here are Russian, their territory is Eurasian. Each of the three final chapters juxtaposes the Soviet center with a specific Central Asian space: Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan respectively. Soil was troped as “Asian” and regarded as a cause of belated development in Russian cultural myths, and Soviet Central

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Asia was thus a particularly symbolically charged site of modernization efforts involving irrigation, water infrastructure, and farming.13 I highlight continuities across these various Eurasian spaces, but I also show how ideological and symbolic systems devised for the Russian heartland transformed when transplanted to other soils. Given the importance of mapping ecological and cultural difference for the practice of statecraft in Eurasia, it is unsurprising that “space, place, and landscape” (to borrow W. J. T. Mitchell’s formulation) have been central preoccupations for humanistic scholarship on Russia and the Soviet Union.14 This book builds on that body of scholarship as it examines how Eurasian lands have been viewed and territorialized, but it also follows the blade of the plough down through the surface of the landscape and map and into the matter beneath.15

Soil and Material Ecologies In the modern age, soil has become a “specialized instrument of production,” dedicated to human purposes and stripped of biological complexity.16 In this new agroecological system, historically distinct not in kind but in scale, the use of specialized machinery, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides raised crop production and supported growing human populations at the same time that it reduced the teeming biological life in soil.17 But soil has not been simplified by such new agroecological regimes, it has rather been incorporated into an immensely complex human economy, rerouting its material flows—biological, mineral—through increasingly labyrinthine social, economic, and political circuits. Soil resides in multiple human ecologies, including new ecologies of knowledge. While this work is primarily concerned with the meanings attributed to soil, it is also attentive to materiality, and is inspired by new critical frameworks in Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS) and new materialism. Soil is a material artifact of human agriculture and social relations, and as such, it is an exemplary object of Bruno Latour’s nature-culture, a material substance that has been entangled in human systems over millennia. This complex object is, in Latour’s words, simultaneously “real, collective, and discursive.”18 Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer argue that our knowledge of such boundary objects is produced by “extremely diverse groups of actors—researchers from different disciplines, amateurs and professionals, humans and animals, functionaries and visionaries.”19 This formulation of cooperative agency aptly describes both the production of knowledge about soil and the production of the material substance itself. Knowledge about soil is generated by farmers, natural scientists, economists, politicians, and a

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variety of cultural producers. Soil is also produced materially by a complex assemblage of humans, animals, plants, bacteria, water, machines, and other agents. It is this deep entanglement that inspires Heather Sullivan’s call for ecocritics to take as their object of study not wild and pristine nature, but “dirty nature,” that is, the environment that is already irreversibly enmeshed in “the dirty human sphere.” Sullivan argues that dirty nature is “an antidote to nostalgic views rendering nature a far-away and ‘clean’ site precisely in order to suggest that there is no ultimate boundary between us and nature.”20 The environmental historian William Cronon similarly questions the centrality of what he calls the “wilderness premise” in ecocriticism, namely the idea that “nature, to be natural, must also be pristine—remote from humanity and untouched by our common past.”21 It is no accident that the central object of interrogation for both Sullivan and Cronon is the clean/dirty dichotomy, a fundamental human framework for policing boundaries between self and other. Agriculture, as the site where humans dirty their hands with nature, also becomes a site where pure wilderness is dirtied by human contact. As we conceptualize an ecology grounded in dirt theory, then, agriculture is an illuminating object of study. Moreover, agrarian thought, as a tradition of human negotiation with the environment that is informed by praxis, should be reread as a kind of environmental thought.22 Our sublime reflections on nature may be productively “contaminated” by a fuller account of the experience of hunger, labor on the land, and our ongoing negotiations with the hard limits of the natural world. As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing notes, “purity is not an option,” and we must come to think of “contamination as collaboration.”23 So intimate are the material exchanges between humans and soil that we might refer to soil as our “trans-corporeal” body, adapting Stacy Alaimo’s term for the interpenetration of the human body and the material world that is “outside” it. As Alaimo notes, the human body is in a constant state of exchange and interaction with “non-human creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors.” Echoing Latour, she explains that this kind of interaction “necessitates rich, complex modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual.”24 Alaimo’s term is particularly useful for thinking about the metabolic relationship between humans and soil: soil is a site of mineral exchanges between humans and their environment throughout life and in death. In this respect Alaimo’s new materialism is not so distant from the “old” materialisms treated in this book. The agricultural chemist Justus Liebig, for example, envisioned a model of metabolic exchanges between

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humans and soil mediated by practices of agriculture, waste, and burial. Liebig described the flows of this ecstatic transcorporeality, as minerals from the soil “assume the form of corn, flesh, and bones; they pass into the bodies of men, and again assume the same form which they originally possessed.”25 Liebig’s vision of soil metabolism shaped Marxist models of socially mediated material flows and influenced such figures as Vladimir Lenin, Vladimir Vernadsky, and Andrei Platonov. Platonov drew on Liebig’s metabolic model when he described the silt of the Amu Darya: “This yellow earth traveling down the river anticipatorily resembled grain, flowers, and cotton, and even the human body.”26 Such materialist visions of the interpenetration of the human body and the natural world may help us to read beyond the Soviet Promethean rhetoric of the mastery of nature and inspire us to write, in turn, new narratives of the Soviet environment. A number of works in the growing field of Eurasian environmental history have complicated our understanding of the Soviet environment, offering a more nuanced view of the relationship between state ideology and practices that impact the environment.27 In the Soviet negotiation between the imperatives of development and stewardship, we can discern what Andy Bruno calls a dualism of hostility and holism.28 Moving beyond the totalitarian model of Soviet history allows us to see continuities with the pre-Soviet past and to recognize more diverse forms of agency—among scientists, farmers, and even actors in the natural world, from minerals to permafrost.29 More ambitiously, we might reconsider the critical potential of Soviet materialisms and how they might speak to contemporary new materialism and ecocriticism.30 While the present book is an empirical study, grounded in a specific geographical-cultural zone, it is in conversation with a broader field of environmental humanities. Over the last few decades, the humanities have seen a methodological turn toward materialist and even posthumanist orientations in recognition of the limits of cultural criticism.31 As the foregoing suggests, this book does not de-center the human from its analysis in the hope of bringing the natural world into clearer focus; it embraces “dirty nature.” Soil, human bodies, and human societies have coevolved and coproduced each other for millennia.32 Moreover, I believe that the processes of human signification and knowledge production, and even our “spontaneous” experiences of nature, continue to be structured by the cultural, linguistic, and social domains. This book attempts to thread the needle by attending to both the myth and the materiality of soil. I believe the humanities have an important part to play in the critical study of the environment. Recognizing the

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explanatory limits of culture and language, we may yet salvage the critical insights and tools that the cultural and linguistic turns have produced for demystifying our discursive, cultural, and scientific constructs. Understanding the structure of our collective myths about the material world is a necessary step toward dispelling those myths and initiating a fuller encounter with the nonhuman world.

The Symbolic Life of Soil Throughout the nineteenth century, insecurity about Russia’s lack of historical progress often took the form of a compensatory valorization of traditional Russian life, essentialized in the relationship between the peasantry and the soil. From Slavophilism to pochvennichestvo, the discourse of native soil (pochva) made a fetish of rural life and traditions, whether in pastoral fantasies of the mir or rural commune, or idealizations of the Russian peasantry. Russia’s peasants were understood to be rooted in their native soil (a concept the Germans expressed as Bodenständigkeit) by the regime of serfdom, and were therefore imagined as the custodians of an authentic Russian national identity. Dostoevsky’s call for a “return to the soil,” taken up by the populists of the late nineteenth century, exemplified the desire of the urban Westernized intelligentsia—the “city,” in Raymond Williams’s schema—to seek common roots in a native soil uncontaminated by foreign cultural transplants. Chapter 1 traces the biopolitical metaphors of native soil, rootedness, grafting, and transplantation through nineteenth-century Russian discourses of the nation and locates their origin in the German philosophical traditions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder. While figures like Herder had attempted to ground their theories of national difference in material and environmental conditions, soil nonetheless remained primarily a cultural, discursive, and philosophical construct in the age of Romantic nationalism. But by the early decades of the nineteenth century, the study of nature was disengaging itself from Naturphilosophie and claiming ever-greater authority on the basis of empirical data and controlled experiment. The matter (materiia) of soil, which had remained chiefly the occupation of the farmer and peasant, was now being claimed by new institutions of scientific knowledge. Chapter 2 considers how the Russian discourse of soil was reterritorialized by debates about philosophical materialism emerging in the 1840s, focusing on the Russian reception of the agricultural chemistry of German chemist Justus Liebig (1803–1873). Liebig was discussed by such cultural figures as Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Chernyshevsky,

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and Fedor Dostoevsky, and his model of soil metabolism served as inspiration for Karl Marx’s concept of “social metabolism.” Soil was a central matter of debate between philosophical idealists and materialists in nineteenth-century Russia, and it played a similar role in related debates concerning literary realism, which upended the norms of aesthetic idealism prevailing in the age of Romanticism. Realism emerged on the grounds of empiricism and methods of objective scientific observation, and dirt (griaz) became the exemplary object of realist observation and social critique. While dirt was a fact of rural life in Russia, its function in realism was more than mimetic: dirt signaled a deliberate aesthetic and political intervention in a literary system that had previously excluded “low” subjects, from the life of the peasantry to unsanitized visions of nature. Chapter 3 shows how “dirty literature” and its critical response, the discourse of aesthetic pollution, emerged at moments when boundary formation in the literary system and crisis in agrarian life coincided. This chapter reads Russian realism through that dirty lens, focusing first on the emergence of naturalism and realism between the 1840s and the 1880s, during the crisis of serfdom and the Great Reforms; and second on the formation of socialist realism in the early 1930s during the crisis of collectivization. The chapter shows how in both periods, dirt, as a central material fact of peasant life and a symbol of systemic disorder, challenged aesthetic norms and expanded the critical potential of literature. The first three chapters of the book reflect on the relationship between Russian national identity and its soil; the final three chapters expand their focus to the place of soil in the multinational project of Soviet culture. Just as native soil and dirt had functioned as symbols of Russian identity, the figure of sediment (otlozhenie) took on important symbolic work in critical discourse and literature of the early Soviet period. Chapter 4 focuses on sediment as the symbol of an Asiatic past in the Bolshevik cultural imaginary. Soviet literature of the first Five-Year Plan identified Russia’s allegedly backward, Asiatic nature with the geological foundations beneath Soviet construction. Because this sediment was consistently imagined as a site of historical inertia and accumulation—economic, cultural, and material—its reform could only be accomplished through violent interventions. The texts examined in this chapter reflect on the reshaping of the inert sediment of Soviet land (through large-scale construction projects) as well as the sedimented matter of the human psyche (through perekovka, or psychological reforging). Historical sediment threatens Soviet construction in these novels, but even more terrible are the monumental public-works projects of the first Five-Year Plan, troped as “monoliths” that demand the sacrifice of

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human bodies. Soviet revolutionary dreams in these novels are re-encoded as a regression to oriental despotism, emblematized by the sacrifice of human laborers and their burial in the ground beneath Soviet construction. Soviet construction aimed to reform the very geological foundations of Soviet nature. In Literature and Revolution, Lev Trotsky described how humans would arrogate to themselves complete mastery over geography, geology, and nature: “The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows and steppes, of forests, and of seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste.”33 Chapter 5 explores the limits of Soviet efforts to refashion nature, to transform deserts into gardens, and to “socialize” wasteland (pustyr’). This chapter reads the literary works of Soviet writer Andrei Platonov in the context of his second career as a land reclamation engineer in the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, whose mandate was to make land more productive through a range of chemical, hydrological, and physical interventions collectively known as land reclamation (melioratsiia). Platonov’s technical experience with land reclamation and his ongoing engagement with the transformation of nature inspire the tale Dzhan (Soul, 1935), set in the Kara-Kum Desert of Turkmenistan. The final chapter considers the place of virgin soil (tselina) in the Russian cultural imagination, culminating in discourses and cultural artifacts surrounding Nikita Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign (1953–1964). I will discuss how virgin soil was imagined as both a natural resource and a symbolic resource, central to re-energizing the Soviet polity and restoring the Romantic connections between people and land that had once been expressed in the nineteenth-century discourse of Russian pochva. The eroticized myth of virgin nature was intended to bring the newly unleashed libidinal desires of Thaw-era youth into the service of the state’s plan to master the feminized and ethnicized nature of Siberia and Kazakhstan. This final chapter brings the cultural biography of Russian soil full circle by showing how the Virgin Lands campaign hollowed out the myths of the Russian settlement of the steppe, the conquest of nature, and the Soviet friendship of nations. From Adam’s origin in clay to our final interment in the earth, we tell stories about soil. In the ones that follow we see how soil is imagined as a site of identity, meaning, and possible redemption of the material world itself.

Ch a p ter 1

Native Soil The Roots of the Organic Nation

In 1864 the journalist Maksim Antonovich wrote that “ ‘soil’ was the philosopher’s stone for us, a journalistic elixir, an inexhaustible goldmine, a cash-cow, in a word, everything.”1 As Antonovich testifies, Slavophiles and Westernizers, journalists and gentlemen farmers, mystics and materialists all used their broadsheets to sort out various dimensions of Russia’s “soil question.”2 Soil (pochva) was figured as both a source of the nation’s ills and a solution to them, and it was placed at the center of models of national identity, history, political economy, and even realist aesthetics. This chapter charts the discursive and symbolic construction of Russian soil in the work of a range of influential figures in nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history, focusing on a particular complex of ideas: the organic analogy of nation and plant. This pervasive discourse of the organic, rooted nation forms the basis of all later Russian and Soviet cultural myths and discourses of soil, and many important cultural phenomena only become legible in light of this symbolic complex—whether the commonplace understanding that Peter the Great “transplanted” Western culture to Russia or the mystical nationalism of Fedor Dostoevsky’s pochvennichestvo movement (often translated as the native soil movement). An investigation of this analogy, which served different writers as pure rhetoric, natural fact, and everything in the blurred spaces in between, will also establish

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a mode of reading for later discourses of the soil, suspended between metaphor and materiality. The Romantic age was characterized by an intense interest in the ontology of the nation and the basis of national difference. Where did nations come from, what shaped their development, and what was their purpose? Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Schlegel, and other German philosophers offered answers to these questions in the framework of their own philosophies of history. Fundamentally shaped by the French Revolution and Napoleon’s trajectory across Europe, the Romantic nationalism of these thinkers was largely a counter-Enlightenment rejection of false universals and mechanistic approaches to nature and history.3 They preferred to take a more holistic approach to systems as “living” organisms. These organicist and primordialist theories naturalized the nation through allusion to native soil, claiming that the material substance was the source of national, racial, and cultural differentiation and identity. In this political philosophy, social and cultural phenomena were transferred into the domain of organic and natural law according to the analogy that nations, like plants, “grew” out of their “native soil.”4 The forerunner of the Romantic nationalists and a founder of the discourse of the organic nation was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), an important figure in comparative philology and aesthetics, as well as a theorist of nationality. Herder’s impact was significant throughout Europe, but there were several reasons that Herder found a place within multiple Russian intellectual currents of the early nineteenth century. Herder lived in Riga from 1764 to 1769, a period during which he developed a special interest in Russia. As a champion of the diversity and peaceful plurality of national cultures, Herder predicted that Russia was destined to “awake from its long and heavy slumber,” and to take its place among other self-realized nations.5 The influential critic Vissarion Belinskii called Herder a “prophet,” and Apollon Grigorev wrote of his admiration for Herder’s “desire to embrace all the peoples of the world with love” and to undertake the “broad contemplation of the fates of humanity.”6 Writer Nikolai Gogol called Herder one of the “great architects of world history” and praised his lofty ideas about humanity (although he noted that Herder had no sense of the everyday life of the common person).7 While Herder’s name is often cited among other influential Western thinkers in nineteenth-century Russia, there is limited scholarship closely tracing the diffusion of his ideas.8 Herder’s main contribution to the theorization of the nation (and the source of his appeal to many Russian readers) was his pluralistic, nonhierarchical model of national forms and cultures. Rather than judging a nation’s

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level of development according to universal standards, Herder asserted that each nation, like a flower, had its own distinctive form, took its own path of development, and uniquely contributed to the beauty of the world garden. Each nation aspired to its own perfection, and a nation that might otherwise be judged “backwards” was, in Herder’s vision, simply unfolding at its own pace according to the plan set out by nature.9 The botanical image of each nation as a flower in the world garden was more than simply a pleasing trope. In Herder’s model the nation is a living organism formed by its unique natural environment—and most particularly by the soil in which it is “rooted.” This understanding of national development was grounded in organicism, an important trend of German Romantic science that emerged as an alternative to Cartesian and Newtonian reductionism. Organicism was primarily concerned with the synergistic relation between parts and wholes—specifically between external forms, internal structures, and the emergent properties observed in higher organisms.10 Organicism is often reduced to a stylistic strategy, with metaphors understood to serve rhetorical purposes and to illustrate principles to a lay reader. But as Amanda Jo Goldstein helpfully notes, Western Romantic materialism, including organicism, was a mode of thinking that “granted substance to tropes and tropic activity to nonverbal things.”11 Even further, in Herder’s work organicism must be understood as a hermeneutic strategy, central to his approach to naturalizing social phenomena.12 That is, the geographical specificity of soils was a material fact that determined national character. It was precisely this analogic, organic method that Immanuel Kant found objectionable in Herder’s Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784–1791), when he noted that Herder possessed an “accomplished sagacity in the discovery of analogies, but a bold imagination” rather than “logical exactitude.”13 However “imaginative” Herder’s analogic method, it produced what many readers of his time considered nontrivial conclusions about important sociopolitical and cultural questions. In the case of the Russian reception of Herder, discussed below, some of Herder’s followers adopted the plant-nation analogy merely as a productive fund of metaphors, while others embraced organicism as a universal hermeneutic applicable to human development. To understand Herder’s model of the organic nation, it is useful to pause briefly with his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, which opens with a natural history of the Earth, illustrating the “Great Chain of Being” that “descends from the creator down to the germ of a grain of sand.”14 All of the Earth’s creations, inanimate and animate, “possess a form and fashion dependent on eternal laws.”15 Universal principles of organization may be discerned in everything from soil and stones (“the smallest and most

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unfinished things”), to higher biological organisms like plants and animals, and finally, to humans. Herder relies upon analogy as a fundamental hermeneutic tool, proceeding from the understanding that universal laws give order to all organic form. He makes empirical observations about the natural world and from them abstracts principles that determine human historical and social development. As a superorganism ranged above the individual subject and below humanity, the nation is the fundamental unit of human history in Herder’s scheme. “Nationality is a plant of nature,”16 on which “fruits grow according to the climate and care.”17 The genius of the nation is specifically vegetative because it is rooted in place; nations grow, evolve, and are fixed in “native soil.” As Mark Bassin has discussed, the German concept of Bodenständigkeit—the state of being rooted in one’s native soil—was both metaphorical and literal: “a Volk could be genuinely integrated into the matrix of the natural world only to the extent that it was literally anchored in the earth or soil and attuned to their natural rhythms.”18 Thus it is to the plant kingdom that Herder turns to understand the nature and life cycle of the national organism. In Herder’s vision the emergence of national difference was a natural process akin to speciation among plants and animals. National difference was produced by the physical environment and affected, in turn, by cultural adaptation and interactions with other nations. Herder asserts that each nation has a distinct Volksgeist, certain features of which, like genetic inheritance, remain relatively stable through time, even when the organism is uprooted from its original environment (he cites the Jews as an example).19 Herder is less interested, however, in physical anthropology than in celebrating the variety of cultural forms—the highest expression of the Volksgeist—that obtain from different environmental conditions. In his consideration of “the bonds of love that tie us to the Fatherland [Vaterland],” Herder rejects the idea that patriotism could be grounded in “the soil [Boden] of the country . . . all by itself. It would, rather, be the heaviest of all burdens if man, viewed like a tree or a plant or a beast, would have to belong, inherently and eternally, with all his soul, body, and powers, to the soil where he was born”—a kind of belonging that he compares to the “harsh laws” of serfdom. Rather, reason, culture, and other historical forces “lead towards a gradual unshackling of these slaves, born of a mother’s womb or of the mother-earth [Muttererde], from the hard scrap of land that they are expected to fertilize with their sweat in life and their ashes in death, and instead ties them with more gentle bonds to a fatherland [Vaterland].”20 Writing in 1795, when proposals for the abolition of serfdom were intensely

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debated across Germany, Herder thus distinguishes between a “natural” citizenship—which reflects a primal and material relationship to soil and which he compares to enslavement—and a “cultural” citizenship, in which native soil is understood as a matrix of shared cultural values and history. Herder enlists a series of terms to illustrate: “soil” (Boden), “land” (Land), “mother-earth” (Muttererde), and “fatherland” (Vaterland). Herder deliberately arranges these terms into meaningful binaries. Material “soil” may evolve into the more abstract and polysemous “land.” Herder likewise genders these values, asserting that national citizens must transfer their attachment to the primitive symbolic terrain of “mother-earth” to the higher cultural topos of the “fatherland.” It is through this process that individuals articulate their relationship to native soil, transforming from natural slaves into national subjects. Herder clarifies these semantics in his account of the historical process by which nomadic peoples, “dwelling in deserted places for periods of time and burying their fathers there,” became attached to this burial place, which they came to think of as a fatherland. “ ‘We shall await you at the graves of our fathers,’ one would call out to the enemy: ‘Their ashes, too, we shall protect as we defend our land.’ Thus the holy name emerged, and not as if human beings had sprung from the soil. Only children can love the fatherland, not serfs born of the soil or slaves captured like wild animals.”21 Herder associates material soil with abjection and the state of biological enslavement, while land is defined by symbolic mastery over nature and biology. The act of burial unites the material and symbolic domains, producing feminine and material “mother-earth” through the decay of bodies, and masculine and cultural “fatherland” through public rituals of memorialization. Burial and agriculture are two means of investing and exchanging value through the medium of soil. Herder’s image of the bodies of the “fathers” fertilizing a particular patch of soil is a striking figure for the birth of national consciousness: burial ground becomes a battleground that conationals are prepared to defend, as well as the source of their sustenance through agriculture. Following this line, Michel Serres identifies this nexus of plow, gun, and tomb as the source of our primal “object bonds to the soil.”22 Herder’s binary terms (soil and land; mother earth and fatherland) correspond further with the assertion that while a national organism grows from material soil, a national spirit (or Volksgeist), is cultivated in a cultural land.23 This opposition of a material mother-earth and a cultural fatherland prefigures Otto Schlüter’s later theory of cultural landscape, or Kulturlandschaft, which reflects human values in contrast to an original material Urlandschaft.24

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Russia as a Herderian Organic Nation: Environment, Roots, and Transplantation Herder’s Russian readers found the plant-nation analogy an extremely productive apparatus for understanding national form, possible paths of national development, the process of cultural transfer, and the relationship between individuals and the nation and between the nation and humanity. From the plant-nation analogy, a string of propositions could be explored: the nation is an organic product of its environment with roots in the native soil; nourishment from this soil allows it to grow, blossom, and produce fruits; and finally the nation withers and dies, thereby fertilizing the ground for subsequent growth. Herder’s vision of the organic nation fed into multiple nationalist discourses in nineteenth-century Russia and provided a framework for understanding the ontology of the nation and its development. Here, a survey of the plant-nation analogy will provide background for subsequent close analysis of several Russian organicist thinkers who develop those tropes in more complex ways. By the close of the eighteenth century, Herder’s ideas were making their way into the Russian world of letters through figures like Nikolai Karamzin, who produced translations of Herder’s work into Russian and frequently drew (without credit) on Herder’s ideas.25 Karamzin’s “On the Love of the Fatherland and National Pride” (1802), for example, directly paraphrases Herder’s discussion of the cultural fatherland as a higher object of attachment than the material earth. Karamzin writes: “This love for fellow citizens . . . is a second, or moral, love of the fatherland, as general as the first, local or physical.”26 Karamzin’s description of the relationship between the nation and its environment also closely parallels Herder’s exposition in the Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. Herder writes that “all plants . . . arrive at much greater perfection in their proper climes. With animals and with man it is the same.”27 Herder continues: “Every soil, every sort of mountains, every similar region of the atmosphere, as well as a like degree of heat and cold, nourishes its own plants.”28 Karamzin, in turn, writes that “every plant has more energy in its own climate: this is a law of nature, and for humans it doesn’t change.”29 The nation is shaped by environment, and “every soil . . . nourishes its own plants,” according to Herder. “Does not this prepare us,” he writes, “to expect similar varieties in the organic structure of man, so far as he is a plant?”30 Herder understands the proposition that nations grow within their natural environment like plants literally, and it is this proposition that yielded the root as a fetish of Russian nationalist discourse. In Russia the fear

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that the nation was rootless, or ungrounded, took hold in the nineteenthcentury Russian imagination following Peter Chaadaev’s “First Philosophical Letter,” published in the journal Telescope in 1836. Chaadaev, typically considered the locus classicus of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia’s anxiety of influence and identity, wrote (in French) that Russians were like “nomads” in their own land, not rooted to native soil and that “not a single useful thought has grown in the sterile soil of our fatherland.”31 Chaadaev criticized the Europeanized Russian gentry (rootless nomads) and yet also suggested that Russia itself was a poor environment for the development of a national culture. From Chaadaev’s provocation many Russian authors took up the question of rootedness and whether Russian soil was “sterile.” Discussing this line of discourse in Russian intellectual history, Nikolai Berdiaev later noted that “groundlessness [bezpochvennost’] could be a Russian national trait.”32 The first-generation Slavophile Aleksei Khomiakov wrote that “it is a shame when the earth makes itself a tabula rasa and rejects all the roots and offspring of its historical tree.”33 Khomiakov attempts to clarify his use of biological analogy; by national “roots,” he specifies “the Kremlin, Kiev, Sarov Monastery, folk life with its songs and rituals, and the predominantly rural community.”34 In short, the nation was rooted in folk culture, which had become a new subject of study and curation in Russia, inspired by a similar awakening of interest in German folk culture led by figures like Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the Brothers Grimm.35 The second-generation Slavophile Ivan Aksakov (son of Sergei Aksakov) worked further within this topos: “Outside of our native soil there is no foundation, outside of the national there is nothing real or living, and every well-intentioned idea and every enterprise not connected by its roots to our historical native soil, or not grown organically out of it, does not bear fruit and turns to mulch.”36 The vital economy of the nation depends upon exchanges between life-giving soil and the national organism: soil feeds the nation, and the soil is fertilized in turn by the products of the nation. Aksakov extends this organic metaphor to the “rooting” of national identity in what he calls “historical native soil.” Aksakov’s historical native soil, like that of Khomiakov, is constituted from Russian folk culture, material practices, and vernacular language. For Aksakov, this “historical native soil,” rather than rootless foreign influences, should be the basis for all later cultural developments. Aksakov understands the Herderian valuation of national particularity in a conservative political sense as a limit on the transfer of ideas from one environment, or soil, to another. The life cycle of the Herderian organic nation is also vegetative: “It is obvious that human life, insofar as it is vegetation, has the fate of

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plants. . . . Our ages too are the ages of a plant: we spring up, grow, bloom, wither, and die.”37 Karamzin takes up the idea in his essay on Russian patriotism with an extravagant botanical image inspired by this model of the life cycle of nations: “We are still in the middle of our glorious course! The observer everywhere sees new branches and development; sees many fruits, but even more blossoms.”38 Karamzin’s analogy suggests uneven development: Russia has borne fruits already, but simultaneously new blossoms promise an even greater cultural harvest ahead. Karamzin’s purpose is primarily to encourage patriotic sentiment, and his use of the analogy of national and botanical life cycles is so conventional that it hardly attracts notice, although even this cliché can be traced genealogically to Herder. Once the nation has flowered and borne fruit, it stands to reason that it withers and fertilizes the ground on which it grew. Khomiakov was disturbed to think that he and his Europeanized compatriots, “divorced from their vital foundations,” might not fertilize Russia’s growth and development, but like so much dry brush, would only obstruct new organic growth: “At the moment when the vital beginning of Rus is strengthening and blossoming, will we be merely dry and barren brush, hindering new vegetation?”39 The notion that national soil was fertilized and manured by one’s ancestors became a common trope, signifying one’s sacrificial duty to the future, the sense that the current generation must enrich the ground so that the future nation can bloom and bear fruit.40 Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin railed against his compatriots who fell back on this formula when rationalizing their own political inertia. He imagines them throwing up their hands in defeat: “We are manure [navoz], and history is manure, and our children are manure!”41 Much later, Petr Stolypin gave the idea a tone of civilizational decline when he spoke before the Duma: “Nations sometimes forget about their national duties, but those nations perish, they are turned into manure [nazem], into fertilizer [udobrenie] from which other, stronger nations will sprout and grow strong.”42 The figure of manure in these contexts was a creative extrapolation of the plant-nation analogy that served as a model for the transmission of a cultural legacy through time. The topos of cultural exchange as “transplantation” was a durable concept for understanding the movement of bodies and ideas across Russia’s borders. It was so pervasive, and its tropes so routinized in Russian nationalist discourse by the end of the nineteenth century, that its origin has become obscure. It first took on critical mass in the historiographical literature on Peter the Great. Voltaire’s History of the Russian Empire (1759–1763), may, in fact, be the locus classicus of the figure of Peter as gardener: “The arts, which he transplanted with his own hands into countries till then in

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a manner savage, have flourished and produced fruits.”43 Voltaire’s image was grounded in the Enlightenment exultation of the garden as a rationally organized space that exemplified human mastery over the natural, the savage, and the uncivilized.44 Herder also writes about Peter’s cultivation of the “half-wild” Russian nation.45 Both Voltaire and Herder take a positive view of Peter’s legacy, although for reasons that suggest their different positions along the spectrum between Enlightenment and Romantic thought. Voltaire extolled Peter’s embrace of universal civilizational values, while Herder made the more tortuous argument that Peter helped foster the development of a uniquely Russian national spirit. Russian commentators took up the notion of transplantation with varying degrees of ambivalence about Peter’s legacy. Nikolai Karamzin writes of Peter’s reforms that “we looked at Europe, so to speak, and with one glance appropriated the fruits of her long-term labors,” a process that he calls humiliating, but ultimately salutary.46 Vissarion Belinskii also drew on this discourse of the organic nation in assessing Peter’s influence on Russian culture. In his “Literary Musings” (1834), he writes of Peter the Great’s transplantation of foreign ideas into Russian soil: “He saw miracles and wonders overseas and wanted to transplant them to his native soil, not thinking about the fact that this soil was still too harsh for foreign plants, that they have not experienced the Russian winter; he saw the fruits of centuries of education and wanted to appropriate them for his people in an instant.”47 Like many of his Russian contemporaries, Belinskii uses the apparatus of Herder’s organic nation primarily as a fund of metaphor, with soil standing in for the generative matrix of national culture. Belinskii and Chaadaev agree that Russia is a harsh environment for foreign transplants, but Belinskii rejects the conclusion that Russian soil is so harsh and “sterile” that it cannot produce or sustain a vital culture. He writes that although Russian literature was the result of an “artificial transplant,” it has thrived and developed further in Russian soil. Belinskii follows Herder in praising Peter as the gardener of the “young” nation and the source of a distinctive Volksgeist, expressed in Russian literature, which was the “fruit of artificial transplants. And that is why it was first imitative and rhetorical, with poor content and meager vitality. If it had stayed that way, it would not be literature but scribalism, and would deserve no attention whatsoever. But perhaps in our literature above all else and more than in any other terms, we find the fertility and vitality of the artificial reforms of Peter the Great.”48 Belinskii notes that, although Peter’s “artificial transplants” initially lacked vigor, they later succeeded in taking root, producing new forms that were fertile; Russian literature evolved new, distinctive forms that produced equally vigorous and fertile offspring.

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Pochvennichestvo: The Native Soil Movement This repertoire of organicist tropes, used by Russian intellectuals across the political spectrum, took on particular importance for the writers affiliated with pochvennichestvo, or the native soil movement of the later nineteenth century. In the announcement for his new journal Time (Vremia) in 1860, Fedor Dostoevsky sketched his own theory of Russian historical development from the time of Peter. He marks 1812 as a critical moment, when the intelligentsia were united with the people in a mystical consummation of national identity and purpose. In his famous Pushkin speech, Dostoevsky gives an ex post facto grounding for pochvennichestvo that follows Herder’s and Belinskii’s arguments that Petrine reforms and subsequent Westernizing efforts furthered, rather than hindered, Russia’s unique organic development. Dostoevsky argues that the intelligentsia’s period of separation from the Russian pochva was a necessary stage of development that allowed for an ecstatic return to the soil and a renewed appreciation of the distinctive values of Slavic culture. As Victor Terras observes, the pochvenniki, like Belinskii before them, endeavored to “salvage the idea of Russia’s ‘organic’ development without rejecting the reforms of Peter the Great.”49 The pochvennichestvo movement that emerged from the journal Time advocated a middle course between the Slavophiles’ apotheosis of the Russian people and their fetishization of Russian soil on the one side, and the Westernizers’ embrace of modernization and the importation of European values and ideas on the other. The former sought a reconciliation of East and West, as well as a metadiscursive rapprochement between the Slavophile and Westernizer movements. Pochvennichestvo focused on national particularism and was fundamentally conservative in its politics and nostalgic in its cultural tastes; Wayne Dowler even translates “pochvennichestvo” as “native soil conservatism.”50 In addition to Dostoevsky, its notable proponents included Nikolai Strakhov and Apollon Grigorev, the latter of whom developed a literary-critical apparatus from pochvennichestvo that he called “organic criticism.” Although pochvennichestvo was originally concerned with political, intellectual, and literary questions, by 1862 the elaboration of pochvennichestvo in Time had taken a mystical turn. Like Herder, who had argued that the Slavs would take up the Christian mission, the pochvenniki infused the discourse of native soil with Orthodox religious significance. Dostoevsky writes, “We have finally seen that we, too, are a distinct nationality, highly original, and that our task is to create a new form, our own native form, drawing on our own soil, drawing on our national spirit and national source.”51

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The most developed aesthetic statement of pochvennichestvo was attempted by Apollon Grigorev, whose organic criticism is grounded in the Herderian model: literary creations and writers, like nations, evolve from native soil like plants. This is why the very essence of literature is the national. Grigorev writes of “faith in the ground, the soil, the people”52 and calls for judgment of all “artistic work according to its connection with the soil.”53 He approves of Karamzin as a “man of his soil”54 and Nekrasov as a “poet of the soil” in whose works “a deep love for the soil resounds.”55 The longer Pushkin lived, Grigorev wrote, the “more tightly he grew together with the soil of his land,”56 and Turgenev’s characters Lezhnev and Lavretskii have “internal physiological connections with the soil that produced them.”57 Aleksandr Blok understood Grigorev’s “organic criticism” as little more than an attempt “to clad himself in the armor of science.”58 But Grigorev’s critical apparatus has a wider philosophical reach than Blok allows, and it fits within a continuous genealogy reaching back to Herder and his earliest Russian interpreters.59 Like Karamzin, Grigorev had translated Herder into Russian, specifically his poetry.60 In his autobiography, My Literary and Moral Wanderings, Grigorev shares the origin of his concern with the soil as the basis of the organic nation: “at the beginning of the fifties at the time my second and real youth began, at a time when there arose in my soul a new, or rather renewed, faith in the ground, soil, people, at a time when everything immediate was recreated in the mind and heart, everything that reflection and science had only seemingly erased in them.”61 Grigorev elsewhere explains that “one epoch believed exclusively in development, that is, in forces and drives. Another epoch believes exclusively in nature, that is, in the soil and the environment.”62 In narrating his own intellectual Bildung, Grigorev describes his evolution from a mechanistic to an organicist worldview, the latter grounded in the symbolic values of pochva. He evokes Friedrich Schiller’s distinction between mechanical and organic processes of formation—be they of literature, soil, or nations—in order to distance himself from what was seen as the reductive materialism of the Enlightenment, later revived by the Russian materialists. Grigorev’s personal evolution shows how eclectic, pragmatic, and asynchronous the Russian reception of European intellectual influences often was. However outmoded in German intellectual circles, figures like Herder or Schiller might offer Russian thinkers just the right answers to the most topical problems of their own society. Reading Grigorev in the context of Herder’s framework of the organic nation can clarify some of the opacities in his understanding of the relations between the organic, the vegetative, and the national. We can take, as an example, Grigorev’s term rastitel’naia poeziia (vegetative poetry), explicated

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in A Few Words on the Laws and Terms of Organic Criticism. The essence of “vegetative” poetry is not its slow growth but rather its national character. Grigorev clarifies his term further: the laws of vegetative poetry are “strikingly similar to the laws of plant life.”63 It is worth performing a close reading of Grigorev’s vegetative poetry to clarify its relation to Herder’s organic analogy. Grigorev gives the example of the folk song, which “lives like a plant, precisely like a plant that germinates in favorable soil.”64 The folk song has no single identifiable origin in time or space and no known author; it spontaneously grows and takes root, unfolding organically, without any design or intention imposed upon it from the outside. These spontaneous manifestations of the Volksgeist spring up and grow like plants, but they also wither and become—in a further botanical analogy—the fertile soil on which succeeding national plants grow: “A song is not only a plant—it is the very soil on which layer after layer has settled; by removing the layers and comparing variations you can sometimes get down to the first layer.”65 Through the succession of individual specimens (variants of the song or plant) from generation to generation and across space, the song in abstract, like the plant as a species, evolves as an organic type. While each of these organic phenomena carries its own blueprint for development, the plan is mysterious, internal, and irreducible, and the organism must be studied as an integral object that is more than the sum of its parts. Just as the higher-order categories of a botanical species or genus are an abstraction built from empirical observations of individual specimens, so too is the song a speculative object that only takes form in individual instantiations—in specific performance events and in multiple variations that, nonetheless, are recognizable to the listener as a single song. Observing the characteristics of an “organic” phenomenon like the folk song is a method for Grigorev, as for Herder, by which general laws may be discerned. One senses in Grigorev the urgency to document and understand folk phenomena before they are irretrievably lost or hybridized by “foreign” contact. He writes that “nothing can hide the sad truth that close to capitals, in big cities, along major trade routes, the best or more poetic songs are disappearing more and more, replaced by bad factory romances, desecrating with their meaningless interpolations.”66 Once original, uncontaminated cultural forms go extinct, lost is the opportunity to study the unique principles of organic form that they embody. As a close reading of Grigorev’s ideas on vegetative poetry and the folk song demonstrates, “organic criticism” relies on the Herderian framework of the organic nation for its main support. Herder’s theory of the particularity of national culture—including art, literature, and even science—suggested

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to Grigorev, as a theorist of pochvennichestvo, a national style of criticism and, implicitly, of art. According to the principles of the Herderian organic nation, every work of art must be judged as an organic expression of the nation. It is this axiom that accounts for the interest in types in Russian literature as the purest expression of the Volksgeist. This discourse of the organic nation and the rhetorical inflation of pochva drew critical fire from some contemporaries of the pochvenniki. The journalist Maksim Antonovich charges them with mystifying the concept of pochva: “Suddenly a new phrase appears: ‘soil’ [pochva], even more indefinite and therefore, more convenient, than ‘nationality’ [narodnost’].”67 In a heated response in Time, Nikolai Strakhov took issue with his opponent’s contention that the rhetoric of the “soil” was vacant. Strakhov writes: Let’s start at the beginning. Mr. Antonovich writes about soil. The first proposition, which he tries carefully and at length to convince his readers of, is that all the talk of soil is empty phrases. This is his starting point. Some journals, he says, incessantly repeat it in different ways: soil, soil, soil. . . . Hearing this, Mr. Antonovich wittily decided to respond by repeating another word: phrases, phrases, phrases, phrases. . . .“We held in our hands,” writes Mr. Antonovich, “a printed page, on which nothing remained, not one thought or word, after we struck out phrases about soil.” . . . Why talk about phrases? We need to talk about action.68 Antonovich was a “man of the sixties,” a literary critic and translator of works of natural science, who assumed editorship of literature for the journal Sovremennik after Dobroliubov’s death in 1861. Like many of his generation who were oriented to philosophical materialism, Antonovich had studied the physical sciences (in his case, geology), and perhaps he felt he had a special mandate to rescue pochva from symbolic dematerialization. Nikolai Strakhov was, however, no mystic: he did advanced graduate work in biology (writing a thesis on comparative anatomy) and taught natural history at a Petersburg gymnasium.69 Russian intellectuals with both conservative and progressive politics were occupied with the study of biology, agricultural chemistry, and practical agronomy at the same time that they were engaged in the discursive construction of native soil in the public sphere.70 What is crucial here is the evolution of the Romantic materialism of Herder into an increasingly diversified field of natural science beginning in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Herder attempted a materialist explanation of the origin of nations, but it would become increasingly outdated as the natural and social sciences disaggregated, as discussed in the next chapter.

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In response to the pochvenniki, Antonovich deconstructs their central sign. For all that he is an avowed materialist, Antonovich also turns out to be a witty discourse analyst. In this response to the pochvenniki, Antonovich exhausts the journalistic declensions of “soil,” referring to the six grammatical cases in the Russian language: It so happens that for a critical article of one and a half broadsheets you just need to sit yourself down quietly and without any great mental strain or invention, just decline soil into all of its cases and your article is done. It’s like this. The nominative: the soil is unknown to us, a Sphinx, a riddle, terra incognita, and so on—that’s about two pages. The genitive: we do not know the soil, do not understand it, do not love it, are disconnected from it, etc.—that’s a total of three pages. The dative: we owe everything to the soil—our being, our spirit, our life, and therefore soil deserves our sympathy, empathy, passion, etc.— that’s a total of four pages. The accusative: we must not fertilize and remake the soil, but fertilize ourselves through a return to the soil, the penetration into it, and so on—that’s a total of five pages. The vocative: O soil, who has penetrated and understood you?—only Pushkin, and us too, but not any of those theorists who . . . etc.—there you have a total of six pages. The instrumental: the soil should never be neglected, even if nothing grows on it but thorn-apple and henbane, etc.—a total of four pages. The prepositional: soil can be endlessly written about, because we can always continue into the next book. That altogether totals twenty-four pages, exactly one and a half broadsheets, and all this without the slightest difficulty; well, that’s it!71 We can see political and material phenomena transforming into pure discourse before our very eyes. Antonovich’s absurd grammar of “pochva” attempts to neutralize the symbolic nationalist discourse of soil that had been developing in Russia since the beginning of the nineteenth century but, in the end, merely generates more discourse. The battle waged by materialists like Antonovich to demystify soil in the discourse of the organic nation is the topic of the next chapter. Grigorev built a literary-critical apparatus from the Herderian concept of the organic nation, but perhaps the fullest expression of Herder’s influence on Russian nationalism emerged in the work of Nikolai Danilevskii, a theorist of pan-Slavism in whom there has been a resurgence of interest in postsocialist Russia. Danilevskii collaborated with Nikolai Strakhov on Dawn (Zaria), the last journal to emerge from the ground of pochvennichestvo.

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Both Danilevskii and Strakhov were trained in the natural sciences and both wrote anti-Darwinian works.72 Danilevskii drew on his direct knowledge of botany in formulating a theory of “cultural-historical types” in his signal work Russia and Europe (Rossiia i Evropa), published serially in Dawn. The influence of French naturalist Georges Cuvier on Danilevskii has been well documented, but his botanical model also draws on the German discourse of the organic nation.73 Danilevskii’s national organisms (narodnye organizmy) were relatively stable, just as Herder’s nations were fixed. Danilevskii identifies five laws of these cultural-historical types. Each type: 1) is defined by a common language, 2) is politically independent, 3) possesses its own “principles of civilization” that cannot be transferred, 4) has diverse “ethnographic” constituents (depending on “environmental” conditions), and finally, 5) reaches a peak of cultural development before perishing.74 To further schematize Danilevskii’s “laws,” we could say that they define and set classification boundaries for each national type (laws 1 and 2), describe the relationship between national types (law 3) and between the whole nations and its parts (law 4), and finally, describe the life cycle of each national type (law 5). Several of Danilevskii’s laws clearly respond to either immediate or inherited intellectual and political concerns. For example, his emphasis on language as a key feature defining the nation was in step with developments in the emerging field of comparative philology, which grew out of the work of Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Danilevskii’s insistence on the political independence of each type, and the relative independence of the diverse nations loosely affiliated within a civilizational type appears to be a reworking of Herder’s preoccupation with the unification of Prussia and its effect on the autonomy of its constituent “nations.” Yet Danilevskii’s laws are primarily derived from abstractions based on botanical principles and empirical observations of nature. From such organic laws a distinctive political vision emerges. If a cultural-historical type is united by a common language, then Russians must speak Russian, learn its history, and develop it as a literary language (literature, as Belinskii had argued, was the highest expression of the Volksgeist). If each type is defined by political independence, then Russia “cannot be a member of the European political system,” nor can it adopt modes of European governance that are alien to its own civilization, according to the third law (if we accept the proposition that hybrids are “sterile”).75 Russia’s breadth and diverse physical and cultural environment suggest that it is a rich civilization, with many diverse “ethnographic” constituents in a loose affiliation.76

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The rise and fall of civilizational units is also correlated with a very specific botanical life cycle. Danilevskii explains in his fifth law that “the course of development for cultural-historical types closely resembles that of perennial plants that bear fruit only once, whose period of growth is indefinitely long, but whose period of flowering and bearing fruit is relatively short and exhausts its vitality once and for all.”77 As Stephen M. Woodburn notes, Danilevskii is referring specifically to monocarpal plants, which die after bearing fruit.78 As a rise-and-fall narrative, we might discern the general influence of Hegel’s philosophy of history (in which nations bear the spirit of civilization for an epoch, then degenerate), but the specific articulation of Danilevskii’s “law” more closely evokes Herder, who also explicitly cites monocarpal plants (the American aloe and the fan palm) as organisms that—like human civilizations—blossom, produce fruit, and then immediately die. Herder writes that “so long as the young plant produces no flower, it can resist the winter’s cold: but that which bears too soon, soonest decays. The American aloe frequently lives a hundred years: but when once it has blossomed, no process, no art can prevent the superb stalk from decaying the next year. In five and thirty years the great fan palm grows to the height of seventy feet; it then grows thirty feet higher in the space of four months; when it blossoms, produces fruit, and the same year it dies. This is the course of nature, in the evolution of beings one out of another.”79 Herder concludes that “in the dissemination and degeneration of plants there is a similitude observable that will apply to beings of a superior order, and prepares us for the views and laws of Nature.”80 Danilevskii’s own vision of the nation as a monocarpal plant was a source of optimism, as it had been for many of his predecessors including Karamzin: while other nations had already flowered and borne fruit, and were now declining into senescence, Russia was just on the verge of blossoming. Perhaps the most interesting feature of Danilevskii’s elaboration of his system of types is his discussion of cultural influence. His third law addresses the kinds of contact that are possible between civilizational types; he offers three possible models, each correlated with a botanical phenomenon: transplantation (or colonization), grafting (or parasitization), and fertilization.81 Danilevskii observes that the “simplest means of dissemination is transplantation from one place to another by means of colonization.”82 Whereas Herder concluded that colonialism is usually a harmful transplantation of organisms from their original natural environment to another, Danilevskii endorses colonization, even by violent measures, if it means that a “universal” civilization may thrive. He compares this process to clearing “weeds” for the sake of agriculture.83 At the moment that Danilevskii articulated this

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biological justification of colonization, Russia was expanding its empire into Central Asia—a policy that his fellow pochvennik Dostoevsky also endorsed. The discourse of cultural transplantation, as discussed earlier, often thickened around the subject of Petrine reforms, and Danilevskii, like his predecessors, offers his own take on Peter as the gardener of the state. Echoing Karamzin, Danilevskii writes of Peter: “Seeing the fruits borne by the European tree, he concluded the plant itself was superior to the still fruitless, wild Russian variety.”84 Too impatient and too passionately enamored of Europe, Peter did not see that the “wild tree’s fruitful time had not yet come.”85 Here Danilevskii clarifies the difference between influence and transplantation. Peter undertook change on two distinct fronts. The first was innovations in “state activity,” borrowing technologies and administrative techniques, and this was the positive side of Peter’s activity. The second, negative, side was his reform of “lifestyle, manner, customs, and ideas.”86 Acts of transplantation, according to Danilevskii, can be judged by whether they “proceed from the internal needs of the people” and therefore take root on Russian soil, or “wither” like sickly plants.87 In this defense of Peter’s gardening skills, one feels the limits of Danilevskii’s hermeneutic. Like Herder, Belinskii, and his fellow pochvenniki, Danilevskii goes to great lengths to reconcile a model of organic national development with the Europeanizing influence of Peter the Great. Danilevskii’s second model of cultural contact is grafting. In horticulture, grafting entails joining the tissue from one cultivar (the scion) to a rootstock that supplies it with water and nutrients. In an echo of Antonovich’s objection to the discourse of pochva, Danilevskii complains that the term “grafting” is used in the cultural domain in a “mysterious, mystical sense by people unacquainted with physiological theory or practical gardening.”88 Clearly Danilevskii takes seriously the botanical analogy, not as a system of metaphor or a way of speaking about culture whose substance lies elsewhere, but as a hermeneutic model. The very substance of Danilevskii’s civilizational system is the organic law that he obtains from biological givens. Danilevskii observes that this “mystical” understanding of grafting (imputed to his opponents) is “neither true among plants nor among cultural-historical types.”89 He describes the relationship between the scion and the rootstock in a tone of horror, as a parasitization, in which each retains its own character. The graft draws “from its host plant only the sap it needs for growth and development and converts it according to its specific traits. The wild rootstock becomes the means or servile instrument for the cultivated cutting or scion, like an artificial parasitic growth for whose benefit all the branches from the top to the base are cut off so they will not crowd it out. This is the

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true meaning of grafting.”90 The graft, from this perspective, is a parasite that sucks the vital juices from a rootstock that, once mutilated by the gardener, will never have the opportunity to produce its own flowers and fruit. Danilevskii notes that such grafting shows that the gardener appraises the rootstock to have no value in itself and no potential for further development. Grafting is used to produce consistent results and uniform fruits and to limit the operations of chance; Danilevskii calls this a “useless repetition of the old” that hampers free organic development.91 He further expands on the idea of the parasitic organism, although it is somewhat ambiguous whether he means Russia or Europe: Is it possible for an organism, which for so long has been nourished by its own juices extracted by its own roots out of its own soil, to latch on with its suckers to another organism, leaving its own roots to dry out and make itself a parasite instead of an independent plant? If the soil is exhausted, that is, if it is missing any components required for full growth, it should be fertilized, to deliver these missing particles, to loosen through deep plowing those already in it so that they are better and more easily absorbed, rather than to parasitize, leaving its own roots to dry out.92 Danilevskii refers to plant suckers, or haustoria, that tap into the roots of other plants to extract nourishment. In the Slavophile discourse of rootlessness, Russian identity is generally represented as an “ungrounded” or “rootless” plant. However, if this passage is consistent with Danilevskii’s arguments elsewhere, then he is making a very different point indeed. It is not Russia that is rootless but rather Europe. European soil—the cultural matrix that nourishes its civilization—is exhausted. The very fact that the degenerating organism sends out suckers shows that Russia’s soil, on the other hand, is rich and vital—indeed, Danilevskii refers to Russia as a “virgin” land.93 Further drawing out the analogy, Danilevskii recommends fertilization and deep plowing, most likely meaning a revival of native folk culture. Fertilization is the only unambiguously positive form of cultural contact that Danilevskii discusses. Nations, like plants, fertilize the ground in which they live and die, enriching it: “Among them [nations] we must distinguish the isolated types from the sequential types, the fruit of whose activity passed from one to another as fodder or fertilizer (that is, enrichment by various absorbable, nourishing substances).”94 Danilevskii remarks that those nations that do not rise to become cultural-historical types are (in his private idiom) “ethnographic” material for subsequent nations. They decompose, and their remains fertilize the ground on which yet greater civilizations arise.95 Among

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the ten civilizational types that Danilevskii identifies, he notes that six were successive rather than isolated, meaning that they successfully “fertilized” the ground for later civilizations: “Egypt and Phoenicia acted upon Greece, Greece upon Rome . . . and both Greece and Rome on Germanic-Roman Europe.”96 Danilevskii calls this “free interaction” among civilizational types, although it proceeds from the death of the donor culture. “Only in this way should the peoples of a certain cultural type become acquainted with the products of foreign experience,” he writes.97

The Organic Nation under Threat By tracing the analogy of plant and nation over the course of the nineteenth century, it is possible to see how Russian national soil came to be seen as threatened—symbolically and materially—by alien forces. Just as Danilevskii regarded cultural influence as parasitization, his fellow pochvennik Dostoevsky also expressed fears of the organic nation under threat from hostile organisms invading Russia’s native soil. In his later work environmental threats were racialized and figured as invasions from ethnic outsiders. In this sense Dostoevsky’s national chauvinism and anti-Semitism are organically and fundamentally linked to the fetishization of native soil. Dostoevsky’s pochvennichestvo resembles other nationalist ideologies in which rootedness in the organic nation is the sine qua non of national belonging. Placing Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism in the context of organic nationalism shows how entwined the symbolic and material significations of pochva are in pochvennichestvo. In his Writer’s Diary ( July–August 1876), Dostoevsky writes about ethnic threats to Russian territory and the related ruin of its fertile soil. Writing on the cusp of the Russo-Turkish war, Dostoevsky asserts that Russian colonists should replace the Tatars in the Crimea, because of the latter’s “inability to work the soil properly.”98 Dostoevsky quotes a Ryleev poem to illustrate the Crimea’s former splendor: “Where bounteous meadows, fertile soil / Demand but trifling, easy toil, / Reward the plowman and restore, / His seed a hundred-fold or more.”99 But Dostoevsky fears that this national wealth is being squandered: he cautions that if Russians do not occupy this space and properly take root, then “Yids will certainly fall upon the Crimea and ruin the soil of the region.”100 Elsewhere Dostoevsky elaborates further on the perceived Jewish threat to the actual material soil that anchors the organic Russian nation: “Now the Yids are becoming landowners, and people shout and write everywhere that they are destroying the soil of Russia.” He rails against the capitalist “exhaustion” of both the soil and the Russian peasant: “A Yid, they say, having spent capital to buy an estate, at once exhausts

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all the fertility of the land he has just purchased in order to restore his capital with interest.”101 Jewish acquisition of farmland stands in for the capitalist rape of Russia’s fertile soil and the rooting out of the organic nation from its native soil. Dostoevsky writes that Jewish landowners “sucked the juices” (vysosali soki) from the peasants, using a botanical figure, rather than the more conventional topos of Jewish “blood-sucking” (vysosali krov’). His lexical choice echoes Danilevskii’s plant analogies, specifically the description of how an organism that is no longer nourished by its own “juices” (soki) parasitizes another by “latching on with its suckers” (prisosalsia sosal’tsami).102 Dostoevsky’s native soil conservatism excludes not only Jews, but other unrooted or nomadic peoples of the Russian Empire, like the Crimean Tatars referred to above. In The Adolescent (1875), one character associates deforestation and the ruin of the soil with the incursion of nomads: “They are depleting the soil, turning it into the steppe and preparing it for the Kalmyks.”103 As David Moon has shown, deforestation in Russia in the nineteenth century was already understood to be a factor in climate change.104 In this case, Dostoevsky suggests that deforestation will transform Russia into a barren steppe and Russians into rootless nomads. In the work of the philosopher Vladimir Solovev, climate change also became a discursive site in which old fears of nomadic invasions from the East were revived. Drawing on studies from agronomy and soil science, Solovev attributes climate change and drought to several factors: first, the external threat from the sukhovei (a hot wind originating in Central Asia); second, the internal threats of deforestation and “predatory agriculture,” which disturb virgin soil and vegetation. He describes the “slow desiccation of our soil, including chernozem [black earth]” and explains that “due to poor care, inadequate nourishment, excessive labor straining and exhausting its powers, the organism, no matter how well built, no matter with what high natural abilities it is gifted, is no longer able to function properly.”105 It is difficult to discern which “organism” Solovev has in mind; he appears to be no longer talking about soil, but about the Russian nation (narod) as the organic product of the soil. Indeed, Solovev asserts that desertification is not only caused by nature, it is also caused by social imbalances. He lists three issues that must be addressed to avert the threat to the native soil of Russia: raising the cultural level of the masses, channeling aid from the urban elites to people of the countryside, and addressing the “increasing desiccation of the Russian soil and the impossibility of leaving agriculture in its present form.”106 Solovev sees an imbalance in Russian society within the mirror of nature, and he proposes that desertification, the “enemy from the east,” can only be countered by a reconciliation between society and the narod;

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between city and country. Asia, both as an external force and as a figure for Russia’s own backwardness, is the enemy that Solovev seems to have identified, and only the general lifting of “the intellectual and cultural level of the masses” might neutralize the social factors leading to the desiccation of Russian soil.107 Soil science provided new ideas and ground for national mythmaking. Dostoevsky and Solovev were not wrong to warn of the degradation of Russian soil, although their translation of soil science into the cultural domain became the stuff of xenophobic myth. The scientific authority that Solovev drew on in his discussion of the degradation of the national soil was Vasilii Dokuchaev, one of the most important figures in soil science. His first major work on Russian soil, Russian Chernozem (Russkii chernozem, 1883), imported the peasant term for the Russian Empire’s rich, black soil into the domain of science as a natural object of national pride and universal scientific interest.108 In Russian Chernozem, Dokuchaev proposed that soil was not merely an inorganic mass of rock and mineral deposits but a unique organic body formed under particular climatic, topographical, and biological influences.109 Dokuchaev stressed the exceptionalism of Russian soil, asserting that many other countries “could last millions of years, but never, under the present climatic conditions, see the bountiful soil that is the native and incomparable wealth of Russia, and which is, I repeat again, the result of a surprisingly fortunate and terribly complicated complex of physical conditions!”110 Dokuchaev further notes that because of the unique properties of Russian soil, “we should be ashamed of having applied German agronomy in Russia to true Russian chernozem, without taking account of conditions of climate, vegetation, and soil conditions.”111 Dokuchaev’s emphasis on the particularity of Russian soil echoed the ongoing discourse of the Herderian organic nation growing out of its distinctive native soil. Dokuchaev validated the idea that Russian soil was special and further that only a distinctly Russian approach to soil science could capture its complexity; soil science became a privileged site of national science (otechestvennaia nauka).112 Accordingly, the national character of Dokuchaev’s work had a folkloric dimension, drawing on vernacular soil terminology and local folk knowledge of soil conditions.113 As he studied local soils, Dokuchaev spoke with peasants across Russia, sharing their stories and quoting them in his work. In Russian Chernozem, after describing the sinkholes along the P’iana River, for example, Dokuchaev relates a story passed on by local peasants: “Not infrequently the local population witnesses the formation of sinkholes. . . . About ten years ago, a house was ‘swallowed up’ in the village of Vorontsovo, about three versts east of Edelevo. The local inhabitants point out sinkholes that

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were formed ‘last summer’ or ‘the summer before last.’ This phenomenon is familiar to the local peasants, who say that all their land along the entire P’iana bank is of this kind.”114 Although Dokuchaev’s subject was natural science, his work entailed the gathering of oral history, local mythologies, and ethnographic data about the ways that people worked and managed the soil of their own regions. It was in this way that Dokuchaev came to document the national “soil crisis” referred to by Solovev. In 1891 the Volga and central regions of Russia experienced one of the most serious droughts in recorded history, and by the summer the extent of the catastrophe was becoming clear as crops withered in the heat; 12.5 million people were in need of food aid by December, and the number would grow steadily over the following year.115 The Russian government was widely blamed for inadequately responding to the crisis, and public frustration was projected into the discursive sphere, where everyone from scientists to mystics proposed solutions for preventing future drought and famine. A charity volume for the victims of the famine was produced, including literary works and essays by such figures as Solovev, Lev Tolstoi, and the climatologist Aleksandr Voeikov.116 At every level of society, there was a new urgency to the ongoing discussion of climate change and soil management; the extensive social and political debates around pochva of the earlier decades were supplanted by debates about human effects on the environment, the fitness of steppe soil for cultivation, and the potential for reversing or mitigating erosion of soil, climate change, and drought. Dokuchaev was among the first scientists to publish a serious response to the crisis, Our Steppes, Past and Present (Nashi stepi prezhde i teper’, 1892), in which he proposed “improvements” to the steppes of southern Russia. Dokuchaev had apparently been considering the problem of steppe erosion even before the drought; visiting Gogol’s Dikanka estate in 1888, he lamented the destruction of the virgin steppe described in the novella “Taras Bulba.”117 Even for Dokuchaev, soil represented both a natural resource and a cultural patrimony that was under threat. This chapter has charted how, over the course of the nineteenth century, a distinctive Russian discourse of native soil, or pochva, developed. Its origin was the German organicist tradition, particularly the Herderian concept of the organic nation. Herder’s analogic method of deriving universal laws of human historical and national development from the natural sciences, frequently from botany, produced both metaphors and methods that were used by Russian intellectuals to address critical questions about the nation. Intellectual movements like pochvennichestvo drew on the resources of organic nationalism in formulating an approach to Russia’s history and its immediate

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sociopolitical problems. While pochvennichestvo has been largely treated as a symbolic discourse of nationality, Dostoevsky’s descriptions of the Tatar and Jewish threats to the soil show that such symbolic discourses have both material counterparts and political implications. In folk and agrarian ideologies, rootedness is the defining feature of national belonging: as Dostoevsky’s pochvennichestvo, Danilevskii’s Pan-Slavism, and other nineteenth-century Russian nationalist discourses came out of the Herderian discourse of the organic nation, so, too did German Volkisch movements and, later, the Nazi ideology of Blut und Boden.118 Although Herder himself rejected national chauvinism and celebrated the distinctive virtues of each nation, his vision of the primordial nation rooted in native soil was put to a variety of political purposes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.119 The discourse of the organic Herderian nation in the writings of the Slavophiles, the pochvenniki, and others would be questioned by political radicals and philosophical materialists like Nikolai Dobroliubov, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Dmitrii Pisarev. In the writings of these “men of the sixties,” soil also became a central symbol—not of national character, but of a materialist worldview. The contest between these mystical, national, and material discourses of soil is a subject of the next chapter.

Ch a p ter 2

Matter Models of Soil and Society

When the journalist Maksim Antonovich critiqued the symbolic use of soil by the pochvenniki, he did so with a conscious political agenda. For materialists and social radicals like Antonovich, the mystifications of native soil threatened to obscure the urgent significance of real soil for the fate of the Russian people: Russian soil required not sublime contemplation but cultivation and improvements, informed by scientific research. This chapter considers the process by which advocacy of practical soil science and agronomy, against the emptiness of pochva, became an established position in the Russian cultural field of the late nineteenth century, with far-reaching consequences for Russian and Soviet attitudes toward agriculture and soil management as social questions. This story is told through an illustrative case study of the cultural reception of the ideas of German chemist Justus Liebig (1803–1873). As the founder of one of the most important chemical research centers in Europe, the Giessen Chemical Institute, Liebig would become a pioneer of modern organic chemistry and one of the most significant promoters of science in the public interest in nineteenth-century Europe. Liebig revolutionized agriculture with his assertion that plant life relies on minerals for nutrition, laying the foundation for the development of artificial fertilizers and the later Green Revolution. Liebig’s 1873 obituary in the English journal The Chemical News summed up the chemist’s renown among the general 34

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public: “The application of chemistry to agriculture, and to many of the wants of daily life, received so powerful an impulse from Liebig, that the popular mind has taken him for the representative of the science in its application to practical purposes.”1 Liebig’s ideas on soil fertility were at least as powerful an influence on the Russian “popular mind” as on the English or European mind, and arguably more so, in view of the pervasiveness of the “soil question” in nineteenthcentury Russian political and intellectual history.2 When Liebig’s ideas began to filter into Russia, they met with a charged political and cultural environment. Beginning in the 1840s and intensifying in the 1860s, Liebig’s work was widely discussed in Russia’s press and literature, among gentlemen farmers and amateur scientists, by novelists such as Dostoevsky and Ivan Turgenev, and among Marxist and other social revolutionaries. Liebig’s ideas became a site of contest between the Romantic, antireductionist trend in science and the radical, positivist-materialist trend that would follow, and between the social and political postures associated with those two tendencies. Liebig’s name became a rallying cry for groups with different political agendas and a symbolic object of contention between intellectual generations. Above all, Russian discussions of Liebig and his materialist soil chemistry refracted questions about Russian society and how Russia’s distinctive national spirit arose from its native soil. In addition to tracing Liebig’s direct impact on Russian discourses of agriculture, history, and society, this chapter will consider how creative reworkings of Liebig’s ideas by such figures as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Aleksandr Engelgardt had a far-reaching impact on Russian and, later, Soviet attitudes toward soil and society. The transfer of Liebig’s ideas across epistemic domains—from soil science to social science—framed discourses of soil, social formations, and agricultural policy for a century to come. This study of the reception of Liebig in Russia traces a genealogy of the Soviet political concept of the smychka (the unification of the city and countryside) from Liebigian soil economy to Soviet political ecology. The study also examines how models and metaphors travel across the scientific, social, and cultural domains, and how Liebigian agricultural chemistry became a cipher for materialist philosophy and radical politics in an era of political repression.

Liebig’s Mineral Economy Before discussing the Russian cultural reception of Liebig’s ideas, it is necessary to provide some background on Liebig and his ideas. Liebig’s renown, like that of many great popularizers of science, was far greater in his own

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time than today. At his peak of productivity from the 1840s to the early 1870s, his name was constantly before the European public in the ephemera of the age; these encompassed an extensive body of journalistic writing including his popular Letters on Modern Agriculture, public and professional polemics around his work, product testimonials, and his own commercial ventures (of varying success) involving everything from chemical fertilizer to meat extract. Liebig’s books on plant and animal chemistry, moreover, were popular among lay audiences and were translated into a number of European languages by his numerous students. Even if Liebig’s works have been called too technical for the lay reader—Karl Marx complained of having to “wade” through them—it did not prevent a broad public from attempting them.3 In a widely circulated anecdote it was said that the passport official who examined Liebig’s documents on his arrival in London in 1842 shook his hand and affably chatted with him about his first major work, Agricultural Chemistry.4 In addition to his direct outreach to the public, Liebig was enormously important in building the institutions that supported the development of chemistry as the editor of a major journal of the day, through his professional relationships with chemists across Europe, and in his long teaching career, which produced several generations of students who would go on to form the core of Europe’s great body of chemists and industrialists.5 Liebig’s mineral theory of plant nutrition supplanted the prevailing “humus theory” of his German predecessor, A. D. Thaer, which asserted that humus, the “living” component of soil, nourished plants, while minerals, the “non-living” component of soil, were not necessary to plant nutrition.6 Liebig argued that, in fact, all life has a chemical basis and that “non-living” substances like minerals interpenetrate soil, plant, animal, and human organisms. Liebig writes that minerals from the soil “assume the form of corn, flesh, and bones; they pass into the bodies of men, and again assume the same form which they originally possessed.”7 As Liebig notes, this mineral economy depends on the recycling of minerals back into the soil as fertilizer, a process that, he argued, was not only technologically but also economically and socially mediated. Liebig’s original German term for this process of exchange across the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms was Stoffwechsel (metabolism), translated into Russian as obmen veshchestv, literally “the exchange of substances.”8 Liebig narrativizes the movement of minerals and imagines the exchanges among plant, animal, and human life through the medium of soil as chemical equations that must be balanced. As Liebig suggests in his Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology (1840), the relationship between human bodies and human agriculture is essentially one of chemical affinities. Plants resemble humans

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insofar as they contain the substances of our flesh and blood: sulphur, phosphorus, nitrogen, alkalis, phosphates, etc.9 The formation of these constituents of our blood—for human blood has a “vegetable composition” in Liebig’s words—is the main purpose of agriculture. It is an extension of Liebig’s reasoning that the forest environment does not correspond to human physiology in the way the cultivated field does: “Agriculture differs essentially from the cultivation of forests, inasmuch as its principal object consists in the production of the constituents of the blood; whilst the object of forest culture is confined principally to the production of carbon.”10 Forest landscapes will never “resemble” humankind as the cultivated landscape does (here one wonders whether Liebig was thinking of Romantic poetry’s pathetic fallacy). Agriculture, as an extension of human culture, deeply reflects human needs and values and is a site of transcorporeal exchanges with nature. Liebig was a transitional figure between German romantic Naturphilosophie, exemplified by the works of Goethe and Friedrich Schelling, and the new philosophical materialism. After attending lectures by Schelling in his student days, Liebig wrote that “Schelling possessed no thorough knowledge in the province of the natural sciences, and the dressing up of natural phenomena with analogies and images which was called exposition did not suit me.”11 In his later works, Liebig would call this Romantic tendency in science “a dead tree, which bore the finest leaves and the most beautiful flowers, but no fruit. With an infinite sagacity, only pictures were created.”12 But Liebig’s vision of organic exchange owed something to Romanticism’s ecstatic vision of unity under the surface of shifting forms. While Liebig offered materialist explanations of nature, the poetics of his scientific vision are Romantic. Although his work opened the way for a nonvitalist explanation of human and plant life, it also lent itself to Romantic interpretations of nature. Blood and soil are the same substance in different forms, an echo of the Herderian discourse of the organic nation that would later inform German discourses of Blut und Boden, and Russian discourses of narod and pochva. Not only was biblical Adam formed from soil—so, too, was modern, biochemical man. Thus, despite his rejection of Naturphilosophie and his endorsement of rigorous experimentation, empirical data, and the practical application of scientific knowledge, Liebig himself would come under fire for antireductionism and excessive “literariness.” Liebig’s mentor and erstwhile friend, the chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, ironically made a similar insinuation about the literary nature of Liebig’s own work, writing of the latter’s Agricultural Chemistry, “This kind of facile physiological chemistry is created at the writing table.”13 A younger generation of positivist materialists in Europe took

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up Berzelius’s critique of Liebig, but in Russia the chemist was venerated in materialist thought and discourse for several decades to come.

Liebig in Russian Intellectual History Liebig’s Giessen Chemical Institute has been called a “chemist breeder,” and indeed a significant number of Russia’s chemists and scientists in the midnineteenth century were mentored by Liebig or one of his disciples.14 By the 1860s Liebig’s Russian students had returned home to establish themselves as major figures in their fields and to propagate Liebig’s legacy and materialist vision of the world in both the scientific and cultural domains. This cohort formed the first generation of Russian chemists: Nikolai Nikolaevich Zinin (first chairman and cofounder of the Russian Chemical Society), Nikolai Nikolaevich Sokolov (who published the first Russian journal of chemistry, Khimicheskii zhurnal, from 1859–1860 together with the agronomist and journalist Aleksandr Nikolaevich Engelgardt), Aleksei Ivanovich Khodnev, Nikolai Erastovich Liaskovskii, Fedor Fedorovich Beilstein, and Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fadeev, among others. Liebig’s famed student Aleksandr Abramovich Voskresenskii, called the “grandfather” of Russian chemistry, trained the succeeding generation of Russian scientists—among them Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev, the physical chemist Nikolai Nikolaevich Beketov, and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Menshutkin (discoverer of the Menshutkin reaction).15 Beketov and Mendeleev, in turn, mentored the founder of modern soil science and soil classification, Vasilii Dokuchaev (who was nonetheless critical of Liebig’s limited chemical vision of soil). Aside from the transmission of influence through these direct lineages, Liebig shaped Russian chemistry on an institutional level, as the first Russian chemistry labs were modeled on the Giessen research center.16 Liebig’s students of chemistry also popularized his ideas by translating his works into Russian. The earliest translations, mostly excerpted in journals, were published in the 1840s and 1850s, but it was not until the 1860s that Liebig’s works exploded in Russia, a trend coinciding with the professionalization of his first generation of Russian students and the coming of age of a generation of radicals known as the “men of the sixties.”17 Between 1860 and 1863, at least nine full Russian translations of Liebig’s books were published, a sensation that Aleksandr Engelgardt remarked on in an editorial in Saint Petersburg News in 1863.18 The first full Russian translation of Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry was published in 1862 by Liebig’s student Pavel Antonovich Ilenkov (1821–1877), who would become professor of chemical engineering at St. Petersburg University.19 Brockhaus-Efron, the authoritative Russian

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encyclopedia of the prerevolutionary period, hailed Liebig’s work as a “blessing to mankind” because of the promise it held to increase crop yields and end hunger.20 As Liebig’s works became widely available in Russian, and with the memory of the 1833–1834 famine fresh in their minds, many Russians had high hopes that Liebig’s ideas could provide a solution to the multifaceted “soil question” in Russia. The reach of Liebig’s ideas in Russian society extended, then, through scientific institutions, print publications, professional relationships, and, finally, social-intellectual circles. The kruzhok, or intellectual circle, had become an important institution of intellectual life during the repressive reign of Nicholas I, and it served as a forum for the intermixing of politics, ideology, and science. Not only within kruzhki, but throughout all informal circuits of intelligentsia sociability, Liebig’s disciples brought their scientific interests, education, and expertise to the troubling questions of Russian society.21 There were many close social and family ties among scientists and artists during the mid- to late century. For instance, the chemist Nikolai Beketov and his brother, Andrei Nikolaevich Beketov (a celebrated botanist who wrote extensively on soil conditions) were close friends of Dostoevsky, who parodied Liebig as an empty cultural signifier.22 These social networks conditioned the movement and contestation of metaphors and images across cultural and scientific domains.

Liebig as a Russian Cultural Icon Materialism as a philosophy was nearly inseparable from radical politics in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, and Liebig, as an icon of materialism in Russia, also became an icon of radical politics. In Europe Liebig’s works emerged during a period of political revolution, but in Russia these works were received in an era of political repression. Michael Gordin notes that the “German states perceived the revolutions [of 1848] to be at their roots agricultural disturbances caused by instability in crop production.”23 Liebig himself argued that agricultural chemistry could help stabilize the social order by ensuring “greater crop stability across harvests.”24 While German states and scientists were promoting agricultural chemistry as a utopian cure for revolutionary unrest, Nicholas I was reacting to the events of 1848 with repressive measures, including curtailing foreign travel and study and eliminating philosophy from the university curriculum.25 Nearly all of Liebig’s most important Russian disciples had studied in Giessen before 1848, and they were a key force in importing to Russia not only Liebig’s ideas but materialist philosophy in general. Victoria Frede notes that

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Nicholas I’s censorship “delayed the arrival of the new materialism into Russia.”26 Throughout the repressive decades of the 1840s and 1850s, however, agricultural chemistry became a safe way of discussing new materialist ideas. Crucial to the strategic interests of the Russian state, Liebig’s works managed to escape the censor, yet they carried potentially subversive materialist ideas and placed soil in a broader social and political economy in which serfdom was an inescapable question. It was but a short step from Liebig’s mineral theory of nutrition to a materialist ontology of human life, and as the Dutch physiologist Jakob Moleschott would suggest, cognition as well (exemplified by the slogan “No thought without phosphorus”).27 Thus, it was precisely due to the political repression of mid-nineteenth-century Russia that Liebig’s works on agriculture became so symbolically charged: they offered a means of talking about new materialist philosophies and of critiquing the Russian sociopolitical order grounded in an unbalanced economy of soil. By the 1860s, while Liebig’s ideas were being critiqued in Western Europe as vitalist and “literary” by a younger generation of positivist materialists, many young Russians continued to hail Liebig as an icon of scientific materialism and a broader materialist philosophy, as well as of radical politics. If Liebig exposed a generational divide in Russia, that divide was exemplified by the polemic between the gentry belletrist Ivan Turgenev and the radical writer and critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Liebig appears in the works of these authors as a symbolic object of contention between two ideological camps and intellectual generations in mid-century Russia. In 1861 Turgenev had dissolved his relationship with the journal The Contemporary over ideological conflicts with Chernyshevsky and a younger, politically radical generation of contributors to the journal. This debate was playing out publicly just as Turgenev was finishing work on his novel Fathers and Sons (1862), and Turgenev’s portrait of the young nihilist student Evgenii Bazarov was regarded as an unflattering reflection of Chernyshevsky’s generation of posi­ tivist materialists. The novel has been widely read as a “concrete social picture” of the generational conflict between the men of the forties, liberals like Turgenev who favored gradual reform of Russia’s political institutions and a holistic vision of anthropos, and the succeeding generation of radicals, “men of the sixties” like Chernyshevsky.28 Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons is a compendium of the intellectual debates of the age, and Liebig appears in Turgenev’s story as an empty idol of the younger generation.29 In the novel the positivist materialists Bazarov and Nikolai Petrovich excitedly discuss a number of contemporary works of science and social theory, and a dilettante “lady chemist” named Kukshina refers to Liebig in order to legitimate her amateur enthusiasm for chemistry.

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At their first meeting, Bazarov and Kukshina turn their conversation from lunch to Liebig: [Bazarov]: “A piece of meat’s better than a piece of bread even from the chemical point of view.” [Kukshina]: “Are you are studying chemistry? That is my passion. I myself have even invented a new sort of glue.” [Bazarov]: “Invented glue? You?” [Kukshina]: “Yes. And do you know for what purpose? To make dolls’ heads so that they won’t break. I’m practical, too, you see. But it’s not quite ready. I’ve yet to read Liebig.”30 Kukshina applies Liebig’s chemical theories to the formulation of better glue for dolls’ heads. The name Kukshina evokes kuksha (a jaybird, or a slatternly woman), but also kukla, or doll. In his savage parody of the lady chemist, Turgenev declares Russia’s men and women of the sixties to be puppets uncomprehendingly replicating Western materialist discourse. Kukshina and her dolls also constitute a parody of the mechanist and materialist view of the human body—a doll held together not by vital spirit but by chemical glue. Chernyshevsky responded to Turgenev’s provocation in his work of the following year, What Is To Be Done? (1863), a major influence on the architects of the Russian revolution, including Lenin, who famously called it his favorite novel. In What Is To Be Done?, Liebig’s ideas concerning soil appear as the basis for an extended metaphor in the famous dream of the novel’s heroine, Vera Pavlovna. The evening before her dream, Vera’s dinner guests steer the conversation to “the current debate about the chemical basis of agriculture according to Liebig’s theory, the laws concerning historical progress— an unavoidable subject of conversation in such circles at that time.”31 Later that night, Vera Pavlovna’s dream logic fuses agricultural chemistry and human historical development into an extended metaphor of Russian soil and revolution. In the dream the young positivist materialists Lopukhov and Aleksei Petrovich contrast plants grown in “real” soil with those grown in “putrescent” soil. Real soil is composed of healthy elements (elementy) which form “complex chemical arrangements” through energy from the sun. The main element of this healthy soil is labor. Putrescent soil, on the other hand, is characterized by “stagnation.” This discussion of healthy and putrescent soil mobilizes a dialectic between pochva and griaz’ (dirt). Chernyshevsky marks griaz’ as Russia’s real soil, while the putrescent and fantastic soil of Vera Pavlovna’s dream is the symbolic pochva of Russia’s organic nationalist discourse: an emptied sign, filled with abstract cultural symbolism.32 Liebig’s

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writings on soil inspired Chernyshevsky’s metaphor of revolutionary social transformation, where minerals and labor circulate freely in a healthy economy of soil, a utopian vision in which labor cures the defects of the “stagnant” Russian national character and improves the quality of the mythologized Russian pochva.

Models of Soil and Social Economy Chernyshevsky’s vision of the imbrication of soil economies and social economies echoes Karl Marx’s extension of Liebig’s agricultural models into sociopolitical theory. While formulating Das Capital, Karl Marx was keenly interested in new developments in agricultural chemistry, a field that was already making important social and economic changes throughout Europe. Liebig in Germany and John Bennet Lawes in Scotland were developing fertilizers that could raise crop yields significantly and mitigate the effects of the declining fertility of Europe’s soil under the Raubsystem.33 In his letters to Engels, Marx wrote that “the new agricultural chemistry in Germany, especially Liebig and [Christian] Schönbein . . . are more important than all the economists put together.”34 As Joan Martinez Alier, John Bellamy Foster, and others have shown, Marx extended Liebig’s diagnosis of the source of soil depletion into a broader socioeconomic critique of the unhealthy relationship between city and country.35 In Liebig’s model of mineral exchange, the agricultural cycle depends on the return to the soil of all extracted minerals in the form of food waste, animal waste, and human waste (and even human remains). Liebig writes that “in the large towns of England, the produce both of English and foreign agriculture is largely consumed; elements of soil indispensable to plants do not return to the fields—contrivances resulting from the manners and customs of English people . . . render it difficult, perhaps impossible, to collect the enormous quantity of the phosphates which are daily, as solid and liquid excrements, carried into the rivers.”36 Liebig considered it a major problem for agriculture and society alike that minerals were not returned to the soil of the countryside, but were “wasted” in cities, poisoning water and spreading disease.37 These were conditions of both social and soil imbalance between the country and the city. Marx explains how Liebig’s agricultural metabolism is sealed into the larger interdependent processes of “social metabolism.” He writes that “large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social

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metabolism [Stoffwechsel], a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country. (Liebig.)”38 Marx assures his reader that “social metabolism” is prescribed by nature, as he transfers a “natural law” from soil science to social science. Marx interprets what Foster calls the “metabolic rift” as a broader form of economic exploitation of the country by the city.39 Friedrich Engels, in “The Housing Question” (1872), also appeals to Liebig as an authority in his articulation of the “rift” between town and country: “The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wageworkers. From day to day it is becoming more and more a practical demand of both industrial and agricultural production. No one has demanded this more energetically than Liebig in his writings on the chemistry of agriculture, in which his first demand has always been that man shall give back to the land what he takes from it, and in which he proves that only the existence of the towns, and in particular the big towns, prevents this.”40 In his discussion of the “antithesis” between town and country, Engels frames Liebig’s theory of soil metabolism in dialectical terms and suggests that Liebig’s work points to an effective means of synthesizing town and country into a single economy, founded on reciprocal material and mineral exchanges. The impact of Marx and Engels’s interpretation of Liebig on later Soviet agricultural and social policy is clear, but the concept of imbalance between city and country also evolved independently within the Russian intellectual tradition. In his Sketches from the History of Labor (1863), the radical critic Dmitrii Pisarev echoed Liebig’s critique of robbery of the soil: Only in one case does human intervention weaken the productive forces of nature; this occurs when a person takes out the raw products of the earth to distant markets, and thus permanently deprives the land of its known constituents and does not return any fertilizer in exchange. Such a course of action is possible only in places where there are few people, and where consequently there is no industrial activity. If there were a lot of people, enterprise would be necessary, factories would grow, the raw products would be recycled [pererabotyvat’sia] and assimilated on the site. The remains of processed products would provide rich fertilizer, and the soil rather than being depleted, would continually become more fertile.41 Pisarev implicitly argues against the law of diminishing returns; in his view the only condition under which agricultural labor reduces the fertility of

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soil instead of enhancing it is one characterized by unbalanced exchange between raw products of the country and processed products from the industrial center. Pisarev focuses on the need for the products of agriculture and industry to be consumed and then recycled (from waste to fertilizer) within a single location and community. The chief theorist of pochvennichestvo, Nikolai Danilevskii, too, comments on the “metabolic rift,” observing of Chinese agriculture that, “in the words of Liebig, this is the only rational agriculture, since it gives back to the soil what it takes from it as harvest, without resorting to importing fertilizer from outside sources, which doubtless must be considered agricultural exploitation.”42 Liebig’s model of the robbery of nutrients from the countryside also drew the interest of Aleksandr Engelgardt, a distinguished chemist, popular journalist, and active figure in the Russian Populist movement of the 1870s. Engelgardt had studied with Liebig’s disciple Nikolai Zinin before attaining the position of chemist and rector at the St. Petersburg Agricultural Institute.43 Engelgardt wrote that as a student he was “very attracted to Liebig’s scientific genius” and interested in Liebig’s observations about soil exhaustion.44 Engelgardt himself developed phosphate fertilizers and worked together with Pavel Ilenkov (Liebig’s student and translator) to develop a chemical process to dissolve bones for fertilizer using alkalizing compounds, a method (later called the Ilenkov-Engelgardt method) that Ilenkov discussed in detail with Liebig himself in their correspondence.45 Unsurprisingly, given the links between materialist philosophy and political radicalism, Engelgardt was arrested during his tenure at the Agricultural Institute and in 1881 went into internal exile on his estate near Smolensk, where he continued his agricultural experiments and wrote prolifically on agronomy, farm management, and soil improvement.46 Beginning in 1872 Engelgardt had published a regular column on agriculture in “Letters from the Country” in the popular journal Notes of the Fatherland. In one of his letters, Engelgardt applies Liebig’s theory of the “robbery of the soil” to the description of peasant and gentry estates in his own region: In our parts, both the landowners and the peasants fertilize their land with manure. The need for fertilizer has entered everyone’s consciousness, so that the landowner devotes all his attention to building up stores of manure. . . . But at the same time that the landowner, who is selling grain and cattle, renting out his meadows in part, and leasing land for flax and grain, depletes the soil due to the removal of soil particles [pochvennikh chastits] (most importantly—phosphate salts)

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through the grain, cattle, and hay, by contrast, the peasant by bringing in grain, straw, etc., improves and humifies his own land, bringing in soil particles from outside.47 Engelgardt describes the peasants’ practice of skimming hay, straw, flax, grain, and firewood from rented gentry land to enrich their own small plots. Peasants also consume the fruits of their own land and their “excrement remains on their own plot.”48 “Thus,” he writes, “the peasant brings soil particles as hay from other places, and the soil particles remain on his allotment, increasing the amount of nutrients in his land.”49 Large gentry farms continually lose minerals through the export of agricultural produce: The situation is completely different on the farms of landed gentry. There the soil is always exhausted, and farming further exhausts the land. Under serfdom, the landed gentry produced enormous quantities of grain, which they sold from their holdings and which carried off with them masses of valuable soil particles taken out of the earth, carried them across the sea to the Germans and the English, carried them off to the cities, from which these particles flowed down into the rivers.50 The peasant gleaners are in “metabolic competition” with landowners. Engelgardt’s description of local Russian agricultural conditions closely models Liebig’s description of the unbalanced social metabolism of soil, but with a distinctly Russian class character.

Colonial Theft of National Nutrients So far, I have discussed Liebig’s place in Russia as a matter of diffusion and reception. However, both Liebig’s works and their Russian adaptations must also be understood as products of the systemic transformation of the world economy and Russia’s place in it over the course of the nineteenth century. In this context, Russian intellectuals’ critique of soil mismanagement as an exploitative extraction of resources takes on an international dimension: as Engelgardt points out, the mineral wealth of the soil was expropriated not only from the countryside to the city, but from Russia to the West. Foster situates Liebig’s work in Europe’s so-called soil crisis of the early nineteenth century.51 Intensive agriculture had exhausted the soil of western Europe, particularly England, where the Industrial Revolution had led to an urban population boom and increased food demand. The value of England’s bone imports (for mineral enrichment of soil) increased in the fourteen years

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after 1823 from 14,400 to 254,600 pounds.52 The exhaustion of the soil in western Europe led to a decline in harvests by the 1840s, which in turn led to an international demand for Russian grain. In this way, Russian chernozem entered the world economy as the source of Russia’s comparative advantage in grain monoculture. Large-scale Russian grain exports began during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, but the watershed for Russia’s emergence as a major grain exporter was the repeal of the British Corn Laws in 1846–1849.53 Through a series of booms in the second half of the nineteenth century, Russian grain achieved dominance in British and west European markets and then entered into competition with emerging grain exporters such as the United States and Argentina. The early Soviet Marxist historian M. N. Pokrovskii even considered the export of grain to have been the pivotal factor in Russia’s entry into bourgeois capitalism, culminating in the Stolypin period’s booming grain profits and “conquest of Russia by foreign capital.”54 Russia’s semicolonial entry onto the world market as a raw material exporter, in combination with the new Liebigian anxieties that soil nutrients were leaving the country along with the wheat and rye, set in motion discussions about the effect of capitalist agriculture on the patrimony of national soil. Liebig set out a concrete basis for such concerns in his introduction to the 1862 edition of Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, where he noted that the battlefields of the Crimea were a source of bones used to enrich British soil.55 For Liebig this was just another instance of the theft of mineral resources from one country by another. After all, any trade goods could become fungible through Stoffwechsel: “The importation of urine or of solid excrements from a foreign land is quite equivalent to the importation of corn and cattle.”56 But the Herderian discourse of homeland as burial ground provided a different set of terms for understanding such nutrient extraction as sacrilege and cultural grave robbery. While Liebig’s critique of the robbery of nutrients is obvious in the case of the actual exportation of bones, Russian intellectuals, both conservative and radical, applied the same critique to the broader phenomenon of capitalist agricultural exports. The emergence of Russian soil science was directly related to the conversion of the soil of the Russian Empire into a global commodity. The growth of the grain market gave an impetus to understanding the distinctive characteristics of Russia’s regional soils, but it also transformed the nutrients in the soil into fungible assets, as it converted them first into grain, then foreign currency.57 It was the equation between export agriculture and theft of the national patrimony that provided the implicit basis for Dostoevsky’s tirade against Jewish capitalist ruination of Russian soil

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in the Crimea, discussed in the previous chapter. Non-Slavs, without roots in the soil, were not judged to be fit stewards of the land. Rather they were robbers extracting its nutrients to exchange for cash on the world market. Vladimir Odoevskii, in his late essay “It Is Not Enough” (1867), makes soil exhaustion a first principle of the rise and fall of nations: All the complicated reasons for relocations, wars, raids, robberies, and, in general, violent movements of peoples, as well as internal upheavals, come down to one basic and very prosaic one: the depletion of the soil, to the need to look for another, more fertile one—in a word, the need to saturate oneself. Liebig notes that if a person could only eat water and air, then there would be no violence, no disorder, no reason for lawlessness, no slavery or cultivation of one person by another— but a person depends on the soil.58 Odoevskii echoes Liebig’s (fundamentally Malthusian) assertion that hunger and desire for land are the source of all militarism. Nonetheless, he concludes on a hopeful note. Although Malthus correctly judged the drivers of human history, Odoevskii observes that “practical science has vindicated Providence against Malthus’s blasphemy”: that is, the bountiful harvests brought by Liebigian agriculture will bring an end to the Malthusian war of human against human and predation of nation upon nation.59

Dynamic Models: Metabolic Flows and Soviet Policy These discussions of soil and mineral economy had an impact decades later on both environmental and social policies. The unification of city and country (smychka goroda i derevni) became a crucial slogan of the 1920s, and it can ultimately be traced to Liebig’s system of soil metabolism—but not only by way of Marx and Engels.60 There is a distinctly Russian genealogy of the smychka and social metabolism that drew on the highly developed Russian discourse surrounding Liebig and Russian soil directly, as seen in the writings of Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, Engelgardt and many others. The early Bolsheviks, as heirs to this Russian materialist tradition, read Liebig within an interpretative framework established both by Marx and by their Russian radical predecessors. Lenin was a careful reader of Engelgardt, for example, although he rejected Engelgardt’s populist valorization of agriculture over industry.61 Lenin echoed Liebig’s prescription that mineral exchange between the city and the country should be balanced: in his 1919 document “On the Transportation of Fertilizers by Rail,” he declared that shipments of chemical fertilizers to the country should be precisely equivalent to shipments of

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grain to the city.62 Where Liebig had recommended managing the exchanges between city and country as one would balance a chemical equation, Lenin brought those exacting equations into the realm of social policy. Later, with the “strategic retreat” of NEP, Lenin seems even to have regarded the smychka as a way to come to terms with free trade—which he feared would lead to the “full restoration of capital”—by imagining the NEP economy as a system of moneyless exchange between city and country. As historian E. H. Carr notes, Lenin “seems at first to have envisaged the exchange of goods between town and country as a grandiose system of organized barter.”63 Thus, by ending the exploitative extraction of nutrients from the countryside to the city, he hoped to limit the damage done by Russia’s continued large-scale export of wheat under NEP—that is, the continuation of the semicolonial relationship of Russian agriculture with Western capital that he had critiqued in his prerevolutionary works. Within the Soviet Union the smychka could recuperate wasted nutrients domestically through mechanisms of state control that could not yet be applied to the global market.64 Lenin’s innovation in interpreting Liebigian social and soil metabolism, then, was the centralized control of these metabolic exchanges within a state apparatus, managed by the first generation of professional Russian scientists and technicians, who were themselves products of the nineteenth-century tradition of cultural and scientific materialism (and in many cases claimed direct professional descent from Liebig through a chain of apprenticeships). The smychka—grounded in a unified system of social and soil metabolism— would offer a model in the later Soviet period not only for the exchanges between city and country, but also between center and national republics within the Stalinist “all-union division of labor,” which coordinated the material flows of the Soviet economic regions.

Ch a p ter 3

Dirt Dirty Literature

Dirt was an important force in Russian realism. It may seem obvious that dirt should serve a mimetic function in representing the everyday realities of Russian rural life, yet as modern readers we must be reminded that its presence in Russian literature was contested from its first appearance. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Russian authors consciously introduced dirt into their literary works as a means of challenging existing aesthetic and generic codes that restricted the representation in the verbal arts of nature, the peasant, and the material conditions of rural life. Nikolai Gogol’s remarkable novel of provincial life, Dead Souls (1842), transformed the landscape of Russian literature with its unidealized representation of the countryside, no longer extolled as a pastoral paradise but critiqued as a morass of filth. Dead Souls was reviled by critics not only for its representation of material dirt (griaz’), but also for its “dirty jokes” (griaznye shutochki) and its exposure of the moral filth (griaz’) of the landowning class.1 The critics’ conflation of the mimetic, metaphorical, and metonymic uses of dirt in Gogol’s novel shows the many ways in which dirt “spoke” and served to expand the borders of literature and to endow it with new critical potential. Griaz’ became a keyword as important to the literary sphere as pochva was to discussions of Russian identity in the sphere of publitsistika. Indeed, the two terms exemplified rival interpretative frameworks for writing and reading Russian nature and nation. 49

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Anthropologist Mary Douglas defines dirt as “matter out of place.” In Russian literature of the early nineteenth century, dirt was indeed out of place: prevailing aesthetic codes and literary conventions discouraged the depiction of the low, base, and dirty, preserving art as a sphere of purity. Douglas argues that pollution taboos are translated from the material domain into such “symbolic systems of purity” that create boundaries between clean and unclean elements. Dirt is a disordered element that implies “a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt, there is system.” When dirt entered the Russian literary system, it signified disorder in the material, sociological, and aesthetic domains. Indeed, Gogol and his nineteenth-century descendants embraced the tactics of what Belinskii called “dirty literature” as a political and aesthetic intervention in the prevailing order. Their conscious act of polluting literature was a means of branding Russian naturalism and, later, the field of Russian realism: dirt, which had once been an extrasystemic element, became integral to Russian realism, effecting a complete reorientation of literary norms. If we accept Douglas’s assertion that dirt is a symbol of disorder or a “byproduct of a systematic ordering,” then we might expect the discourse of pollution to intensify during important moments of literary systematization and change, when the boundaries of literature and its institutions are under re-evaluation.2 This chapter argues that indeed the discourse of pollution and the associated representation of dirt in literature emerge during such periods of negotiation, and these moments of literary crisis coincide with periods of sociological and political disorder in the countryside. This chapter reads Russian realism through that dirty lens, focusing on two phases in its development: first, the formation of naturalism and realism between the 1840s and the 1880s, coinciding with the crisis of serfdom and the Great Reforms; and second, the theorization of socialist realism in the early 1930s, during the crisis of collectivization. Régine Robin has highlighted the central role of the ambiguous term “realism” in drawing together these two polemical phases into a discursive complex that “endlessly reworks the same argumentative structures, the same polemical logics, the same discursive contours.” The antagonists in debates about the literary representation of rural life were many of the same Slavophiles, pochvenniki, radical materialists, and Old Bolsheviks who were also involved in the polemics about the relationship between soil and society with which the first two chapters are concerned, and involved the same blurred lines between science, social science, politics, and aesthetics.3 In these two periods we see how the literary representation of dirt and the critical discourse of aesthetic pollution together serve to focus

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debates on the hygienic boundaries between art and life; between culture and nature; and between peasant subjects, their writers, and readers.

Out of Arcadia In Russian literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, representations of rural life were shaped by the values of the pastoral. Following the classical idylls of Theocritus and Virgil, the pastoral was defined by the topos of the locus amoenus (pleasant place), a schematic idealization of the countryside, whose pleasant beauty mirrored the amorous pursuits of the shepherds who lived in ease amid its green meadows.4 As J. R. Morgan notes, “the unreality of the pastoral countryside constitutes it as a space of the imagination, accessible only through the literary act.”5 The pastoral landscape was an aesthetic topos autonomous from the sociopolitical realities of Russian life and unmarked by the material facts of dirt and agrarian labor. Joachim Klein notes that although Aleksandr Sumarokov had produced a large volume of pastoral verse in the late eighteenth century, the genre was not taken up by many Russian writers, perhaps because of the jarring disjuncture with the realities of Russian rural life. Klein writes that “the sharp contrast of the pastoral world with the reality of peasant life is striking. This is the problem of the gallant pastoral: it is incompatible with the classic principle of imitation of nature.”6 Although the pastoral genre was not taken up as such, Arcadia cast a long shadow over Russian depictions of the countryside, and pastoral values persisted in other genres of literature.7 Thomas Newlin has discussed the limits of the pastoral imagination in the case of the gentry memoirist Andrei Bolotov (1738–1833). On the basis of Bolotov’s prolific diaries, prose works, and verse, Newlin shows how Bolotov’s pastoral vision depends upon the suppression of the anxieties and violence of serfdom.8 The peasant laborer, for example, is absent from Bolotov’s pastoral vision of his own estate; the serf is a character that the genre cannot accommodate and the author cannot admit into Arcadia. As Bolotov’s case shows, the conventions of the pastoral allowed gentry writers to create an internally coherent mythology of Russian rural life that obscured its socioeconomic basis. Russian soil, apostrophized as a mythical source of fertility, could stand in for the actual source of superabundance that the pastoral did not have the resources to represent— namely, enserfed labor. As the Russian gentry developed a new sense of their social commitments in the early decades of the nineteenth century, new aesthetic resources were needed to depict the realities of both nature and peasant life. Pastoral values

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were increasingly incompatible with the emerging political conscience of the Russian intelligentsia and with a changing “structure of feeling,” in Raymond Williams’s terms, which resulted in an increasing variety of counterpastoral works and new literary methods for “imitating” nature and rural life.9 Gogol was the literary author most responsible for disassembling the pastoral myth of the countryside in Russian prose. His story “Old World Landowners” (1835) is a parody of the pastoral idyll of Baucis and Philemon— what Renato Poggioli calls an “inverted eclogue.”10 Poggioli argues that the parodic distortion of the pastoral results from Gogol’s attempt to translate its conventions from verse to prose, a form that was becoming increasingly important in Russian literature.11 Poggioli makes the intriguing suggestion that the pastoral was edged out not only because of changes in the mood of the intelligentsia but also because of the internal needs of literary form: prose, with its capaciousness and demand for observational detail and narrative, “broke” the pastoral and its fossilized conventions. But Gogol did more than deconstruct the pastoral as the primary mode of representing the countryside; he innovated new literary tools for depicting the countryside and the gentry estate in the first volume of his novel Dead Souls. By the time of its publication in 1842, Russian literature was undergoing rapid expansion and change as a social institution. A new generation of socially mobile déclassés, raznochintsy, made careers for themselves working for the newspapers and thick journals of Moscow and Petersburg, producing stories, sketches, and reviews. The appearance of such authors from the nongentry estate, with diverse social and educational backgrounds, coincided with an expansion of literary themes, attitudes, and genres. This growth in print journalism and a brief relaxation of censorship correlated with a growing sense of civic responsibility among intelligentsia readers and interest in the life of the peasantry. In Belinskii’s formula, Russia needed a literature not of “society” but of the “people” and thus, implicitly, a literature of the countryside.12 As Belinskii asked rhetorically in a private letter, “What do I care if some genius lives in the clouds, when the crowd is wallowing in the dirt?”13

Dirty Literature Under the influence of Gogol and Belinskii, and in step with broader changes in literature and society, then, the so-called natural school emerged in the 1840s. The natural school label had been intended as a smear by its creator, the conservative editor of the Northern Bee, Faddei Bulgarin, who regarded the naturalistic method of representation in literature as excessively raw, devoid of artistic refinement, and obsessed with the unsystematized minutiae

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of daily life, especially the low, base, and dirty (terms that collapsed the mimetic, metaphorical, and moral). Dirt and griazefil’stvo—or love of dirt— came to define Gogol and the natural school. Nikolai Polevoi, for example, wrote that, “by choosing from nature and life only the dark side, selecting from them only dirt, dung, debauchery, and vice,” the natural school failed to capture the higher essence of “nature and life.”14 Belinskii embraced and reappropriated the natural-school label, just as the natural-school writers would embrace dirt as a brand for their movement. In Dead Souls Gogol directly addresses the changes that were taking place in Russian literature and the charge that he was polluting the field of literature with low and dirty subjects: “The author is most ashamed to occupy his readers for so long with people of low class, knowing how reluctantly they make acquaintance with the lower estate.”15 What follows is a description of the antihero Chichikov (a speculator of dead souls) at his weekly toilet, having washed and “wiped himself from head to foot with a wet sponge” before being accosted by orphans in “soiled shirts” as his open carriage races over the “soft earth.”16 Like the reader, Chichikov attempts to maintain sanitary boundaries between himself and the soiled villagers, but the “soft earth” underneath his carriage is a metonym for moral quagmire. As the britska travels to the second landowner in the tale, bouncing over a plowed field turned to mire by the rain, it flips over, dumping Chichikov in the mud.17 He is again marked by mud when a peasant girl is sent to help him find the way back to the high road: the mud is caked so high and thick on the girl’s bare legs that that it is mistaken for boots. Scrambling onto the box beside the coachman, the girl puts her foot on the “master’s step,” soiling it just before Chichikov places his own foot on it.18 Chichikov is literally marked with dirt by the village where he is a social and generic outsider. His attempts to stay clean (and conceal his own moral filth) are in vain. Dirt has more than a mimetic function here: Gogol uses dirt to signal aesthetic and generic contamination. Gogol’s “dirty” subjects, from his orphans in soiled shirts to the peasant girl caked with mud, signal the generic pollution of a countryside that had previously been under the jurisdiction of pastoral codes. Gogol further pollutes the old order by interpolating between the landowner and the peasant a character type entirely new to Russian literature: the speculator. Gogol’s representation of Chichikov as a speculator of dead souls carries a socioeconomic critique of new modes of capitalist exchange entering the feudal countryside, but it is also a pollution of literary space and the idealized bond between the gentry and peasantry. The mutual contamination of Chichikov and the village shows that elements are out of

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place; there is a new (dis)order in the literary domain and in the sociopolitical system of the Russian countryside. Gogolian dirt is associated with narrative disorder, or what critics would consider a cluttering of the narrative itself with the meaningless detritus of everyday life. What we expect to be an insignificant encounter in Gogol’s novel—for example, the scene with the girl in mud “boots”—is given unusual narrative emphasis in the hands of this author. Belinskii notes that it is a virtue of Dead Souls that life is “dissected down to the smallest detail and that detail is given broader significance.”19 It appears that Gogol’s dirt and detritus have the function of training readers in a new method of observation and reading, training them to see the insignificant details in the narrative—the dirt of nature and everyday life—and to understand their meaning. In the second book of Dead Souls, Gogol shifts his parody from the pastoral to the georgic mode, with a new interest in agricultural labor. On his travels Chichikov visits the disordered estate of Colonel Koshkarev, which he contrasts with the model estate of the hard-working neighbor Kostanzhoglo, who “knows soil” and “works like an ox.”20 Koshkarev, despite his grand designs and his rhetoric of improvement, becomes the target of Gogol’s satire: Koshkarev brags that despite the widespread ignorance he encounters, someday the peasants of his village will “at the same time as walking behind the plow, read a book about Franklin’s ‘thunder rod’ [sic] or Virgil’s Georgics, or the chemical study of the soil.”21 As Bella Grigoryan has discussed, Gogol’s second volume was a response to the growing body of Russian advice literature on agriculture, as well as a parody of his rival Bulgarin, who had disparaged the natural school.22 Bulgarin’s popular advice literature and his novel Ivan Vyzhigin (1829) presented the reading public with a model of the ideal Russian landowner and a set of behavioral codes that were didactic and politically conservative. Bulgarin voiced an idealist approach to art, writing that “in nature there is so much that should never enter the domain of the arts and literature, and from which a genteel person averts his eyes.”23 Bulgarin’s attitude clarifies the relation between dirt and the Gogolian narrative detail: both elements pollute the pure order of art. Although Bulgarin actively managed his estate and wrote on matters of agriculture, he regards art as an autonomous domain, one in which idealized, not mimetic, images should reveal a higher reality of the spirit, free from the limitations of external reality. Comparing Bulgarin to Gogol brings the latter’s values into sharper relief and suggests that Gogol’s attention to the trivia of life exemplifies the new structure of feeling among the reading public, a commitment not to avert one’s eyes from the “low” and insignificant facts of life in the material world.

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Following Gogol, the writers of the natural school opened dirty literature’s second front of the assault on conventions. Belinskii and Nikolai Nekrasov edited two publications (intended to be a serial) with which the natural school was primarily identified: The Physiology of Petersburg (1845) and The Petersburg Miscellany (1846). In these works the natural school appropriated the narrative techniques of the French physiological sketch, which trained an “objective” and protoethnographic gaze upon the colorful hodgepodge of urban street life and sundry character types, recording the minutiae it observed in studiedly neutral and dispassionate prose.24 Dmitrii Grigorovich and Ivan Turgenev had contributed to these volumes and would transfer the narrative techniques of the physiology from the urban milieu to the Russian countryside.25 The influence of the physiological sketch can be seen in Turgenev’s collection A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), specifically in the narrative attention given to apparently trivial detail and the use of social typing (as in “Khor and Kalinych”). But more notable was Grigorovich’s adaptation of the physiological sketch to critique the moral and material filth of Russia’s countryside. A year after the appearance of his physiological sketches of the city of St. Petersburg, Grigorovich published his short story “The Village,” which offered a counterpastoral and protoethnographic vision of life in the countryside.26 As in Dead Souls, the narrator of “The Village” apologizes to the reader for the necessity of writing “dirty” subjects into literature: “Although the narrator of this story takes indescribable pleasure from talking about people who are enlightened, educated and higher class, although he is quite convinced that the reader is far more interested in them than the crude, dirty, and, furthermore, stupid peasant men and women, he must nonetheless move quickly to the latter as the individuals who are—alas—the main subject of his narrative.”27 Grigorovich makes an ironic moral rebuke of his imagined reader, to whom he imputes moral revulsion. Grigorovich’s “dirty” heroine, Akulina, is born “in a dirty, stinking hut in a barnyard.” She lives a brief, cruel life first with a resentful foster mother, then with a bitter husband whom she is forced to marry by the landowner. In his description of Akulina’s childhood, the narrator fixes on griaz’ (which may be translated as dirt or mud) as a site of contagion, illness, and early death, exclaiming, “How many times a poor child, left to its own devices, has crept in the middle of the street, covered with dirt and muddy puddles, and paid for such pleasure with vile illnesses and death!”28 Dirt is not only mimetic and metaphorical, it is also a metonym of the insalubrious moral environment and bad morals of the villagers, who allow the child to wallow in disease-carrying filth. Real filth, in short, invariably reveals moral disorder. As a grown woman, Akulina passes a field as empty as a “wasteland” abutting

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the graveyard where her mother is buried, and the young woman throws herself on her mother’s bare grave (toshuiu mogilku).29 For Akulina, the earth that should give life is associated with desolation, disease, and death, and the story ends with Akulina’s burial in Mother Moist Earth, her fate rhyming with the folk song that Grigorovich quotes as an epilogue: Oh, open up, Mother Moist Earth, Swallow me, unhappy one [fem]! Russian song Akh, raskroisia, mat’ syroi zemlia, Pogloti menia, neschastnuiu! Russkaia pesnia30 Grigorovich does not depict dirt, then, simply for verisimilitude. Dirt and mud were certainly facts of Russian life, but they were also strongly marked in the symbolic systems of moral and aesthetic purity in which Grigorovich made an active intervention. Dirt in the story is also an inversion of soil, pochva, with its idealization of the Volksgeist and peasant life. The “dirt, dung, debauchery, and vice” that Polevoi reviled in the physiological sketch were not strictly urban phenomena but were endemic to the Russian countryside. The natural school appropriated the critical tools of the French physiological sketch but adapted them to Russian conditions by applying them to the disorder of the countryside, challenging the myth of the physically and morally healthy peasant working the fertile soil. The peasant in this new dirty literature is covered not in soil, but in dirt, and is morally contaminated by it, as is the reader. The publication of “The Village” triggered a polemic in the thick journals. In the comic journal Eralash, the artist M. L. Nevakhovich published a caricature of Grigorovich that suggested a perverse interest in filth. In his memoirs Grigorovich described the cartoon: “I was portrayed as a dandy, digging in a dunghill, while a woman pours a tub of slops from a nearby window; below was a caption, something like: ‘An unsuccessful search for the Akulinas in the village.’ ”31 Grigorovich misremembers the caption; in fact, it was drawn from Ivan Krylov’s fable “The Cock and the Pearl,” in which a cock finds a pearl while scratching in the dung but scorns it as a useless object, declaring that it would rather have found barley, which “is not so showy, but is satisfying.” Krylov spells out the intended meaning: some people “do not value what they do not understand.”32 In Krylov’s version, the target of the fable was widely understood to be philistinism, although here it is also charged

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with topical meaning as a critique of philosophical materialism. Nevakhovich implies that Grigorovich satisfies himself with filth because he is incapable of genuine aesthetic discernment or appreciation. The juxtaposition of dirt and pearls would become a recurring trope in the debates on dirty literature. Belinskii, who had rather fulsomely praised “The Village,” came to his protégé’s defense. He ventriloquizes and then criticizes the judgment of Grigorovich’s opponents, the so-called aristocrats: “ ‘How could you debase literature by depicting the dirt and stench of the life of the common people? How could you bring to the stage the mob, the rabble, the peasant clods, the country wenches, the village lasses?’ This aristocratic aversion to the dirty literature [griaznoi literatury] of the villages was very cleverly expressed by one cartoonist-aristocrat, who portrayed the young author of a splendid story of peasant life rummaging in a garbage pit.”33 The critiques of the Russian natural school anticipate to an extraordinary degree those of French naturalism decades later. Émile Zola would be referred to as the “Homer of sewage” and caricatured as writing on a chamber pot, while his novels were variously referred to as a “puddle of mud,” “filth,” and a “collection of scatology.”34 Long before Zola claimed the term “naturalism” in 1868, Russian authors had polluted their own literature with similar goals and effects.35 While it is generally the consensus that there is no genealogical connection between the Russian natural school and French naturalism, pollution is the central method, theme, and metacritical term in each movement. Jennifer Tanner argues that Zola used dirt strategically to mark his own literary brand: by “reappropriating his dirt from critics,” he was able to assert control over its meaning in his works.36 The Russian natural school, like Zola decades later, consciously branded their form of naturalism with dirt; this branding was a provocation, a reappropriation of literature, and a reorientation of its norms. Zola also attempted to theorize and practice a literature that oriented itself to the scientific methods of “observation and analysis.”37 In Russia the dirty literature of the natural school was associated with an amoral scientific or materialist worldview, in opposition to an integrated artistic vision guided by elevated moral and aesthetic principles. Dirt was a figure for the low stuff of nature and everyday life that had previously been beneath the notice of high art. In correspondence with Turgenev, Belinskii broaches this relation between dirt and the materialist worldview, addressing the charge that Nekrasov is steeped in “dirty positivism” [griaznoi polozhitel’nosti].38 This association between dirt and positivism helps to unravel one of the most common critiques of the natural school. Many readers and critics were

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alienated by a lack of narrative economy, or even an empiricist reporting of apparently meaningless detail in the works of the natural school. Such representations of material life with all its unassimilable and unprocessed data were thought to rely on observational and reporting techniques more appropriate to science or reportage than to art. This accumulation of disordered verbal “waste” appeared to many critics as a failure of artistic method rather than a success of scientific method. The term “dirty positivism” suggests, then, that dirt is not only matter in the wrong place, as Douglas suggests, but that it symbolizes the disorder that is surplus to art. It is here that the metaphors of pollution and purification enter the foundational discourse of dirty literature. Belinskii, for example, defends Gogol from the charge that he offers the reader unpurified nature: “It is always the same thing: he depicts dirt, he presents unwashed nature [neumytuiu naturu].”39 Positivism has polluted art with its focus on the representation of the material world instead of an “ideal” realm of higher values, refined sentiments, and ordered meanings. The “washing” of dirt was one figure for the ritual purification of literature and the moral redemption of both gentry reader and peasant subject, and alchemical transformation was another figure. In his comic vaudeville play “The Natural School” (1847), Petr Karatygin creates a parodic character resembling Belinskii, who declares that “gold is visible in the mud! (zoloto vidno v griazi!)”40 Karatygin refers to Belinskii’s frequent use of the trope of dirt-into-gold in his criticism.41 Belinskii writes that everything that Gogol touches turns to “pure gold,” or that in the work of the poet Aleksei Koltsov, “dirt turned into the pure gold of poetry.”42 Karatygin explained that his play was directed only at cynics who “in their dirty works stooped to revolting disgrace,” again anticipating later critiques of Zola.43 In Belinskii’s “Literary Conversation Overheard in a Bookstore” (1842), two friends discuss an “aristocratic” reviewer’s offense at the garbage-eating pig in Korobochka’s courtyard in Dead Souls. One of the friends (presumably Belinskii’s mouthpiece) remarks, “I find this dirt exquisite—‘elevated to the pearl of creation,’ I find it a million times more exquisite than the gold leaf of the poets of the middle classes.”44 Superficial “gold leaf ” is contrasted with the “real” gold that has been alchemically transformed from the dirty raw material of life. Although Belinskii defends dirty literature, his aesthetic system, fundamentally shaped by Hegel, still demands a purification of material reality.45 On these grounds, Belinskii criticized Gogol for depicting the material dirt of Russian life without its necessary artistic purification. Reacting to Gogol’s bleak Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, Belinskii condemns Gogol for leaving the Russian peasantry “lost in dirt and manure.”46 It is here that Belinskii’s

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aesthetics come into focus: art is the space in which we witness transformation from the material to the ideal—from dirt to gold, from matter to meaning. It is not that dirt must be excluded from art but rather that it must be properly purified in the service of a positive ideal. Although Belinskii argues that art should be grounded in empirical reality, he also firmly believes in the purifying function of art, which gives meaning and order to otherwise disordered material phenomena. The tropological transformation of dirt/manure to gold/pearls suggests the ritual purification that characterizes the artistic process. If dirt is that which is grossly material, insignificant, and unsystematic, then it must be elevated, processed, and systematized by the artistic process. In Belinskii’s criticism, dirt is dialectical: it is the extrasystemic element that is assimilated by the system, altering it in the process. Dirt is no longer aesthetically extrasystemic—indeed, it plays a mimetic role in “dirty literature”—but it also functions as a central metaphor for the artistic process itself. Belinskii writes that Shakespeare’s works were disparaged by critics as a “dung-heap into which pearls had accidentally fallen.”47 But the juxtaposition of dung and pearls in Shakespeare’s art is no “accident” at all for Belinskii: the pearls have not fallen into dung so much as they have been transformed from its very substance into something of value. Pollution and purification, then, are recurring metacritical figures for the successful aesthetic and cognitive systematization of the low and meaningless facts of life in the material world. It was a shift in the attitude to artistic purification that differentiated Belinskii from the second generation of literary “dirt lovers,” the village writers of the 1850s through the 1880s, including Nikolai and Gleb Uspenskii, Aleksandr Levitov, and Aleksei Pisemskii.48 Although these writers pollute literature, it is not in the service of higher aesthetic aims, perhaps because they choose to leave their readers in filth in order to propel them to acts of moral purification beyond the text.49 A survey of the second wave of dirty literature reveals entire villages suffused with griaz: every street, every home, every household object, and every body is covered in dirt, mud, and manure. The uses of dirt range from mundane verisimilitude (houses made from “earth and dung”)50 to the faintly comic (the reader must “pass through heaps of some sort of manure” to reach the door of a home),51 and throughout their work, manure confers only odor, not otium, on scenes of rural life. This is not an idealized pastoral landscape. It is hard to imagine that peasants have dirt thrown at them as punishment for offenses (as in a Pisemskii story), given their everyday subjection to the relentless insult of dirt. The radical critic Dmitrii Pisarev, as the chief defender of the second generation of dirt lovers, extolled Pisemskii’s portrayal of the corrupting filth of

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the countryside in the novella “The Simpleton” (“Tiufiak”). He explains that the characters are not to blame for their moral failures, rather it is simply an effect of the dirt and soil that cling to the Russian people: “the soil [pochva] will always remind you of itself with its strong odor, its Russian spirit [russkim dukhom], from which the characters don’t know how to escape, from which even the reader sometimes gets sick at heart.”52 Pisarev punctures the elevated discourse of pochva and its associations with the organic nation. Against conventional usage, he ironizes pochva by attributing to it not abstract values but odor and materiality, echoing Chernyshevsky’s discussion of “real” and “putrescent” soil (as discussed in chapter 2). The soil is not a spiritually nourishing source of connection to the Volksgeist, but the material cause of the characters’ abject enslavement as well as their moral failings. Pisarev further punctures the discourse of the soil by playing on the resemblance of spirit [dukh] and perfume [dukhi], recalling Pushkin’s phrase, “There is the Russian soul . . . it smells of Russia!” [Tam russkii dukh . . . tam Rus’iu pakhnet!]53 Pisarev suggests ironically that the filthy smell of soil is the “perfume” of the Russian soul. Pisarev focuses on soil as milieu, that is, as the environment that forms the individual subject, psychologically and otherwise. This determinism evokes the Herderian discourse of the organic nation, which seeks material causes for national difference, hence the “perfume of the Russian soul” is soil. But the influence of milieu is not unidirectional. Individuals also shape their milieu in turn; they “increase their layer of dirty soil, just as last year’s plants increase the layer of black soil.”54 In Pisemskii’s story, as Pisarev writes, the filthy milieu produces morally corrupt individuals who then “increase” the corrupting soil in which they and others live. Just as the weak organism cannot survive in an unhygienic environment, the morally weak cannot get out of the mire of the Russian countryside: “What is wonderful about Pisemskii’s story is that it shows us not exceptional people who are above the level of the masses, but dozens of people, wallowing in the mud, smeared from head to toe, smothering in a stinking atmosphere and not knowing how to find a way out. To really appreciate all the filth of our daily lives, we need to look at how it affects weak people; only then will we fully understand its poisonous effect; a strong man easily gets out of it; but the weak are smothered or overcome.”55 Pisarev associates the material filth of the countryside with moral filth. The weak succumb to this dirty environment—and then further pollute it. This is more than a metaphorical association; it is an attempt to find a material basis for abstract or psychological phenomena, a method common to nineteenth-century positivism.

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By the end of the century, the tactics of dirty literature had become fully absorbed by the mainstream of Russian realism. Realist writers no longer needed to aggressively brand their work with dirt to show their political or aesthetic orientation or their affiliation with any particular school of literature. Dirty literature had successfully “polluted” Russian literature, and the literary system had responded, in turn, by absorbing and routinizing these new elements. The nineteenth-century debates around griazefil’stvo became a resource in themselves for theorizing and codifying literary norms in the Soviet period. We can explain this both genealogically and structurally. In the first place, the intelligentsia tastes and values of the old Bolsheviks had been shaped fundamentally by the civic literature and literary criticism of the nineteenth century. The critical perspectives of Belinskii, Dobroliubov, and Pisarev established many of the terms of the debate. But the discourse of pollution also had a similar structural function in the development of socialist realism in the early Soviet period, as it once had in the development of naturalism and realism in the nineteenth century. While the symbolic discourses and biopolitical metaphors of purification, hygiene, and cleansing (or purging) were present from the beginning of Bolshevik power, they took on force in the literary domain in the concentrated period of the codification and canon formation of socialist realism in 1934.

Literary Rituals of Pollution and Purification In 1934 there were over 250 articles in the central newspapers and journals on the question of “purifying” the Russian literary language.56 This thickening of the discourse of pollution was triggered by Maxim Gorky’s attack on Fedor Panferov’s multivolume novel of collectivization, Bruski (1928–1929), which was filled with dialecticisms, regionalisms, and markers of peasant speech.57 The story of the virulent campaign against “Panferovism” (panferovshchina) is discussed in canonical accounts of the establishment of socialist realism, but in this chapter, I situate the episode in the transhistorical recurrence of literary dirt as an object of Russian critical polemic.58 This intensified discourse of pollution and purification is an index of a literary system under strain. Hans Gunther argues that the attack on Panferovism was intended to bring the literary establishment under ideological control on the eve of the First AllUnion Writers’ Congress.59 And as Katerina Clark observes, language debates are often fundamentally about “authority and system.”60 Both of these views

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refract Douglas’s assertion that dirt is the figure for what is extrasystemic while purification is the framework for systematization. What perhaps bears further remark is that—as in the case of nineteenthcentury dirty literature—the charge of pollution in the case of Panferov’s Bruski was attached to a literary work that is dirty on multiple levels. Manure and mud pervade the villages that surround the former estate of Bruski. There is, furthermore, an unmistakably Freudian association of feces and private property in Bruski, at a moment when Freudianism in the Soviet Union had come to be associated with ideological impurities, whether Trotskyism, bourgeois decadence, “naturalism” (semantically negative), or “biologism.” Just as Panferov was guilty of coprolalia, or speaking filth, the kulaks in Bruski are guilty of Freudian coprophagy. As the novel opens, the frozen Volga river, which we might expect to be a source of purification, is described as a pustule “soiled with liquid manure.”61 The origin of all fertile soil is continually revealed to be manure, and the novel posits an equivalence of excrement and land. The peasant Chukhliav cares for the ailing landowner Sutiagin in the final years of his life, expecting the heirless bachelor will sign over the Bruski estate to him. Cajoling Sutiagin to sign, Chukhliav exclaims in markedly colloquial speech, “Was it for nothing that I cleaned up your shit?” [Za chto pro chto ia za toboi der’mo chistil?].62 Chukhliav believes that he can transfigure the landowner’s shit into land, but Sutiagin fails to sign the crucial document before expiring. Deprived of the land he believes to be rightly his, Chukhliav steals 2000 rubles that Sutiagin has set aside for burial, reasoning that the money should not be buried in the earth, but should circulate among the living. Chukhliav’s own hoarding is consistently associated with feces. When looting bandits enter the village, he repeatedly pours manure over his horse to make her look like an old decrepit nag.63 When the bandits enter his yard, they find Chukhliav himself squatting in a privy in a corner of the stable, clutching his guts. Chukhliav points downward and announces to the Tatar bandit in simplified foreigner talk that his belly “gurgles little-little” [treshchit malo-malo].64 Chukhliav’s consciousness and internal life are also compared to excrement, as he sits with his private thoughts, like a “chicken in manure . . . empty manure, senseless.”65 The private thoughts of the peasant are akin to the fecal matter he hoards. The hoarding of private property in Bruski and the related actions of saving and spending are further linked with defecation, constipation, and diarrhea. Chukhliav’s friend and ally against the village communists, the former village elder Plakushchev, is likewise associated with this perverse economy of excrement. In the days of prerevolutionary graft, Plakushchev bragged to his friends, “We can make candy out of shit” [My iz der’ma konfetku lepim].66

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The miserliness of his family is correlated with their anal retentive habits and their confidence that their feces are exceedingly valuable, indeed precious. Panferov suggests that Chukhliav and his associates are stuck in the anal stage of capitalism. But Panferov’s message is that you can’t eat your own shit any more than you can hoard land as your private property. Shlenka, another supporter of the old order, taunts the poor peasant collective that has spontaneously organized to take over the neglected Bruski estate, joking ironically that their wheat must have reached the height of an arshin (28 inches). The poor peasants sarcastically respond that Shlenka’s private land also grows bountiful nourishment: “pies of dung” [pirogi ot korov]. These cow pies, they joke, have been sitting in the field since autumn, presumably meaning not only that Shlenka is lazy but that the private manure on his property shamefully remains outside the system of social and soil exchange that purifies excrement into soil.67 (This passage was redacted from later editions of the novel, part of the ongoing sanitization of the text.) The kulaks want to keep their manure circulating in a private economy. The symbolism of soil, though, is multivalent. While excrement is the private (and therefore semantically negative) form of waste, soil is its semantically positive form—collective and cleansed. Manure is the “golden food for the soil” that will feed the village, but the kulaks persist in trying to eat their private raw manure rather than allowing it to cycle back into the earth and into collective ownership.68 The first volume of this dirty novel ends with half the village peasants dealing each other blows in a free-for-all in the mud. The peasants have just completed the collective labor project of a dam and canal to irrigate the drought-stricken fields of the village. But the elemental energies that have been unleashed cannot be contained, and tragedy strikes when the initiator of the project, Stepan Ognev, is trampled to death in the mud: “Stepan almost no longer felt their heavy boots and bast shoes striking his back and face, and his head was half sunk in the liquid mud. He spat out a mouthful of mud and dug his fingers deep into the slime.”69 Although Gorky’s attack on Panferov was first waged on linguistic grounds, it was hinted that there was a broader disorder in the text, an unseemliness that suggested ideological deviation. Gorky reads the pollution of the Russian literary language with peasant speech as a hostile takeover of Soviet literature by the muzhik. Panferov’s ear was too attuned to peasant speech, and perhaps to the peasant mentality as well, in Gorky’s view. Rather than going to work on the peasant’s consciousness and transforming it from dirt to gold, showing it in its revolutionary development, Panferov gives the unreformed consciousness of the peasantry too much narrative space for Gorky’s taste. The

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raw material of peasant experience is improperly processed and transformed in Panferov’s work; this is the quality that opened him to critiques of “naturalism” (in continuity with nineteenth-century literary debate) or, a newer smear, “biologism.” Aleksandr Serafimovich, the author of The Iron Flood, was one of several writers who defended Panferov publicly. He observes that Panferov and Sholokhov both use regionalisms and other markers of peasant speech, and he wonders why they are tolerated or even praised in the work of the latter but viciously critiqued in the former. Marietta Shaginian also responded publicly to the “so-called pollution” (zagriaznenie) of the Russian language with provincialisms and dialecticisms.70 Her intervention questions Stalinist-era notions of purity that underwrote discourse and policy in multiple domains, from the linguistic to the national. She uses her defense of Panferov to reflect on hybridity as a feature of multilingual, multinational contact zones. Contamination is the creative principle of the Sprachbund, a fact that was obvious to Shaginian as a Russophone Armenian in the era of Soviet national delimitation. Gorky’s fear of the pollution of literary language was founded on the same ideological and philosophical principles that generated Soviet nationalities policy from the 1920s into the 1930s. Hybridity is now read as a category error, a violation of the essence of type that went back to Herderian organicism in political philosophy and literary debates on national type in Gogol’s time. This debate over the pollution of language and literature carried over into the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in the summer of 1934. Fedor Gladkov notes that the language of socialist people “has all kinds of layers and dirt, such as thieves’ cant, swearing, old mutilated words.” This language needs to be handled “with great care” and artistically “smelted.”71 His metaphor is metallic, but nonetheless shows the ruling concern with the purification of raw material. The minor writer Kuzma Gorbunov gives a similar recommendation to young writers to purify their material: “When making use of the folk lexicon, a beginner should act like a gold digger, carefully washing out what is of real value from the dirt and rubbish. The prospector sometimes chips off from literature a block of dubious origin with unpolished strata of obsolete eras, and slams it on the table in front of the reader and says: ‘This is a gold nugget.’ ”72 Here the inexperienced writer mistakes naturalism for realism, and Gorbunov’s juxtaposition of dirt and gold recalls Belinskii’s comparison of the artistic process to alchemical transformation. Iurii Olesha responds to the more significant issue that Gorky raises about the possible contamination of the author by the mentality of his or her subject: “The artist’s relations with the good and the bad, with vices and virtues are not at all simple . . . You raise up the bad and the dirty from

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the depths of the soul, that is, you are convinced that it is in you—the bad and the dirty—and therefore you take upon your own consciousness a very heavy psychological burden.”73 Olesha leaves open the question of whether a writer can fully maintain hygienic psychological and ideological boundaries with his or her “dirty” subjects. As Régine Robin notes, such a line of speculation was an implicit threat to writers, who could be accused of ideological impurity at any time.74 At the Writers’ Congress Freudianism also newly animates the well-worn discussion of dirt-and-realism, remapping it onto feces-and-psychological realism, with James Joyce as the focal point. In his lengthy speech on contemporary world literature, Karl Radek throws out a common barb at Joyce for pursuing his characters “into the toilet.”75 But this is part of a systematic critique not of Joyce’s morals but of his narrative methods. The outhouse is the outer limit of semiosis in the literary text. It is the site of nature and naturalism, and Joyce stands accused of failing to confer any meaning on the biological act of defecation. Radek’s memorable final judgment of Joyce is “a pile of manure, in which maggots are stirring, filmed by a movie camera through a microscope—that is Joyce.”76 The German writer Wieland Herzfelde polemicized with Radek on this point in his own speech two days later. “A Marxist,” Herzfelde says, “can and should study every detail, including piles of manure.”77 He continues: “To deal with manure is certainly not very pleasant, and a person with healthy inclinations does not take the slightest pleasure in witnessing such an activity. But this does not yet serve as evidence that manure does not exist at all, that a microscope is a useless invention, and studying manure is harmful.”78 Radek makes his objection to Joycean manure explicit, returning to the terms of the debates on dirty literature in the nineteenth century: “It isn’t realism to include everything indiscriminately. That would be the most vulgar naturalism. We have to select phenomena. Realism means making choices from the standpoint of what is important, from the standpoint of our guiding principles.”79 The kernel of Radek’s objection, then, is that the unfiltered human psyche and the unprocessed material of everyday life are disordered and dirty. In the sense that Douglas posits, dirt is extrasystemic at multiple levels. Panferov’s kind of dirt does not belong in socialist reality, nor does it belong in the “depiction of Soviet socialist reality in its revolutionary development.” Aleksei Tolstoi sums up this central problem in the Radek-Herzfelde polemic in the form of an anecdote: “The other day, in a conversation about art, Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich gave a successful example illustrating the difference between naturalism and realism. A man walks through the mud. A person can experience a joyful sensation of overcoming a difficult road, a sense of

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his own strength. . . . A photographer fixing him with a camera from the sidewalk will only capture a person splashed with mud. The photographer who clicks the shutter on the sidewalk is a naturalist. An artist who understands the internal state of man is a realist.”80 Naturalism, then, is best described as a photograph of manure or mud. It is a mechanical inscription of a disordered empirical reality that remains outside the reach of signification—especially outside socialist realist signification, defined in the formula “the depiction of socialist reality in its revolutionary development.” The discussion of Joycean manure is removed from Panferov by one degree: both Radek and Herzfelde refer to Panferov in their speeches but not in relation to the charges of impurity raised against him. Yet the discourse of purity and pollution in the literary domain seems to have thickened into a political and aesthetic imperative in 1934 that touched all writers, many of whom were compelled to acts of ritual self-purification inside and outside the text. The writer Efim Permitin reacted to the debates on linguistic purity by performing an auto-da-fe in Literaturnaia gazeta. In an open letter to Gorky, Permitin confesses that he was “tormented” after reading Gorky’s public response to Serafimovich and immediately went to work revising his own story “Enemy” (1933). He reports that he “burned out of it” all the “verbal regional trash” (slovesnyi oblastnoi musor), took out a number of “dirty sayings” (sal’nye slovechki), and “significantly toned down the odor of cynicism.”81 At the Writers’ Congress, in a speech that is both self-excoriating and sentimental, Aleksandr Avdeenko tells how he felt after seeing the Young Pioneers at the Congress the previous evening: “I have a lot of dirt. I’m sure that you too are not clean. That evening I felt all of your dirt. I could feel it like a growth on myself, and suddenly I really wanted to be like the pioneers.”82 The sentimental cult of youth jars against the discourse of pollution in Avdeenko’s speech, pointing to the broader cultural logic that produced such phenomena as Pavlik Morozov. But Permitin and Avdeenko’s responses also point forward to the time when self-purification was a matter of life and death for writers in the Soviet Union. Many turned to cleansing their texts, including Panferov himself as the central figure in the language purity debates of 1934. Panferov purged later editions of Bruski, but not necessarily of dialecticisms. Linguist Evgeniia Basovskaia identifies some of the dialecticisms Panferov uses, including robiaty, pokazh’te, and zybka, noting that some are not only attributed to peasant characters but are in the authorial voice.83 These dialecticisms remain in both quoted speech and authorial speech in later revised editions, and it is the scatological Freudian scenes discussed above that have been excised.84 Authors understood that the debate about language purity extended beyond the linguistic sphere but stood for a

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broader pollution of literature—with Freudianism, ideological disorder, and political deviation. A catastrophic period of cleansing, or as it is more commonly translated, purging (chistka), was approaching for Soviet literature and its practitioners. Writing requires both mess-making and cleaning up, the production of narrative surplus and its aesthetic and cognitive organization. It is for this reason that dirt—that most central material fact of rural life in Russia—was not only an object of literary mimesis but also a symbol of the values and methodology of realist representation from the age of Gogol to the birth of socialist realism. Dirt was a limit case for the aesthetic systematization and representation of the low, base, and insignificant. If dirt could be made to signify, then Russian realism could epistemologically conquer the material conditions on which it was based. The branding of Russian realism with dirt was also an effort to reterritorialize national identity, grounding it in the real material conditions of peasant life, rather than the idealizing discourse of soil inherited from German Romantic nationalism. In the hands of these literary dirt lovers, it was dirt rather than soil that captured the order of the agrarian economy and the condition of the peasant. Finally, pollution and purification served as central metaphors for the artistic process and the organization of the literary canon. For all these reasons, dirt was central to Russian realism and its philosophical, political, and aesthetic brand. The very act of representation necessarily brings symbolic systems into play, and each of the metaphorical and symbolic uses of dirt discussed posits a relationship between matter and its meanings. Dirt challenged the existing literary codes that limited how the peasant, the village, and the material conditions of rural life could be understood and represented. In cleaning up the resulting mess, Soviet critics and writers hoped to capture or construct an agrarian reality that was, in its revolutionary development, finally emerging from the deep and intractable mud of the Russian countryside’s wretched past. The following chapter considers this temporal dimension of soil, the accumulation of the dirt of the past and Soviet attempts to clear it away.

Ch a p ter 4

Sediment Soviet Construction on Asian Soil

The concept of historical sedimentation took on life in various early Soviet critical enterprises as a way of thinking about the relationship between “the old and the new.” Marx, of course, had written of capital as an accumulation of the life energy of the worker and of the commodity as “dead life,” gothic visions of the ongoing haunting of the present by the past.1 But the figure of sediment as historical accumulation had particular power in the Bolshevik cultural imaginary. Russia’s soil had long been understood as the repository of its history and identity, commonplaces of the Herderian discourse of the organic nation. One year after the Bolshevik Revolution, the historian V. O. Kliuchevskii wrote that historians should move below the surface to deeper layers, which were “not barren fossils, but fresh soil on which you can sow and reap.”2 Yet in the revolutionary society the Bolsheviks were building, this historical sediment was more often regarded as a symbol of its rigid past and its developmentally belated alterity; as Michael Kunichika notes, “The post-Revolutionary generation . . . discerned the obdurate persistence of the past everywhere in the landscape.”3 Language, culture, and everyday practices were widely understood to be shaped by archaic structures—the sedimented life of previous epochs that now threatened the revolutionary potential of the present. In the Soviet social and human sciences, sedimentation was a common figure for talking about psychological, linguistic, and cultural processes 68

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before it became a commonplace in continental philosophy and critical theory, in the works of such figures as Husserl, Adorno, and Merleau-Ponty, or in historian Reinhart Koselleck’s model of the “sediments of time.” Soviet discourses of sedimentation owed an unacknowledged (and inadmissible) debt to Freud.4 The founder of Soviet cultural-historical psychology, Lev Vygotskii, wrote of the human character as a “sedimentation” (otlozhenie) of the unconscious life plan.5 The figure recurs in the work of the Bakhtin Circle, where historical residues have an unstable potential to either enrich or deaden new literary and cultural production. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, fixed systems of language are described as a “deadening sediment [omertvevshim otlozheniem] of the actual language formation” and the creative individual act of speech.6 The spontaneity-consciousness dialectic is mapped onto the Saussurian parole-langue paradigm, and special value is assigned to the “spontaneous” parole. In short, the utterance has the spontaneous force to break through linguistic sedimentation, to revolutionize and reshape its structures, in a dialectical process akin to what Merleau-Ponty would later call the “spontaneity-sedimentation dialectic.”7 In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin concludes that although inherited folk images have accumulated “dead sediment,” they may also be “enriched” by this residue, a repository of the collective creativity of the masses that could not be tapped under previous political orders.8 The writer Konstantin Paustovsky gave a comical cast to these geological metaphors of the psyche in his novel The Black Island (Kara-Bugaz, 1932), where a mad geologist raves that extraction of coal, oil, slate, and ore will release the “psychic energy compressed in these strata. . . . Against limestone we will release the young and powerful energy of the alluvial strata.”9 Lev Trotsky took the more cynical view in Literature and Revolution, writing of the “barely noticeable sediment” of culture covering the millennial backwardness of Russia.10 Trotsky’s formula crystallized a common apprehension: under the thin deposit of Soviet modernity was a deep stratum of primitive culture that reached into geological time and could not be easily excavated. Even after the revolution, the lifeways and worldviews of the peasantry had remained largely unchanged: their primitive agricultural practices, the stagnancy of their political, cultural, and social life, and their folkOrthodox cosmology. Furthermore, fears that Russia had been and always would be an oriental despotism, associated with forced labor and large public works projects, lay just under the surface of the Bolshevik myth of spontaneous mass mobilization. Sediment, soil, deposits, and fossils were among the recurring metaphors for the legacy that this revolutionary society inherited from the past—a past that like real material sediment could fertilize the

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ground for future growth, as Bakhtin or Kliuchevskii suggested, or threaten Soviet civilization. Bolshevik culture, then, was troubled by a deep paranoia about its foundations, a suspicion that these historical sediments and strata might undermine its utopian aspirations. As the Bolsheviks endeavored to build socialism on this historical ground, Soviet culture of the first Five-Year Plan found the figures of sedimentation and excavation tropologically useful. The historical sediment that Trotsky and others had spoken of metaphorically was materialized in the very ground of the Soviet construction site, and the earth itself became a target of the violent assaults of Soviet modernization. This was dramatically visualized in the film Turksib (1929), directed by Viktor Turin from a screenplay by Viktor Shklovsky, where railroad workers wage an “attack against the stubborn earth!” (v ataku na upriamuiu zemliu!). In a long montage sequence we see workers use shovels, jackhammers, dynamite, and earth-moving machines in their multipronged assault on the “intractable, stubborn earth, well-fed over centuries” (nepokornaia, upriamaia, vekami upitannaia zemlia).11 Only after the laborious excavation of this Asian ground, culminating in dramatic shots of exploding earth, may the new railway proceed. Years before, in 1923, writer and land-reclamation engineer Andrei Platonov had called on the authorities to foster an “explosive culture” and make widespread use of dynamite in reshaping the land in the countryside, changing first its surface and, later, reconstructing it at deeper geological levels.12 Platonov, who had personally overseen land reclamation work (melioratsiia) in the Russian provinces in the 1920s, explicitly identified the tsarist past with an infertile landscape: “We will have true Bolshevik soil. Now we just have ravines, sand, and bare clay. That’s not ours—it’s tsarist territory!”13 In addition to dynamite, the tractor was another tool of the violent attack on the soil as the central site of the nation’s millennial backwardness. Rolling off the Fordist assembly line, the tractor materialized the assault on the sedimentations of history, the soil, and on the age-old habits of the peasantry. Construction and industrialized agriculture, then, constituted two lines of assault on the deposits of Russian history. Bolshevik soil needed to be situated in a new complex of meanings in this revolutionary society: materially transformed, but also symbolically reterritorialized. Undoubtedly the most powerful Soviet literary work dramatizing excavation on the Soviet building site is Platonov’s subversive short novel The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan, 1930). The plot is simple: workers assemble to build a workers’ home, while collectively caring for the orphan Nastia, who becomes a mascot for their endeavors and a symbol of the communist future that they are building. The entire span of the novel is coterminous

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with the excavation of the foundation pit under the future workers’ home. As one worker, Chiklin, digs in the “soft topsoil” of the foundation pit, he thinks of himself as “annulling nature’s old order.”14 He visualizes the geological strata of the site as he violently swings first a shovel, then a more destructive pickaxe: “Beneath the soil for some reason there’s sandy loam. Then clay and after that limestone. The earth needs the touch of iron or it lies there like some fool of a woman.”15 Chiklin rains blows down upon these “dead places” in the pit, attempting to break up their static order.16 The engineer Prushevsky also thinks of the world as “nothing but dead building material.”17 He “pictured the whole world as a dead body, judging it by those parts of it that he had already converted into structures.”18 But the workers never succeed in converting the foundation pit into a structure, and Prushevsky openly raises the question of whether this foundation can support socialist construction. He thinks about the layers of the pit as a materialization of the Marxist base and superstructure: “The walls of the excavation rose up on either side of him; he could see how the topsoil rested on a layer of clay and did not originate from it. Could a superstructure develop from any base?”19 Platonov’s story suggests that it cannot, and the engineer’s idea of the topsoil and clay as distinct layers echoes Trotsky’s remark that a thin sediment of culture rests on a primitive bedrock from which it does not originate. Nastia sickens and dies, and the grief-stricken Chiklin breaks into the storeroom for a spade, throws himself into the insuperable pit, and starts to dig. With the soil frozen, “Chiklin had to cut the earth into blocks and prise it out in whole dead pieces. Deeper down was softer and warmer; Chiklin plunged into the earth with slashing blows of his iron spade and soon disappeared, almost to his full height, into the quiet of its inner depths—but even there he was unable to exhaust himself, and so he began to batter the ground sideways, gaping open the earth’s cramped space.”20 The workers never successfully excavate the dead matter of the foundation pit; instead of building a workers’ home, they convert the site into a grave of socialism when they bury Nastia’s body within it. Platonov’s antiproduction novel was never published in his lifetime, but the tropes that he uses and the association of the construction site with the burial site were common to other cultural texts. The enraged violence that Chiklin and his fellow workers direct at the earth and the old order it represents was normalized under the slogans of the “war with nature” and “war with the primitive.” The Bolsheviks were launching an assault against their nation’s backwardness, located in the very ground on which they stood: the material and historical inertia of their foundations demanded violent action.

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This chapter is about the joint cultural and geopoetic projects the Soviets undertook in the 1920s and 1930s to de-sedimentize the archaic cultural stratum that figures like Trotsky identified below the surface of socialist modernity. Soil symbolized the primitive ground under modern Soviet culture, but it was also the very material substance of the agrarian economy and peasant life. Efforts to change nature and create a new Soviet political subject were understood as a single, integrated project, grounded in a Marxist understanding of how human potential must be realized through the labor-mediated remaking of the natural world. Socialist labor provided the spontaneous vital energy to reshape the Soviet landscape—the inert material body of the nation—as well as the politically and psychologically inert Soviet subject. In this chapter, I consider how the Soviet construction site becomes the ground for the violent assault on historical sediment—material, political, and psychic. This chapter focuses on two novels that reflect on sedimentation and excavation as processual metaphors for the transformation of nature (through Soviet construction) and the reform of human nature (through perekovka, or political and psychological reform): Boris Pilniak’s The Volga Falls to the Caspian (Volga vpadaet v kaspiiskoe more, 1930), and Bruno Jasien´ski’s Man Changes His Skin (Chelovek meniaet kozhu, 1932–1933). Each of these texts depicts the construction of canals, one in the heart of “Asiatic” Russia and one on the Asian periphery. The juxtaposition of these two spaces is central to my analysis because despite the expected differences, the authors of these works associate the past and its sediments with Asian belated development. Like the Russian nationalists discussed in chapter 1, many Soviet theorists and writers used soil as a figure for Russia’s departure from universal laws of historical development. Once again, this specificity inhered in culture (for which soil was a metaphor) and place (with soil as a synecdoche), but it also inhered in the material properties of actual soil, which set the conditions for agriculture and construction. The Soviet version of soil-based specificity departed from the Romantic nationalist version in its negative valuation. If Russia’s Asian soil exempted it from the common path of European nations, this was not the uniquely fertile basis for a great national destiny but an aberration that could only hold it back from Marxist development.21 Soil is troped as archaic and Asiatic, and the state that rules over it resembles an oriental despotism. The archaic soil under the construction is indeed a threat to its stability, but even more terrible are the monumental labor projects, depicted as “monoliths” that demand the sacrifice of human bodies. What unites these works is the suggestion that the process of excavating this “Asian” soil threatens, paradoxically, to restore oriental despotism. These works speak to the fears that the Soviet state cannot reform its archaic

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historical ground because the violence it employs to de-sedimentize its past results in Asiatic restoration and further historical accumulation—namely of newly sacrificed bodies, buried in the ancient soil under the Soviet construction site.

Site-Specific Models of Development, Or, Why Asia is Historically Belated In 1993 the journal USSR in Construction ran a photo-essay by Aleksandr Rodchenko depicting construction work at Belomor Canal. The caption of one dramatic two-page photomontage highlighted the construction’s violent assault on the sediments of history: “The attack on the land took place with spades and explosives, iron and fire!”22 The Belomor Canal was one of the most infamous and symbolic of Stalinist land-works projects—from 1931 to 1933, thousands of prisoners worked in brigades under the supervision of the Soviet security agency, the Unified State Political Directorate (OGPU). Workers were so poorly supplied that it was said that they even excavated the earth for the 150-mile canal linking the Baltic and White Seas with their bare hands.23 Gorky commissioned a brigade of writers to travel to the newly completed canal in 1933, and the resulting document, the History of the Construction of the Belomor Canal (History) was an avant-garde work of collective authorship, produced to publicize an allegedly new and humane Soviet penal institution that would reform political and criminal convicts through labor projects—a process called perekovka, or reforging.24 The association of hydroengineering with state violence was firmly established when all Soviet hydroengineering projects, on the basis of the “success” of the Belomor Canal, were exclusively entrusted to Soviet security agencies: the OGPU, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).25 Aside from their symbolic or plot function, OGPU agents are mimetic fixtures in production novels of hydroengineering. Such projects were declared not only to discipline nature but to reform workers as political subjects.26 The History of the Construction of the Belomor Canal opens with a paraphrase of Marx: “In changing nature, a person changes himself.” This model provided a framework for understanding the relationship between material and psychological de-sedimentation. The epigraph’s source, from the first book of Capital, identifies labor as “a process between man and Nature . . . by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism [Stoffwechsel] between himself and nature.” Crucially, Marx identifies man himself as “a force of nature” who attempts to control and make use of “the materials of nature” precisely

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by “set[ting] in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands. . . . Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.”27 The transformation of nature, then, is understood not only as an external act, but as an internal act that reforms the human subject. Marx proposes that humans should manage this exchange with nature “in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power.”28 By disrupting the inertia of nature through land reclamation, hydroengineering, and other such projects, the state has the power to transform its psychologically sedimented human subjects. This was the ideological basis of the linkage between the Soviet transformation of nature and the reforging of human political subjects (perekovka). Gorky picked up this thread just a few months after the Belomor Canal expedition, issuing an influential recommendation on literary themes to writers. He urged writers to show “the enormous value of physical labor, as it changes not only the form but also the quality of matter, as it masters elemental forces, creates a ‘second nature.’ ”29 Gorky defines this second nature as “socialist culture,” and identifies physical labor as its catalyst. The labor at Belomor was forced labor—only dialectical violence could disrupt the static and sedimented structures of nature and human nature. Gorky had already introduced the public to the project of reforming criminals at the earliest experimental labor camp in a series of sketches for the journal Our Accomplishments in 1929. Discussing the Bolshevo show camp outside Moscow, Gorky wrote of “the profound social and pedagogical value” of “reorganizing the criminal psyche.” Evgeny Dobrenko remarks on this link between the transformation of nature and the psyche: “The discourse of violence against nature grew into the discourse of violence against the human masses. Actually, Gorky’s favorite phrases—‘the transformation of nature’ and ‘reforging [perekovka] of human material’—are synonymous.”30 In the History of the Belomor Canal the treacherous sediments of nature and human nature are combined in the single image of quicksand (plyvun’). A practical threat to the stability of the entire canal construction, quicksand also provides a metaphor for the political unreliability of the labor force. The kulaks ordered to dig in this substance are called “human quicksand” (chelovecheskii plyvun’), and the national minorities (natsmeny) in the camp are likewise described as “loose and unsteady,” also evoking quicksand.31 Soviet construction, then, is destabilized both by archaic Russian elements (the kulaks) and by the natsmeny, who are coded as backwards, Asian, and superstitious (they drop their shovels and run in fear of the volatile substance they are digging in).32 They are the little brothers of the Great Russian nation,

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who, in a common trope, must leap “across a thousand years—from feudalism to socialism.”33 Just as quicksand must be stabilized on the construction site, the camp administration must shore up the instability of these archaic elements by “mixing” them with the “best quicksand workers [plyvushniki] from other brigades.”34 The national minorities and the class enemies in the camps are considered survivals of a deep past and are an unreliable foundation for the construction of the socialist canal. Like quicksand mixed with cement, they must be reinforced with more politically reliable laborers to complete the work. While official discourse troped Asia as the site of backwardness, to some observers the violence involved in monumental state efforts to excavate historical ground and build a new Soviet land suggested that the Soviet state was paradoxically returning to its despotic “Asiatic” origins. No sooner did the Bolsheviks seize power than observers began to describe the new order as an “Asiatic restoration.” The main outlines of this critique may be seen in Osip Mandelstam’s 1923 essay “Humanism and the Present” (“Gumanizm i sovremennost”). Mandelstam warns of the “monumentality of the forms in the social architecture that is approaching,” noting that “there are epochs which contend that they care nothing for man, that he is to be used like brick or cement, that he is to be built with, not for.” Mandelstam’s description of the new social architecture of the Soviet state makes clear the threat of a restoration of oriental despotism with its monumental forms, and he compares it to the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian empires. He concludes, “If the social architecture of the future does not have as its basis a genuinely humanistic justification, it will crush man as Assyria and Babylonia crushed him.”35 Subsequent versions of this critique, particularly during and after the Stalin period, would place special emphasis on one particular form of “Asiatic” monumentalism revived by the Soviet state: the forced-labor excavation and construction of vast systems of canals for transport and irrigation.36 In the 1950s Karl Wittfogel made a political critique of the Soviet Union as a hydraulic despotism, drawing on Karl Marx’s own model of a distinctly Asian sociopolitical order, the Asiatic mode of production (AMP).37 Marx originally proposed that the climate and geography of Asia created conditions under which strong states consolidated around massive forced-labor irrigation projects— the defining feature of the AMP. The other features associated with this mode of production were state ownership of property, state management of water and natural resources, and a ruling class of bureaucrats. Discussions of the Asiatic mode of production in the early Soviet period, then, raised questions not only about the development of the Soviet Asian periphery but also

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about the Soviet center—specifically about the legitimacy of Soviet power, given its apparent continuities with Russia’s despotic and “Asiatic” past. From the time that Marx first introduced the concept into political theory, the AMP has presented problems of interpretation for students of historical materialism, from Soviet ideologues to contemporary postcolonial scholars. Marx’s earliest discussions of a special “Eastern” social order, in his pieces on “The History of British Rule of India” for the New York Daily Mail and in his Grundrisse, were never fully integrated into his teleology of historical development, leaving others to interpret or inscribe meaning in his texts.38 Marx’s concept of the AMP evolved within a tradition of Western conceptions of the East, including that Asian peoples were “slaves by nature” (Aristotle), that the Asian climate produced “weak” nations (Montesquieu), and that Asian states were stagnant (Hegel).39 Economic theories of oriental despotism also influenced Marx’s formulation of the AMP, including the work of political economists such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. In “The British Rule in India,” Marx wrote of Asia that “climate and territorial conditions, especially the vast tracts of desert, extending from the Sahara, through Arabia, Persia, India, and Tartary, to the most elevated Asiatic highlands, constituted artificial irrigation by canals and water-works, the basis of Oriental agriculture. . . . Hence an economical function devolved upon all Asiatic Governments, the function of providing public works.” He thus explained the desertification of previously “brilliantly cultivated” regions as the result of those regions’ complete dependence “on a Central Government” for “artificial fertilization of the soil,” and consequent vulnerability to the collapse of irrigation systems in the absence of such a government. This dependence, Marx notes, “explains how a single war of devastation has been able to depopulate a country for centuries, and to strip it of all its civilization.”40 This original conception of a distinct “Asian” social order was rejected by the Stalinist regime in part because its geographically and environmentally specific model suggested a distinct path of development for the arid lands of Asia, including Soviet Central Asia. Moreover, the AMP raised questions about Russia’s own development and the legitimacy of Soviet power in the context of its Asiatic past. On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, Georgii Plekhanov had warned of a potential “restoration of our old ‘semi-Asiatic’ order.” In his History of Russian Social Thought, he wrote that “old Muscovite Russia was distinguished by its completely Asiatic character. Its social life, its administration, the psychology of its people—everything in it was alien to Europe and very closely related to China, Persia, and ancient Egypt.”41 Plekhanov declared that Russia’s leaders were either oriental despots, like Ivan the Terrible, or they used “despotic

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means to advance ‘Westernization,’ ” as in the case of Peter the Great.42 At the Stockholm Congress, Plekhanov singled out Lenin’s proposed land policies as particularly dangerous, warning, “It will be all the more easy for our restoration to return to that nationalization because you yourselves demand the nationalization of the land, because you leave that legacy of our old semi-Asiatic order intact.”43 While Lenin agreed that Russia had historically been Asiatic, he rejected Plekhanov’s fears that a premature revolution might lead to a restoration of oriental despotism and asserted that state nationalization of land differed qualitatively from Russia’s old Asiatic order. After the revolution the theoretical debate concerning the AMP was increasingly shaped by Soviet realpolitik, particularly questions about the role the Soviets should play in advancing “less developed” nations, both outside and inside Soviet borders. Chinese politics exerted the most overt influence on the Soviet discussion of the AMP in the 1920s and very early 1930s.44 But while China was the ostensible and immediate subject of this debate, the conclusions drawn had serious implications for understanding Soviet development. It was possible to critique Russia as an oriental despotism before the revolution, but this line of argument was too liable to generate suspicions that Soviet rule carried on this continuous tradition. By the early 1930s the vigorous debate surrounding the AMP was resolved, and the unilinear historical model of the piatichlenka (the five-stage model of development) became the new Party line and stilled further debates.45 The AMP was now understood as an Asian variant of feudalism, not a distinct (and self-perpetuating) historical stage of development. As Marian Sawer notes, for the next thirty years Soviet political theorists simply “read the concept out of the Marxist canon.”46 The triumph of the piatichlenka was significant because it was a rejection of site-specific models of development. Asian—and Russian—historical ground no longer had distinct properties that required a distinct path of development. This general line forcibly suppressed lurking suspicions that Russia and Asia were not ready for socialist development. In short, it was an attempt to de-sedimentize the historical foundations of Bolshevik power. But if the AMP was written out of political theory, visions of oriental despotism continued to haunt the Soviet construction site, suggesting that the matter of history remained charged. The ideological slipperiness of these works is the product of their political moment, between Stalin’s ascent to power and the schematization of plot lines and political messaging in literary narratives.47 Unlike Mandelstam, these authors do not adopt outright the narrative of the Soviet Union as an oriental despotism—indeed, they explicitly contrast oriental despotisms with Soviet

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state projects. Nonetheless, in these works the pairing remains polyvalent and charged with significance, as the theme of oriental despotism is woven into a dense texture of meanings.

Asiatic Restoration: The Moscow-Volga Canal Throughout his literary works Boris Pilniak engages with questions about Russia’s Asiatic past and its persistence in modern Russian life. Pilniak’s 1930 construction novel, The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea (Volga vpadaet v Kaspiiskoe more) depicts an ambitious hydroengineering project in the city of Kolomna, designed to reverse the course of the Moscow river and create a vast system of connecting canals and rivers. Pilniak opens with a geological creation myth, narrating the eternal dialectical struggle between water and earth: rock and soil determine the course of rivers, and they are, in turn, shaped by the erosive power of those rivers. Millennia later, Soviet power is harnessing the hydroenergy of its rivers to destroy Old Russia, symbolized by the ancient geological structures that lay underneath Moscow. Sedimentation materializes in two forms in Pilniak’s novel: fixed in geological strata and mobilized in the form of silt or sand, which threaten to inundate and desertify the Soviet heartland. Both forms of sediment threaten Soviet civilization and are troped as primitive and Asiatic. Water, which “breaks down everything,” is the vital force that captures and transforms sand into riverine silt but also erodes the millennial resistance of geological formations, allowing new channels to be created.48 Pilniak thus depicts the spontaneity-consciousness dialectic through the processes of sedimentation and de-sedimentation, and it is this geological vision of dialectical change that destabilizes the work as a production novel.49 Sediment is a crucial factor in the planning and construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal. We read that the Moscow region “was once a seabed, and the engineers carefully studied the deposits of the Jurassic, Devonian, Cambrian, Archaean epochs; the limestone, clay, coal, silica, sand, silt, and peat—the geological construction of the soil.”50 A central question is whether this ancient alluvium can support the new Soviet “monolith”—the dam that will throw back the waters of the Oka river and generate the force needed to reverse the course of the Moscow River. Monoliths, we are told, are not watertight and may subside and crack unless interlocked with watertight ground.51 These new structures, then, are stabilized by excavating unstable alluvium and welding the edifice into the deep geological layers of the Jurassic and Permean epochs: “There the granite of the continent

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and the granite brought by the will of men were cemented into geology, into the primordial.”52 The hydroengineering project will clear the historical ground under socialism and select its own point of origin in the permanence of deep time. The monolith is an attempt, in short, to petrify socialist construction. The Soviets are replacing nature with “second nature” and sedimentary rock with a concrete monolith—a new kind of sedimentary structure mixed with human consciousness and will. This attempt to immobilize dialectical change and enter geological time is fraught: the force of water, exemplary of spontaneous energy, promises to break through the inert monolith according to the law of the dialectic. The chief engineer Pimen Poletika “knew the power of water, and like all hydraulic engineers was a little afraid of that power.”53 According to the law of the dialectic, even the most carefully constructed monolith must give way to water, suggesting that Soviet power is temporal, not geological, and its monoliths will someday fall to spontaneous political forces.54 References in the novel to fallen civilizations and ruined irrigation systems also call into question the permanence of Soviet power and its structures. The engineer Poletika speaks about the fragility of Asian civilizations past: “In the memory of humanity flourishing countries have disappeared— Assyria, Babylonia, Mesopotamia. The Tigris and Euphrates were once an earthly paradise, a continuous garden; now there are sands, scorching heat, and desert.”55 Poletika appears to believe that these civilizations have fallen to the entropic forces of desertification rather than the petrifying forces of oriental despotism. In half-slumber, he thinks of how gardens that once flourished under Tamerlane have become deserts.56 It is a marked choice to associate the garden not with a golden pre-Mongol age of Eurasia (before the Mongol invasions destroyed irrigation infrastructure) but rather with Tamerlane as an archetypal oriental despot. Poletika’s dreams of the flourishing gardens of Mesopotamia and Timurid Transoxania suggest that the arid lands of Asia require irrigation works and the mobilization of labor on a scale associated with oriental despotism—or Soviet power. Poletika conceives an ambitious plan to dam the Volga River and irrigate the sandy desert of the Aral-Caspian basin.57 The project will rationally redistribute the fertile silt at the bottom of the Volga. He thinks of “how much humus is carried down by the rivers to the sea each spring, washing out of the earth the salts and chemical substances that nourish plant life. Rivers have washed out the soil for ages, leaving sand and stones, wastefully giving up to the seas all that which is needed to nourish life.”58 His plan will redistribute this fertile sediment to allow the cultivation of cotton and rice in a former

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desert—“the desert will be transformed into an ancient Mesopotamia, with rains, lakes, subtropical vegetation.”59 Poletika fears that the desert is expanding into Russia, right up to the Volga, Nizhnyi Novgorod, and the Donets Basin.60 He associates the threat of desertification with an Asian invasion, paraphrasing Vladimir Solovev’s warnings of an advancing “enemy from the East.”61 Poletika recalls the droughts of 1891 and 1921 and their effects: famine, mass migration, and cannibalism. To hold back the desert, Soviet civilization depends upon irrigation, yet such monolithic constructions are a synecdoche for the immobilizing forces of an Asiatic restoration. It is not only the advancing sands and hot winds that are Asiatic; the waterworks designed to hold back this civilizational threat also resemble the monuments of oriental despots, associated with the sacrifice of human laborers. Pilniak makes hydroengineers the common operator between technological utopia and oriental despotism. In 1931, soon after the publication of The Volga Falls, Pilniak travelled to Tajikistan, the new autonomous Soviet republic that had been carved out of the Bukharan Emirate. The writing from this trip, the material for an unfinished novel, Seventh Soviet, was published later in the same year as The Volga Falls. In Seventh Soviet, Pilniak discusses Tajik irrigation canals: “The apparatus which is known as the canal head and which, in antiquity, was built over decades with thousands of people under the direction of half-divine mirabs, . . . now is done by engineers and workers with mathematical calculations.”62 The reader must decide whether Pilniak’s text is emphasizing the contrast more than inviting comparison; one might read Pilniak’s equivalencies between the “half-divine mirabs” (officials who manage water resources in Islamic societies) and Soviet engineers to mean that Soviet power only superficially differs from the political dispensations of premodern Asia. Engineers are the middlemen between the will of the despot and the labor force needed to realize these monumental projects. The engineers Sadykov and Laslo are described as “ordering the world about by will of the Moscow Kremlin, millers of its millstones.”63 The engineers in the novel are conscious of their role in holding back the natural force of water, symbolic of the spontaneity of the masses: “Engineers know of dozens of disasters when the element of water has destroyed cities and thousands of people, washing away everything in its path.”64 They fear that their own attempts at disciplining nature may fail at any moment, destroying the petrified structures of Soviet power. Asia is not only an external threat: the Old Russia that the Soviets battle is also deeply Asian. Concern with this Asiatic past of Russia was central to Pilniak’s work. As Gary Browning observes of Pilniak’s novel The Naked Year, “The Russian people have violently and indiscriminately torn the European

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cultural overlay from a massive and durable ‘Asiatic’ substratum.”65 Pilniak’s representation of the reemergence of the primitive and Asiatic within Russian culture and psychology echoes fears of Asiatic restoration that had been live in the political sphere. In a subplot of the novel, the antique dealers Pavel and Stepan Bezdetov actually specialize in Asiatic restoration: in their workshop on “a typical Asiatic Moscow street,” the Bezdetovs collect and restore antique mahogany furniture. Each style reflects cultural tastes under a succession of Russian despots, and political epochs are laid down on the mahogany furniture like a veneer that never fundamentally alters the nature of the material.66 These restorers “construct nothing now. They merely restore antiques; but they have preserved the habits and traditions of their uncles.” The very name Bezdetov, “childless,” reflects their orientation to the past rather than the future; such men seek only to “restore dead things to full life.”67 The narrative speaks in judgment against the villainous Bezdetovs, of course, but their superficial refashioning of antiques raises the question of whether Soviet civilization, too, merely restores an old despotism with a new veneer. The complex of meanings and associations between Soviet rule and the Asian past is reinforced in the subplot of Liubov Pimenova, an archeologist and the daughter of the chief engineer, who studies the antiquities excavated from the canal bed. The Soviet construction site and the archeological site occupy the same space, collapsing past and future ruins and suggesting the eventual deterioration and re-sedimentation of the monolith as the trace of a fallen Soviet civilization that future archeologists will someday unearth. Poletika notes that even the technological utopia of Atlantis has fallen without a trace, suggesting the hubris of Soviet attempts to halt dialectical and cyclical change and petrify socialist time.68 This attempt to halt dialectical change, to petrify natural and human history, intersects in the novel with multiple views of time, which are never synchronized. The recurring theme of human mortality and the individual human life cycle competes with the epochal geological time of Soviet construction. Liubov and her mother, Olga Aleksandrovna, for example, are said to be in “friendship with the earth,” rather than at war with it, as they dig in the fragrant soil of their garden, a space of feminine kinship with nature.69 This scene of otium is contrasted with the industrial assault on the earth taking place on the nearby construction site. The narrative explicitly connects this relationship to nature with a particular way of being in time: Olga Aleksandrovna digs in the garden in order “to patch, to mend, time.”70 Liubov’s archeological work is another kind of digging in the earth, with its own kind of time. She excavates in order to recuperate the material traces of the past,

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remarking that “it is necessary to look backward in order to see the future,” an opinion echoed elsewhere in the novel.71 Although she excavates the geological layers of history, it is not with the aim of negation and she does not appear to share a geological view of time. Her father, Poletika, also seems convinced of the “law of the recurrence of events.”72 Their historical vision suggests patterns of cyclical return: if the future will resemble the past, then Soviet power is not sui generis and may not differ substantively from other past civilizations that attempted to control nature and beat back the entropic, spontaneous forces of the desert and of water. Ongoing processes of re-sedimentation also suggest cyclicality. In the course of bending the Moscow River to human will, some things will be excavated but others buried. Entire villages and lifeways will be subsumed as dams are built and rivers rechanneled. Burials in the novel are also juxtaposed with excavations, suggesting a natural equilibrium. As one burial is being prepared, machines “tear open the bowels of the earth” on the construction site.73 A second burial scene is juxtaposed with an interpolated story about a mine collapse, and the process of cremation and transformation of the human body to ash is graphically described.74 Even as the construction site is de-sedimented, the cemetery continues to grow, filled with human remains. Excavation and burial appear to be in a continuous equilibrium, with desedimentation balanced by re-sedimentation. The Volga Falls is a notoriously unstable text, and Pilniak embeds metaliterary reflections on the psychology of writing and reading as processes of sedimentation and excavation. Books appear to be sedimented objects, the immobilized traces of human consciousness. From the perspective of the morbid engineer Laslo, books are dead bodies, and the library is a “morgue” and a “crematorium.”75 Each volume is also a sedimentary layer: reaching from Goethe, to Marx, to Plekhanov, they represent epochs of history and resemble the layers of rock under the construction. This sediment haunts the present: “All this has remained in former epochs, in the pre-October period, and by inertia creeps through the communities in boxes of books.” This sediment continues to accumulate: “Marx, Lasalle, Lenin, Plekhanov . . . became the epochs. . . . Lenin is dead but his books grow and grow.”76 Even the epoch of Marx, Lenin, and Plekhanov is weakly differentiated from that of Goethe and Heine; all are accumulated history, soon to be buried. The psychological excavation and construction of the new Soviet subject is another theme of the book. Moscow, the so-called Asiatic center, from which all planning activity emanates, is punned as being “perekovany i perekopany” (reforged and re-dug).77 The term “perekovany” evokes the “reforging” (perekovka) that takes place among political criminals through

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the process of labor in camps run by the GPU, and a GPU police agent appears in the story to investigate saboteurs. The engineer Edgar Laslo is said to be writing an article on the psychological transformation of workers. He observes how seasonal workers develop the mental habits of the proletariat over several years of labor on projects like theirs, “seeing the laws of the formation of the psyche of the working class.”78 As these itinerant workers develop consciousness, visiting libraries and reading rooms, the sedimented consciousness of the bourgeoisie is simultaneously being excavated. Some of this psychoanalytic de-sedimentation takes place in evening conversations between Laslo and his fellow engineer Sadykov. Laslo remarks that they are not ready for the new life: those who are “familiar with Sodom cannot dwell in Israel—they are not fit for the Promised Land, because they remember what a gorodovoi is.”79 It is psychological habit and memory of the past that prevents Laslo, the engineer Poltorak, and the Bezdetovs—who “preserve the habits of their uncles”—from entering socialism. Laslo and Poltorak are shot, but Sadykov, a proletarian by birth, survives to carry on Poletika’s grand dreams of irrigating the desert of Central Asia. Numerous deaths aside from those of Laslo and Poltorak occur in the novel, including multiple suicides and the drowning of an old Bolshevik when his underground cave is flooded after the opening of the monolith. While we may interpret this as the justifiable death of the old (a fitting end for those described as “living corpses”), it is a reminder that all human lives—and perhaps all civilizations—will end. The engineer Poltorak introduces a discussion of violence and human sacrifice for the sake of construction. He argues that “all constructions are bloody. . . . When a canal is dug, the dam bursts through and workers are drowned . . . blood is everywhere. And the red bloody standard of the Revolution is a symbol of bloody births. When the blood disappears, then the Donets Basin will be overwhelmed by arid sands.”80 The narrator contradicts Poltorak and asserts that there are “bloodless” births and deaths. In the idiom of the novel, the deaths that take place are bloodless in the sense that they are the “natural” end of those who have outlived their historical epoch. This includes the fervent Bolshevik Ozhogov who drowns in his underground cave. Ozhogov is described as a man stuck in the era of war communism—a zealous revolutionary left behind by the new epoch. Ozhogov tells his comrades that “a bloodless revolution has now begun, a period of building, when we must fear and be ashamed of blood.”81 He calls for a third revolution, after the social and cultural revolutions—a revolution of “conscience.”82 Ozhogov’s brother, the madman Skudrin, voices an unambiguous critique of Soviet hydroengineering as a restoration of oriental despotism: “Not only are the Bolsheviks letting the Moscow River run

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backward, but also Russia. . . . It is permissible to kill; human life is cheap. . . . We have no men; we have organizations.”83 Poltorak further echoes this when he refers to murder without blood as “statistical, numerical” murder.84 In the midst of this politically sensitive content, Lev Trotsky’s name appears in a vague conversation about the river turning backwards, and Laslo remarks to Sadykov that Moses “lost his way in the deserts just as we do in Trotskyism.”85 Trotsky, then, is associated with the entropic forces of the desert, opposed to the petrifying forces of the hydraulic state that the Soviet Union has become and that engineers like Laslo and Sadykov administer (“millers of its millstones”). Is the reversal of the Moscow River a triumph of engineering or a forcible return of the river of history back to the sociopolitical order of oriental despotism? Irene MasingDelic argues that although the novel “conforms to the demands of the political climate,” Trotsky remains an ideological touchstone of the text. Masing-Delic identifies Trotsky’s influence on the text’s ethos of controlling nature, yet as we have seen, an Aesopian reading of his place in the text might also rest on the identification of Trotsky with the spontaneous forces of revolution that cannot be controlled.86 Pilniak’s novel is layered and slippery, and it must have supported, even in Pilniak’s mind, multiple, even competing, interpretations. How otherwise can we make sense of Pilniak offering The Volga Falls to Stalin as one of “my bricks that are in our construction”?87

De-sedimenting Asian History: Vakhsh Canal Just a year after Pilniak’s novel, the Polish-born Soviet writer Bruno Jasien´ski published the novel Man Changes His Skin, which depicts the shock work to construct a canal along the Vakhsh River in Tajikistan, in order to irrigate 80,000 hectares of land that have already been plowed and sown with cotton. The gripping novel is both a “Red Pinkerton”—a genre of Soviet detective thriller—and a production novel. Man Changes His Skin was published serially in the journal Novyi mir between 1932 and 1933 to immense popular and critical acclaim; between 1934 and 1935, it went through nine full print editions in Russian and at least two in English.88 As in Pilniak’s novel, sediment may be mobile or fixed. It takes the form of silt, grave ash, loess dust, and sand; it constitutes the rock layers that must be excavated from the canal bed that winds through the holy Kata-Tag mountain on its way to the Vakhsh plain. The qualities of soil and rock—alternately unstable and implacable—present the main technical challenges for the engineers on the site, and Jasien´ski introduces the reader to a number of soil

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terms, including loess (lyoss), loam (supes’), and gray soil (serozem). Sediment threatens development in so many forms: soil is washed away by rivers as silt or blown away as dust, leaving farmers to starve; shifting sands “swallowed up whole caravans and settlements.”89 The fine loess dust ruins the excavation machines, and the local earth makes for unstable building material, subject to landslides and washouts. The chief question confronting Soviet power in Tajikistan is whether this earth that “had lain untouched for centuries” can be reformed.90 The Europeans see Central Asia as an empty “primeval landscape,” a monotonously drab panorama where even the buildings—made of clay—seem to have arisen directly from the earthen landscape.91 The people, too, appear to be earthen, and the “legend about god fashioning the image of man out of clay” is attributed to them.92 Sedimentation appears to be the process that has produced the landscape, constructions, and people of the Vakhsh plain. These forms of sediment correspond to the human material that Soviet power must rework: those who are politically inert, associated with sedimentary rock, and those who are unsteady and require reinforcement, associated with mobile sediment. The construction work accomplishes a unified transformation on these geological and political planes: the excavation and mobilization of inert sediment and the fixing in place of mobile sediment through construction, irrigation, and cultivation on the Vakhsh plain. The conflation of the material and the political is illustrated by Kata-Tag mountain, whose loose gray soil poses particular technical challenges to the engineers and workers. It is soft and unstable, threatening to wash out and collapse the canal embankment at any moment. It is suggested that this unstable “gray soil” is the remains of the dead, a gothic animation of the deposits of history, acting from the graveyard to sabotage Soviet construction. Morozov, the chief engineer, explains: “The problem of Kata-Tag is really a question of the soil. In order that the water may not seep through and wash away the dike, we want a firm soil. But just at this point we encounter a sort of gray soil. The local inhabitants call it ‘grave ash.’ In its color and its shifting character it really does resemble ashes. . . . On its summit there is a small graveyard, or mazar, where the ashes of certain Mohammedan saints have been resting from ancient times. . . . The geological structure of the mountain is highly unreliable.” Morozov transmits the local myth that the gray soil is “grave ash” that must not be disturbed. But the Tajik engineer, Urtabaev, argues that the gray soil is actually the “ancient deposits [il] which covered the bed and strengthened the banks of the old canal.”93 Whether its source is “grave ash” or “silt” from the ancient canal, this gray soil is the unstable sediment of the ancient Asian past, a precarious foundation for construction.94 The engineers

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decide to line the dikes with clay and reinforce the gray soil by mixing it with “more reliable soil.”95 Excavation and reinforcement are the tools the team uses to Bolshevize this Asian land. To open the canal bed the brigade must excavate two million cubic meters of earth per month, using a limited number of mechanical excavators and a ragtag workforce equipped with mattocks and shovels.96 All of this labor is “but a drop in the ocean of unturned earth.”97 The narrative dwells on the drama of this excavation. Once the upper stratum of smaller rocks has been removed, “the teeth of the excavators clanked helplessly as they scraped its surface. At this point workers would leap down into the canal bed and commence blasting the rock with ammonal.” There follows a “brief artillery bombardment before the attack, and when the sixteenth explosion had thundered out, men would rush headlong down the slope with mattocks held like bayonets to break up the loosened earth.”98 Excavation and reinforcement also take place in the human psyche, as the OGPU police agent Komarenko works to expose and shore up the old “human material” on the construction site. Jasien´ski’s plot contains many of the standard tropes of the production novel, including sabotage plots by Basmachi rebels, superstitious Muslim elders, and wreckers in the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem). But in addition to deliberate wrecking, the authorities also confront the underdeveloped consciousness of workers on the site, a motley workforce of national minorities who must be reformed through labor. One engineer explains that “imperfections are inevitable in all Asian development. If I started letting workers go for that, we’d soon have nobody left. You have to be satisfied with the labor power you have. No good worker would come to work in these conditions.”99 A young Party official further explains to the visiting American engineer, Clark, that given the primitive “human material” (chelovecheskii material) with which they have started to build, the Party must train (vospityvat’) the workers, or they will “probably not be able to complete even one construction work.”100 This reform is accomplished through labor and ideological reinforcement by more stable elements, represented by the Party. Those who cannot be reinforced through labor must be exposed and excavated. Jasien´ski also links the excavation of sedimentary layers of earth to the shedding of human skin, as alluded to in the book’s title. The Chekist Komarenko explains to an American engineer that his generation has destroyed the capitalist order but not yet attained communism, when “man will finally cast off, like a husk, his whole skin.”101 This process of change is painful and violent, as the surface cannot be so easily removed from the layers beneath: “The old skin has grown on him so that sometimes it has to be ripped off

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together with the flesh. . . . Many of those who in 1917, in 1920, in 1923 were sauntering about in the new skin with enviable ease and facility, are beginning to ail and lag behind. This is not a sign of fatigue; it means that fragments of the old skin that have not been torn off are beginning to rot, thereby infecting the whole organism.”102 The primitive psychology and habitus of Komarenko’s generation is connected to deeper strata. Jasien´ski closes the circle of these metaphors by comparing the skin that must be torn off to the surface of the earth that must be penetrated. In an apocryphal folktale interpolated into the novel, a thirsty camel perishes and its dry skin expands to cover the Vakhsh plain, transforming it into an arid desert: “the earth covered by this skin has withered.”103 As in Pilniak’s novel, water is the dynamic force that shapes geological structures and mobilizes sediment. The Vakhsh River cuts “like a heavy sabre blow hacking at the foot of the mountain.”104 But the river, uncontrolled, washes the people downriver like sediment: “Every year the river Vakhsh coming down with all the force of a glacial mountain river carried away part of the land on its left bank and washed away the main aryk [canal] system of the population. The latter were compelled gradually to move downstream, continually choosing fresh sites for their irrigation works.”105 The poor Vakhsh farmers who eke out a living on the steep mountain banks must carry bags of soil on their own backs uphill to their plots, where they “ram it down in a thick layer on the bare rock.”106 This is all in vain, as water continually washes the soil back downhill. Uncontrolled water is a dispersive force that carries away the black treasure of the soil, its fertility inaccessible as long as it is suspended as silt. Soviet power must control and socialize this hydropower; the Vakhsh itself, if channeled appropriately, can liquidate the age-old geological structures of Asia. The rock excavated from the canal bed is dumped into the silty river [v mut’ reki], which carries it downstream, instead of taxing workers or precious machines. When the Menk excavator stops working on the construction site, the team replaces it with a high-pressure jet of water that literally liquidates rock, carrying its minerals away as a slurry.107 It is a technologically mediated acceleration of the natural erosive processes by which the river washes away rock as silt. The ultimate goal of harnessing this hydropower is the cultivation of the plain. Like the thin layer of soil laid down on bare rock, agriculture does not go deeply enough in Central Asia. It is the goal of Soviet power to deepen Soviet culture and agriculture, changing the structure of life by irrigating and sowing cotton on a scale that only a strong central authority could manage. Once the plain is irrigated, the people of Central Asia will settle as cotton farmers and transition to a

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higher stage of development. Tajik, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz settlers are moving to the valley in droves to farm this “virgin land” (tselina), and the tractor drivers and construction workers form a “million-strong army that was besieging the infinite shifting sands.”108 This mass mobilization of Asian labor—described as a “Tower of Babel”—raises questions about the politics of this monumental irrigation project. The ruins of past irrigation works haunt the landscape, suggesting comparisons with the Vakhsh project. Clark’s Russian translator says: “You may have noted that the plain bears traces of ancient irrigation. According to legend, this whole valley was irrigated and thickly populated in the time of Alexander the Great.”109 The new canal is weakened at its point of intersection with the old canal, where the sediment of these ancient constructions—the gray soil—is deposited. Is Soviet power a new oriental despotism whose works are likewise destined to fall into ruin? The newly appointed chief engineer, Kirsh, gives space in the text to fears of the return of oriental despotism under Bolshevik power. He is a reformed criminal, guilty of sabotage and ideological deviation. He explains his former beliefs: “I was outraged by the wasteful inefficiency of the Revolution: I saw how today they would meaninglessly destroy what tomorrow would have to be rebuilt. I saw how valid and good ideas turned in practice into a caricature due to the clumsiness of the hands that implemented them. I was repelled by this Asiatic version of socialism. I told myself that this country must first get ordinary Western culture and then we could venture a conversation about socialism.”110 Kirsh’s dangerous doubts were corrected by the OGPU, and he is a successful example of political reforging. But the attempt to also instruct and discipline the reader, to redirect any doubts, may produce ambivalence. The process of educating new Soviet citizens, of reshaping “human material,” is a violent one, as Jasien´ski notes. The tragic fate of several workers in the canal bed underscores this violence. Has Soviet power established the “Asiatic version of Socialism” that Kirsh suspected, as it reshapes the “human material” of the Asian workforce? In the process of excavating Kata-Tag, the ashes of the dead “Mohammedan saints” are effectively replaced with those of Soviet workers. The excavation dislodges a large block of stone, which falls and crushes several Persian workers. A “bloody flattened mass” is carried upwards on the conveyor belt designed to lift soil and rock from the canal bed. The Persian worker belongs to a “backwards nationality,” coded as Asian and historically inert like the sediment and rock he is excavating. He is “old material,” doomed to be repurposed into building material. The monolith of Soviet construction consumes bodies, which must be re-excavated from the site.

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Postscript: Sergei Eisenstein’s The Great Fergana Canal The texts at the center of this chapter, related to canal projects of the early 1930s, express the fear that the sedimentation of a despotic Asiatic past threatens the socialist future. I will close with another work, attempted after the height of the Ezhov purges, that combines the myths and motifs repeated throughout this chapter, but with a meaning that was unambiguous and that made the work’s completion impossible. In June 1939 Sergei Eisenstein and his cameraman Eduard Tisse scouted locations in Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara for a new film devoted to the Fergana Canal, a 240-mile long canal to irrigate the Fergana Valley in Central Asia. The canal was completed with 20,000 Central Asian workers in just forty-five days;111 that summer Eisenstein, together with Petr Pavlenko, the author of several fictional works and sketches on Turkmenistan, wrote the script for The Great Fergana Canal in three days.112 Eisenstein had plans for depicting the “kingdom of sand” as a nomadic force advancing upon the ancient civilization of Urgench—threatening both its architecture and its fertile fields.113 Eisenstein uses a readily available trope: the oriental despots of Central Asia are represented by hostile natural forces. Sand is the historical sediment that threatens the architecture and infrastructure of civilization in Asia. While the goal of the project was to contrast the despotic past of Central Asia with the Soviet “people’s construction project,” Eisenstein was fully aware of the meanings that his comparison might unleash. In an article he wrote on the film project for Pravda, Eisenstein wonders “how the real future will grow out of the depths of what is past.”114 Elsewhere in the article Eisenstein refers to the canal itself as a “creative reconstruction.”115 Is the canal a restoration of a previous golden age before the tyrants of Asia destroyed the irrigation works, or is the Great Fergana Canal the work of a new tyrant— namely, Stalin? Naum Kleiman argues that Eisenstein found the project itself coercive. Two of Eisenstein’s sketches from the period suggest this: a human figure bashing its head against a minaret, and another with a revolver to its head with the English caption “That’s how I do feel.” In the original script for the film, the emir of Khiva orders that the blood of enemy captives be mixed into the clay of the city walls instead of water. In revenge, Tamerlane builds a tower encasing the Khivans in clay while they are still alive. In his diary Viktor Shklovsky confirms that Eisenstein told him that “the cement for buildings in Central Asia was sometimes mixed with blood.”116 Kleiman argues that these scenes were suppressed in the approved script because the association

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with the political events of 1939 was unmistakable.117 Although The Great Fer­ gana Canal was never completed, Kleiman argues that Eisenstein repurposed his sketch of Tamerlane for the eponymous despot of his next film, Ivan the Terrible. Ivan’s list of victims is described in Eisenstein’s notes as “Tamburlaine’s Tower.”118 In Eisenstein’s vision there is a clear line of succession from Tamerlane to Ivan, from the oriental despot to the Russian despot, reviving fears of Asiatic restoration, as Soviet civilization is re-sedimented with bodies. The consecration of national soil with the bodies of the dead is a standard convention of modern nation-building. As Katherine Verdery notes, “Gravesites, ancestors, and nation-state formation are interconnected.”119 In keeping with Herder’s myth of the transformation of the ancestral burial ground into the homeland, only bodies could sacralize the Soviet construction site and cement a new Soviet nation. But it was the willful human sacrifice involved in monumental state efforts to excavate historical ground and build a new Soviet land through canals, dams, and other hydraulic infrastructure that led some observers to suggest that the Soviet state was thereby returning to its despotic “Asiatic” origins. This chapter has attempted an archaeology of the layers of meanings and associations that accumulated in early Soviet cultural production and were then figured as the sediment, silt, ash, and quicksand under the Soviet construction site. Soil is the symbol of historical accumulation and the primitive foundation—usually coded as “Asiatic”— beneath the surface of Soviet modernity. Whether it is in the artifacts excavated from the Moscow canal bed, the ashes of dead “Mohammedan saints,” the sands threatening civilization, or the cement mixed with blood, a primitive Asian foundation was feared to undermine Soviet construction. In the works discussed here, the very attempt to excavate and reform this deep geological structure, to de-sediment “tsarist territory” and re-sediment it into “true Bolshevik soil,” results in a further hardening of the Asiatic despotism of the state. Russia and its former imperial possessions in Asia are understood to be locked in the stagnancy of oriental despotism, unable to excavate this age-old historical sedimentation and build anew. As Mandelstam wrote, the Soviet subject is a “brick or cement” that is to be built with, not for—indeed, these bodies are buried in the construction site, cemented into the historical foundation of Soviet civilization.

Ch a p ter 5

Wasteland Platonov’s Dialectics of Waste and Recuperation

Vittoria Di Palma observes that the term wasteland originally referred to land that “stood apart from or outside of human culture.”1 In English translations of the Bible, wasteland was rendered from the Latin terra deserta, denoting an empty land, and the Russian equivalent, pustyr’, is also etymologically related to “emptiness” and “desert.” In the Russian imagination a wasteland was a space that was unproductive and empty of life or human culture. Wasteland could be found in the heartland of Russia, in swamps and other impoverished spaces of Russian nature, untouched by the improvements of labor, science, and capital. But in a cultural imagination characterized by “arboreal chauvinism,” the arid environments on the Russian and Soviet periphery most often figured as wasteland—wild and unproductive spaces inhabited by unconquerable nomad pastoralists and ethnic Others, from Turkic nomads to the “small peoples” of the Far North and East.2 Borderland colonization and the introduction of agriculture was a state practice for bringing these wastelands into productivity and rallying their populations out of historical inertia into modernity, two tasks encapsulated in the Soviet key term osvoenie (assimilation).3 This chapter explores the complex of ideas in the work of writer and land reclamation engineer Andrei Platonov, whose encounter with the Kara-Kum Desert stimulated new reflections on the place of waste in history and the role of wasteland— as vibrant and resistant matter—in Stalinist development. 91

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Conquering the Desert The Kara-Kum (or Black Sand) Desert of central Turkmenistan briefly became a Soviet cultural obsession when in July 1933 a team of twentyone cars, mostly from the Gorky and Stalin auto plants, embarked on the Moscow−Kara-Kum−Moscow motor rally. Pravda and Izvestiia ran frontpage stories on the expedition and followed the team over the course of nearly three months and ten thousand kilometers as they forded streams, climbed sand dunes, and traversed the roadless “white spots” on the map of Turkmenistan. In addition to promoting the new Soviet automobile industry and inaugurating exploration of a little-studied environment, the expedition had the effect of fixing the remote Kara-Kum Desert in the new Soviet cultural geography and installing it in the public imagination. The insuperable Kara-Kum, “the largest sandy desert in the world,” was represented to the Soviet public not only as a test of Soviet technology but an environmental, economic, and cultural challenge to Soviet civilization.4 The journal USSR in Construction ran a two-page photomontage with the caption: “In the places where lay the lifeless sands of Kara-Kum, cotton fields will bloom. And in the places where dead clay cities have been drifted over with sand for thousands of years, new cities, socialist cities, will arise.”5 The project to transform Kara-Kum into a garden of socialism was widely and successfully propagandized, not only in newspapers and journals but also memoirs, children’s books, and even a film produced by Roman Karmen and Eduard Tisse. Over the course of the following two years, Kara-Kum was the site of several cultural and scientific expeditions and the subject of high-profile development projects. The centerpiece of the Soviet campaign to “socialize” Kara-Kum was a plan by the Academy of Sciences to irrigate the desert and grow cotton by diverting one of the great rivers of Central Asia, the Amu Darya, from the Aral Sea to the Caspian, simultaneously creating the conditions for the largely nomadic Turkmens to transform into a settled, modern nation. In the summer of 1934, the Academy of Sciences sent an expedition to investigate the feasibility of the plan, and the glossy illustrated journal USSR in Construction reported that if the river project succeeded, Kara-Kum “would become the granary of the world.”6 The project to irrigate Kara-Kum was even singled out as an exemplary topic for fiction at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow that summer. The writer and engineer M. Ilin declared, “Many times, people have spoken of the desert, or of the Amu Darya. . . . The river is now unstable. It is ready to break through the barriers on its path to the Caspian Sea, rush into it and irrigate Turkmeniia. . . . This is one of those examples of

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Figure 1.  Photomontage of the Kara-Kum desert. USSR in Construction, no. 2, 1934. Ne Boltai! collection.

the type of story that can be seized by the author of scientific-fiction books [nauchno-khudozhestvennye knigi], for the fate of rivers, the fate of nature, the fate of things is tied here to the fate of mankind, the fate of socialism.”7 A brigade of Russian writers had been dispatched to Turkmenistan that very spring to help develop local literature in advance of the Writers’ Congress and to collect literary material for a volume to commemorate the republic’s tenth anniversary.8 Among them was Andrei Platonov, whose posthumously published novella about Turkmenistan, Dzhan (Soul, completed in 1935), drew on material gathered over the course of two trips to Turkmenistan, including a ten-day sojourn into the desert of Kara-Kum.9 Platonov brought a long-standing interest in the transformation of desert environments, as well as special technical expertise, to the problems of development in the Kara-Kum Desert, and he was invited to join not only Gorky’s writers’ brigade but also the Academy of Sciences’ expedition to assess the feasibility of the Amu Darya irrigation project.10 From approximately 1922 to 1927, Platonov had worked for the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture (Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Narkomzem) as a regional land reclamation engineer (meliorator), a period during which he wrote scores of newspaper articles and several short works of fiction on drought, desertification, and the irrigation of arid lands.11 Platonov’s major fiction demands re-examination in

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relation to his early career in land reclamation and the questions about land and human engineering that it generated. Dzhan, specifically, may be read as an artifact of the brief Soviet cultural obsession in the early 1930s with Kara-Kum and the problems encountered when developing it, as filtered through Platonov’s unique experience working in arid environments. Literary scholarship on Dzhan has not placed it in this historical or biographical context; the novella’s landscape, to the contrary, has been a privileged site of interpretation for its apparent lack of geographical indexicality and its abstraction as an archeocultural site of biblical, Sufi, Zoroastrian, Greek, and Russian mythologies.12 I read the desert landscape of Dzhan not as a purely mythological topos, but as a historically and materially determined space. Platonov’s novella constitutes a response to specific Soviet development projects, shaped fundamentally by the ongoing discourses of soil discussed in previous chapters. Reading Platonov within a continuous tradition of Russian materialism and discourse of soil reveals new dimensions of his art and shows how old myths found new expression in the age of Soviet development. As an intervention in the ideological and scientific debates on development of the early 1930s, Dzhan may be the fiction work most symptomatic of Platonov’s evolving concerns as a meliorator. On its surface Dzhan tells the story of a mission to claim souls for socialism, not the mission to irrigate and cultivate the desert. Yet the relationship between the “fate of rivers” and the “fate of socialism”—as Ilin proposed at the Congress of Soviet Writers— is central to Platonov’s tale of the Dzhan as a nation on the fringes of both Soviet historical narrative and socialist construction at the end of the first Five-Year Plan. Platonov understands the nomadic Dzhan and the black sands of Kara-Kum to be the products of similar historical and ecological processes, and he thus asserts that Turkmenistan’s path to socialism demands an integrated reform of nation and nature. While Platonov does not directly address the monumental river project in the plot for his novella, its traces appear there, pointing to a signifying absence, an approach to the development of Turkmenistan that Platonov rejects, implicitly in his fiction and explicitly in his essays of the period. Read as a novella of environmental and social development at the periphery, Dzhan earnestly engages with what could be called vernacular socialism and its metafictional corollary: how to tell an authentic story of the local conditions of socialist development.13 Arif Dirlik uses the term vernacular socialism to mean the “authentic nationalization of socialism: bringing it into the voices of its local social and cultural environment.”14 Similarly, I use the term here to suggest a vision of socialism focused on praxis, lived experience, and

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the distinctive conditions of local environments. As Thomas Osbourne has observed, Platonov’s work is concerned not just with utopia but with “actually existing utopia.”15 There is evidence that Platonov’s practical experience as a meliorator with the problems of arid lands reoriented his attitude to the “war with nature” toward the problems of “actually existing socialism” and the resistances and excesses of nature under working conditions. Platonov had already taken a critical, even satirical, view of Soviet-style Prometheanism in his works of the late 1920s. But in his writings on Turkmenistan, he reveals the changing sense of his responsibilities not only as a writer but as an environmental thinker. Transcending both Prometheanism and satire, these works offer a nuanced vision of socialist development, and they attempt to formulate solutions with a basis in authentic local conditions and praxes. In the Soviet cultural geography of the early 1930s, Kara-Kum was contested territory just at the border of the increasingly homogenized ideological landscape of Stalinism, and its peripheral status made it a unique staging ground for Platonov’s thought experiment in vernacular socialism in its national and natural development. In addition to its attention to Kara-Kum’s specific ecology, Dzhan presents an alternative to two totalizing Soviet master narratives that were forming in the early 1930s: in the political domain, new MarxistLeninist-Stalinist doctrine on modes of production, and in the literary domain, the socialist realist plot. In the summer of 1934, the aesthetic values and potentialities of socialist realism were consolidated and defined at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. In the same period, as discussed in the previous chapter, a crucial ideological debate concerning Marxist models of historical development—specifically, modes of production—resolved into a consensus supporting the five-stage unilinear model of historical development called the piatichlenka, which devalued the explanatory significance of local conditions and subsumed national historiography within a Stalinist master narrative. Platonov’s novella responds to this ideological context: the Dzhan people fall outside the “natural” laws of the piatichlenka and the paradigms of Stalinist historical development, and this fact has ramifications not only for interpreting the history of this fictional nation but also for the plotting of their future development and integration into the socialist realist narrative. Dzhan, then, is a text whose critique of Stalinist models of national and natural development requires it to take on the aesthetic work of remapping the socialist realist plot. As a practicing land reclamation engineer, Platonov reworks many of the discourses and myths of soil examined in previous chapters, placing them in a new ideological landscape. In Dzhan old myths take on new forms: the mineral cycle is literalized as the practice of geophagia among the Dzhan tribe; desertification, nomadism, and Asiatic

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restoration are reconfigured as a complex of myths for the Soviet multinational age; and the transformation of nature and human nature proceed in a slow, grudging dialectic that challenges the Promethean attitude associated with Marxist and Soviet theories of development. This chapter opens with a discussion of the arc of Platonov’s writings on the desert from 1921 to 1927, the final year that he worked for Narkomzem in the provinces of southern Russia and focuses specifically on Platonov’s appropriation of the Solovevian discourse of the battle with the “Asian” desert (discussed in chapter 1 of this book). The next section considers new directions in Platonov’s writings on the desert following his first trip to Turkmenistan, focusing on two texts from 1934: an environmental manifesto, “On the First Socialist Tragedy” (“O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii”), and an essay specifically addressing the development of Kara-Kum, “The Hot Arctic” (“Goriachaia Arktika”). Reading these texts alongside Dzhan and situating the novella in its original discursive, historical, and ideological contexts, we gain a fuller understanding not only of Platonov’s account of the history and future of the desert and its nomadic inhabitants but also of the method by which this tale of socialist development at the periphery comments on the ideological concerns of the center.

Literator as Meliorator: Platonov’s Career with Narkomzem in the 1920s Nearly fifteen years before Platonov wrote Dzhan, the devastating Volgaregion drought of 1921 galvanized him into what he termed the “battle with the desert.”16 Although he had already enjoyed some literary success with the publication of his first book of poetry, The Blue Depth (Golubaia glubina, 1921), Platonov explained that the drought precipitated his decision to commit himself primarily to melioratsiia (land reclamation or land improvement) rather than literature: “What a bore [Kakaia skuka],” Platonov wrote in August 1921, “only to write about the suffering millions, when you could feed them.”17 Later revisiting this decisive moment, Platonov wrote that “the drought of 1921 made an incredibly strong impression on me, and, being a technician, I could no longer occupy myself with the contemplative affair of literature.”18 Platonov graduated from the Voronezh Polytechnic Institute in 1921 and began working as a regional meliorator for Narkomzem in 1922. During the 1920s Narkomzem was the primary Soviet state organ charged with melioratsiia, and its broad mandate was to “improve” land through a wide variety of interventions: irrigation, drainage, soil management, land resurfacing, erosion control,

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and the planting of shelter belts, activities that Platonov describes in diaries, newspaper articles, and memoranda from the period.19 Over the course of five years, Platonov waged war against the desert as both a meliorator and a literator (writer). Viktor Shklovsky, following his brief encounter with Platonov on an agitational trip through the provinces in 1925, took special note of the young meliorator’s concern with buffering southern Russia against desertification: “Here they are cleaning the rivers, straightening them, draining swamps, and sprinkling lime on the fields to control acidity. So that is how they cleaned up Tikhaia Sosna. Comrade Platonov is very busy. The desert is advancing.”20 As Shklovsky observed, although Platonov engaged in a variety of land reclamation efforts, his greatest concern was with desertification, drought, and the irrigation of arid lands. Platonov experimented with his own designs for motors and pumps for small-scale irrigation in Voronezh, and his semiautobiographical story “The Motherland of Electricity” (“Rodina elektrichestva”) describes how a young technician resourcefully uses a motorcycle engine to irrigate fields in a provincial Russian village. A young Voronezh poet, Z. S. Markina, described her visit to Platonov’s experimental field to see his own irrigation system: “The motor pounded nearby, and water gushed out. Andrei said that the water should irrigate the earth and started to tell me about unfamiliar things, Turkmenistan, the sands which also need to drink water; he said that water is life and people must take care of the earth.”21 Soon after joining Narkomzem, Platonov was appointed to chair the Provincial Committee on the Artificial Irrigation of Arid Lands and in the same year wrote one of his earliest works on irrigation of the desert, the sciencefiction sketch “Doklad upravleniia rabot po gidrifikatsii Tsentral’noi Asii” (“Report of the Administration of Irrigation Works of Central Asia”), later used in the story “The Ethereal Tract” (“Efirnyi trakt”). Written in the form of an official technical report addressed to Vladimir Lenin, Gleb Krzhizhanovskii, Aleksei Gastev, and others, the piece describes in fanciful detail a system to harness geothermal energy to irrigate over a million desiatini of Asian land.22 One defense that Platonov proposed against the apocalyptic threat of desertification was the expansion of agriculture to Russia’s arid southern borderlands by means of irrigation. Platonov writes that “the problem of our age is the conquest of the steppes and deserts, the arming of Russian agriculture with agronomy and technology in order to extend it to the steppes and deserts.”23 He even adds desert irrigation to Lenin’s famous formula of Soviet power plus electrification: “Communism is the realization of a concrete set of tasks: electrification (and general industrialization) of

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production and agriculture and the overcoming of the deserts by means of hydrological improvements.”24 Throughout the period of his Voronezh journalism, Platonov elaborated a mythology of Russian drought and desertification that marked the desert symbolically as an “Asian” invader, associated with nomad culture. Platonov attributes the historical formation of deserts to the failure of “Asian” civilizations, writing that “the Sahara, Gobi, and sandy rivers of Asia are the excrement of irrational cultures that lay in sandy graves they have prepared for themselves.”25 He further warns that southern Russia is the battle zone of this Asian environmental and cultural threat: “An arid zone is moving farther and farther inland, deep into the province—the desert is overtaking us; from the southeast, the heat of Turkestan and the dry climate of the plateaus of Central Asia are already breathing in our face across the steppe.”26 Platonov’s marking of this environmental threat as “Asian” places him in a continuous discourse of desertification reaching back to Solovev. Platonov warns that Turkmenistan’s hot winds are “breathing” into southern Russia.27 Referring to one alleged cause of the 1891 drought, the hot wind from Central Asia called the sukhovei, Platonov writes, “Our soil is being eaten away by ravines and deadened by the sukhovei (in our region the tongue of the desert has already pushed in from the southeast), acidic bogs are spreading, and a fine sand is conquering.”28 His reference to the threat of ravines also points to Solovev’s punning title: the vrag (enemy) comes from an ovrag (ravine).29 One year later Platonov echoed this warning: “We mainly have to entrench ourselves against Asia, against the heat and sand of Turkestan. . . . By doing this, southeastern Europe will be saved from drought, and Russia will be saved from hunger.”30 In addition to these sources, Platonov demonstrated broad familiarity with fin-de-siècle scientific works on desertification by Vasilii Dokuchaev (discussed in chapter 1); the climatologist Aleksandr Voeikov, who wrote on the irrigation of Turkestan; and the expatriate Russian geographer Petr Kropotkin, whose 1904 essay “The Desiccation of Eur-Asia” argued that desertification was spreading from Central Asia to Russia.31 Platonov synthesizes these diverse influences, merging scientific and mystico-historical worldviews. Paraphrasing Kropotkin, and adding a touch of Solovevian millennialism, Platonov writes, “Kropotkin says somewhere, on the basis of scientific research, that the fate of southeastern Europe (our regions) is the same as the fate of Central Asia: desiccation, starvation, extermination.”32 By the late 1920s Platonov’s writings on the “war with nature” had become less militant and more satirical, perhaps as a result of increasing

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disillusionment with his work with Narkomzem. In letters written during his assignment to Tambov from 1926–1927, he complains of “squabbling and terrible intrigues” within Narkomzem, a lack of expertise among staff, and resistance from the local laborers.33 In his free hours in Tambov, Platonov turned to a story depicting the failure of a large hydroengineering project and the martyring of its engineer. The story, “The Locks of Epifan” (“Epifanskie shliuzy,” 1927), offers a key to understanding Platonov’s choices in plotting Dzhan. Another work that anticipates the themes of Platonov’s later writings on Kara-Kum was the 1927 story “The Teacher of the Sands” (“Peschanaia uchitel’nitsa”), which closed out the first period of Platonov’s literary works on the problems of deserts and desertification. The story describes the struggles of a village schoolteacher who learns methods of land reclamation and helps to transition nomads to settled agriculture on the “border of the dead Central Asian desert.”34 Platonov’s story abandons the grandiose and the Promethean to explore small, local responses to drought and desertification, prefiguring his works of the 1930s on the development of the Kara-Kum Desert.

“The Dialectics of Nature in Kara-Kum” Platonov’s trip to Turkmenistan occurred during a distinct moment in global environmental history. In the spring of 1934, the United States had the worst drought in its history, and dust became a global obsession as great “black blizzards” of eroded topsoil swept the American plains. The American environmental catastrophe, which came to be known as the Dust Bowl, generated an international discussion about desertification and the future of agriculture.35 Although the Soviet press attributed the American environmental crisis to the rapacious expansion of capitalist agriculture, the first Five-Year Plan mandated similarly rapid agricultural expansion to previously uncultivated arid lands and would, likewise, create extensive erosion.36 In 1929, at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan, Ilin had written, “Our steppes will truly become ours only when we come with columns of tractors and plows to break the thousand-year-old virgin soil.”37 The breaking of the thousandyear-old tselina and the transformation of steppe into farmland was regarded as a means of buffering against an encroaching desert that, even in the 1930s, was troped as “Asian.” Gorky, in his programmatic article of 1931, “On the Battle with Nature” (“O bor’be s prirodoi”) continued Solovev’s rhetoric on the war with drought: “What is the battle with drought and what does it require? From the east, from the sandy steppes heated by the sun, through the

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so-called ‘Kalmyk gate,’ a hot wind blows in a broad band to the northwest— the ‘sukhovei.’ . . . It brings with it a fine sandy dust, clogging fertile soils with it, reducing their fertility.”38 Gorky identifies an “eastern” threat to the fertile soils of grain-growing regions and proposes irrigation and the planting of shelter belts as the first steps in the war with this Asian enemy, much as Platonov had in the 1920s. By the early 1930s Platonov himself appeared to be moving away from Gorky’s “war with nature” and Solovev’s “enemy from the east.” He had already questioned the effectiveness of large-scale hydroengineering projects in “The Locks of Epifan,” and in his work “The First Ivan” (“Pervyi Ivan,” 1930) he had even broached the possibility that desertification was manmade, writing that “contemporary methods of exploiting the soil [pochva] are, of course, the reason for the formation of deserts.”39 But his trip to Turkmenistan in 1934 moved him to seek out new models for understanding nature and society. In his travel notebook Platonov gnomically jotted down, “The dialectics of nature in K[ara]kum.”40 This idea was the seed of what could be considered an environmental manifesto, “On the First Socialist Tragedy” (1934). Here, Platonov problematizes the conventions of the “war with nature”: Nature is not great and is not abundant. More precisely, she is so cruelly designed that she has not yet yielded her greatness and her abundance to anyone. This is a good thing, otherwise—in historical time—we would long ago have stolen, squandered, and drunk nature down to her very bones. There has always been enough appetite. If the physical world had not had a single law, in fact, its most fundamental law— the law of the dialectic—in a few brief centuries people would have destroyed the world completely and in vain.41 Platonov praises the law of the dialectic for protecting nature and driving humanity toward further development. In contrast to the Promethean attitudes of his earlier works, this essay no longer presents nature as a “blind” and irrational adversary but as a “teacher,” protecting against an immature and destructive human will. Platonov notes, however, that humanity has a means of overturning the dialectic—technology: “The relationship between technology and nature is essentially tragic. Technology’s aim is ‘Give me a fulcrum and I shall overturn the world.’ But nature is designed in such a way that she does not like being outsmarted. With the necessary momentum of the lever, it is possible to overturn the world, but so much will be lost along the way and so much time wasted because the lever is so long that the victory will be practically useless.”42 Platonov’s reference to Archimedes’s lever

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offers a pointedly skeptical reevaluation of the Prometheanism of his youth. In the 1921 story “Markun,” Platonov’s title character asks Archimedes why he failed to use the earth to move the universe and asserts confidently that he himself will do what Archimedes could not. Here, technology itself figures as Archimedes’s lever; although it may indeed overturn the universe, the victory will be “useless” in view of its costs. Platonov’s warning further echoes a controversial statement by Friedrich Engels in Dialectics of Nature: “Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first.”43 Engels’s caution that nature’s conquest entails unforeseen consequences was a topic of broader debate in conservation and environmental policy in the early 1930s. Environmental historian Douglas Weiner discusses how Engels’s Dialectics of Nature became a point of contention in debates concerning use policies for nature reserves at the First All-Union Conservation Congress of 1933. The leader of the All-Russian Society for Conservation, V. N. Makarov, “corrected” his opponents’ misreading of Engels: “Engels allegedly indicates that nature ‘avenges’ man for its improper use. People, in referring to Engels’s words, lose sight of two things. First, Engels had in mind not socialist society . . . but the plunderous, unplanned, irrational economy of the capitalist system.”44 Engels does implicate capitalism, but he also takes a long historical view, offering several case studies of precapitalist societies that unwittingly brought about their own environmental, and consequently social, ruin, including “Mesopotamia, Greece, and Asia Minor.”45 Contrary to Makarov’s assertion, Engels’s Dialectics of Nature leaves open the question of whether socialist society, with its ideal organization, will evolve beyond such risks. In his own meditation on the “dialectics of nature,” Platonov points to the abuses of imperialist and fascist systems but then argues that the Soviet Union’s own “crisis of production” should not tempt it to leverage too much technological force against nature and its law of the dialectic. The reader is left with the impression that socialism, or societies aspiring to it, may also be capable of the environmental abuses observed in other societies and modes of production. Platonov’s alternative is surprisingly mild: “We must do no more than stand in the ranks of ordinary people in their patient socialist work.”46 Platonov’s appeal to patience suggests a critique of rapid industrialization and a reckoning with the limitations of dialectical development and authentic historical change.

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Platonov’s environmental manifesto illuminates his concurrent article on the specific development of Kara-Kum, “The Hot Arctic” (1934). The symbolic association between the conquest of the Kara-Kum and the Arctic (the site of the recent, sensational SS Cheliuskin expedition) had been suggested in a 1934 Pravda article on Kara-Kum: “On a wide front, our country has led a heroic attack on the harsh, distant Arctic and has already attained the greatest successes there. Next in line: the deserts.”47 Platonov’s essay reproduces many slogans of the war against nature: he declares that the desert is a relic of history that is “not necessary under socialism” and that the Soviets’ task is the “complete industrialization and agricultural development of KaraKum.”48 But the text subversively rejects the methods employed to meet the “crisis of production,” at least under present conditions.49 Platonov’s actual recommendations for the development of Kara-Kum are stubbornly modest, as I discuss later in the context of Dzhan’s commentary on the standard hydroengineering plot. In “The Hot Arctic” Platonov constructs an idiosyncratic environmental history of Kara-Kum, identifying not only the desert’s origins in a hostile nature but also the failures of society. Among the natural causes of KaraKum’s formation are “wandering rivers” that change course on the vast, flat plains of Central Asia. Foremost among these rivers was the Amu Darya, which was widely believed to have changed course in about the sixteenth century, shifting away from the Caspian Sea to fall instead into the Aral Sea hundreds of miles to the east. The Russian orientalist V. V. Bartol’d promulgated the theory, arguing that the change in course precipitated the decline of Khorezm, a once-rich agricultural province. The idea fascinated generations of scholars and students of the region and inspired hydroengineering plans in both the Petrine and Soviet periods, plans whose shadows hang over Dzhan.50 Although Platonov discusses the autogenic sources of desertification, he complicates the “war with nature” by identifying man-made causes of KaraKum’s formation—namely, “the deadly campaigns of Timur and Alexander the Great.”51 Platonov now seeks out the root causes of Asian desertification in the failures of despotic empires. Where he once drew on Solovevian associations between desertification and nomadism, here he associates desertification with conquest that transformed Turkmenistan into a “cemetery.”52 Platonov’s environmental history of Kara-Kum also inscribes the desert in a Zoroastrian mythological topos with a quasi-Marxist historical materialism. He associates the settled “pre-Turkic” civilizations of Turkmenistan with Iranian civilization and attributes their destruction to a series of “Turanian” or Ahrimanic invasions. Alexander the Great, like the nomadic

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Turanians, is a major Ahrimanic villain of the Avestan canon, an invader who brings darkness and destruction.53 Platonov writes that the nomadic Turkmens are the “descendants of Alexander the Great,” completing their association with destructive invaders who turn the garden of pre-Turkmen civilization into a desert—a cultural and environmental ruin.54 The traces of this mythological topos are made evident in Dzhan when Nazar Chagataev recalls the tales of his childhood, those of the battle between Ormuzd (Iran) and Ahriman (Turan). Chagataev reinterprets the myth, however, as an environmental and anthropological allegory in which the nomadic Ahrimanic tribes of Asia are unable to subsist in their lifeless desert homeland and must raid the fertile gardens of Iran to survive: “Maybe one of the old inhabitants of Sary-Kamysh was named Ahriman, which means devil, and this poor wretch turned from sadness to rage. He wasn’t the most evil man, but he was the most miserable, and all his life he pounded through the mountains to Iran, to the paradise of Ormuzd, wanting to eat and enjoy himself before bowing his crying face to the barren earth of Sary-Kamysh and dying.”55 In this retelling, the mythological figures of Ormuzd and Ahriman are the products of environmental determinism: Chagataev’s Ahrimanic ancestor inherits the barren sands of a wasteland (the Sary-Kamysh basin), while his mythological enemies—the Iranians—inherit from nature a fertile land that easily yields its riches. The ultimate source of the myth of Iran and Turan in Platonov’s telling is social inequality and the uneven distribution of natural resources. Even if Ahriman is not responsible for the original destitution of his homeland, Chagataev nonetheless notes that he has failed to invest his labor in the barren land—he has not struggled to make it bloom: Chagataev looked down at the earth—the pale solonetz, the clayey soil, the dark ragged, tortured dust, in which perhaps had decayed the bones of poor Ahriman, who had not known how to attain the shining lands of Ormuzd and had not triumphed over him. Why had he not known how to be happy? Perhaps because, for him, the fate of Ormuzd and the inhabitants of other distant countries with blooming gardens was alien and repulsive, it did not soothe or attract his heart. Otherwise, he—patient and active—would have done in Sary-Kamysh what had been done in Khorasan, or else conquered Khorasan.56 Chagataev speculates that the nomad’s “heart” is not in the struggle with the desert; he prefers to subsist on the “surface” of nature, spreading out across the desert and thus causing it to extend with him. In “On the First Socialist Tragedy” Platonov explains this elemental way of life: “The ancient life on

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the ‘surface’ of nature could still obtain what it needed from the waste and excretions of elemental forces and substances. But we are making our way inside the world, and in response it is pressing down upon us with equivalent force.”57 This depiction of nomadism as an engagement with the “surface” of nature and its “excretions” is crucial to understanding Platonov’s nomadic Dzhan. In the absence of agriculture, the desert dwellers of Dzhan literally consume the surface of the desert—they eat sand. Sheep and people “chew” on sand or, desperate to obtain water from it, “swallow moist sand all at once.”58 The Dzhan even sup on the substance: “Suf ’ian dug with his hands down to a horizon of moisture and began to chew the sand in his thirst. Some saw what Suf ’ian was doing, went up to him and shared with him a supper of sand and water.”59 The dirt or silt that precipitates out of fresh water is mixed back in to make it more nourishing: “Suf ’ian stirred up the water by the shore so that it would become more turbid, thicker, and more nutritious.”60 Not only do animals feed on sand, but sand in turn feeds on them. Platonov illustrates this with a robust play on words when describing how thirsty sheep, trying to obtain water from sand, inadvertently pour their own fluids back into it: “Sand did not quench their thirst, but itself drank their juice” (Pesok ne poil, a sam ispival ikh sok).61 Sand (pesok) contains juice (sok) extracted from living animals. Agriculture is the primary means of extracting and recycling mineral wealth from the earth, but the Dzhan merely forage for weeds and grasses, not undertaking the intentional cultivation of crops. Judgment is cast on this failure of stewardship when Chagataev, visiting a ruined fortress, observes “enormous grasses with thick, lush stems.”62 Chagataev looks “with hatred” at these plants that feed neither people nor animals but grow “only for their own pleasure.”63 If people consume sand in Platonov’s metabolic vision of the desert, then they presumably excrete it. Indeed, in Platonov’s poetics, sand is the “excrement” of irrational civilizations, and the Dzhan, unable to master nature, are consigned to feed on the waste of their ancestors. Platonov offers a direct instance of coprophagia in the story “Takyr,” published in the Turkmen anniversary volume Aiding-Giunler. He describes how the young heroine, Dzhumal’, supplements her mother’s milk: “She started to enjoy being alive, and she ate clay, grass, sheep dung, coal, sucked the delicate bones of animals that had died in the sand, although she had enough breast milk. Her little body swelled up from the substances that all went into her and were used in growth.”64 Both subversive of the natural order and fancifully dialectical, Dzhumal’ transforms inorganic matter, waste, and even excrement into food. Here, coprophagia is an attempt to recover nutrients from the desert ecosystem in the absence of a more organized means of extracting nutrients from

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the soil—namely, agriculture. The child’s metabolism of waste is an illustration of dialectical synthesis, and this successful alchemical act prefigures her destiny in the new socialist economy: the adult Dzhumal’ returns to her childhood home in Turkmenistan as a sort of meliorator, scouting out the site for an agricultural experiment station deep in the Kara-Kum. The young heroine of Dzhan, Aidym, displays a similar talent for transforming waste into nourishment, marking her as another new woman of Turkmenistan: “Despite eating grasses, despite her fever, her body was not slight; it took into itself everything it needed, even from the dry reeds, and was adapted to live long and happily.”65 Socialism transforms wasteland into farmland, but as new socialist women of Turkmenistan who transform the “excrement” of nature—the desert—directly into nourishment, Dzhumal’ and Aidym incarnate dialectical synthesis.66 These two demonstrate that “waste” is not encoded with negative semantic value in Platonov’s poetics. As Eric Naiman notes, waste in Platonov’s work stands in for the detritus of history, all that is “in danger of being left behind.”67 In this category we may also include the otstalye narody (backward nations), like the fictional Dzhan themselves. According to Platonov’s idiosyncratic vision of the dialectics of nature, waste stores positive use value, holding it safely in suspension until it can be developed through organized, socialist labor (the process of osvoenie). Platonov treats the desert not only as the excrement of human civilization but as the material remains of human bodies. In Dzhan the only material legacy of past generations is the dust or remains (prakh) of the ancestors. Platonov’s use of this term evokes the messianic project of Nikolai Fedorov, a nineteenth-century Russian mystic who hoped to revive the dead ancestors of humanity, particularly its first ancestors in Central Asia, by reassembling their dust (prakh).68 In “The Hot Arctic” Platonov writes, “The meager desert, having long ago scattered its bones in dust and the dust having been spent by the wind, is disappearing and will be forever forgotten.”69 Platonov’s ultimate desire is that this “dust” be transformed into fertile soil, a dialectical process that he understands both metaphorically and materially. This process could effect a recuperation of the remains and legacy of those who came before, but also a Liebigian return of lost resources to the metabolic economy of agriculture. Operating within this framework, Platonov totalizes the logic of human “waste” by treating excrement and human remains as a single substance requiring the same recuperation, as in his comment that Asia’s deserts are both the “excrement” and “grave” of past civilizations.70 The recuperation of such waste was not a new concern for him. In an essay written in the early 1920s on agriculture, Platonov had even proposed that human corpses be processed into mineral fertilizers.71 In his private episteme,

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the dialectic of waste and nourishment is both metaphor and material fact; historical detritus of all kinds should be worked back into the soil, returned to the cycle of life, and made available to the (socialist) future through labor. Otherwise, this “dead matter” is doomed to a material afterlife on the “surface” of nature and culture, which, in Dzhan, is troped as a recapitulation of nomadic life resembling a Hegelian bad infinity. Although Platonov does not imply that the inorganic nourishment of the desert will sustain the Dzhan in a socialist future, it is, in their current stage of historical development, an appropriate and fitting struggle to assimilate the desert and absorb the waste of history.

The Amu Darya Does Not Fall to the Caspian The threat of eternal historical stasis in this arid land also connects Platonov’s Turkmenistan writings to another trope of the 1930s, discussed in the previous chapter: the Soviet Union as an Asiatic hydraulic state. Platonov wrote about hydraulic despotism in “The Locks of Epifan” in 1927, the final year he worked in the provinces as a land reclamation engineer. The story describes a project commissioned by Peter the Great to “rally the rivers of our empire into a single body of water.”72 After arriving in the provincial city of Epifan, the site of the ambitious waterworks, the English engineer Bertrand Perry realizes that the construction plans he drew up in Peter’s imperial capital “had not taken into account local conditions, and especially the droughts.”73 The plan has generally failed to take into consideration local environmental and social circumstances; as a result the local forced laborers die or flee in large numbers, and Perry’s team of foreign engineers, unaccustomed to local malarial conditions, succumb to fever. The ambitious project is an engineering and social failure, and the story closes with Peter, the oriental despot, ordering the torture of his engineer. Vladimir Paperny observes that many of the hydraulic works undertaken by the new Soviet state were revivals of projects conceived or initiated by Peter the Great, notably the Volga-Don Canal and the Belomor Canal.74 While working on the “The Locks of Epifan,” Platonov had compared his literary activity to the work of his fictional engineer in a letter to his wife Mariia: “I’ll close here, my work about Peter’s Volga-Don Canal awaits.”75 A few years after “The Locks of Epifan,” Platonov sought to use his expertise as an “engineer of the soul” again to work on Peter’s canals. In 1933 Platonov appealed directly to Gorky to be admitted to one of the writers’ brigades being organized to document new construction projects, specifically

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requesting either the Belomor Canal or the Moscow-Volga Canal. Platonov noted in his application that his technical training and irrigation work for Narkomzem made him uniquely suited to writing about the canal construction. In a remark that seems perverse coming from the author of “The Locks of Epifan,” Platonov noted in his letter to Gorky that “interest in these developments wasn’t born in me ‘two weeks ago,’ but much earlier. Moreover, a few years back I myself initiated and oversaw similar work (similar not in scale or in pedagogical terms, of course).”76 Perhaps Gorky found Platonov too much of a liability for these showcase canal projects. Instead, he dispatched him to Turkmenistan, the site of yet another canal project first initiated by Peter the Great. Indeed, we might conceive of the resulting work, Dzhan, as a transposition of the topos of oriental despotism from the Russian center back to the Asian periphery. After the failure of his exploratory mission in 1717, Peter abandoned his plans to redirect the Amu Darya, but Soviet planners revived the project, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences sent its own expedition to Turkmenistan to assess its feasibility at the height of the Kara-Kum craze in 1934.77 Soviet scientists argued that in the sixteenth century the Amu Darya shifted toward the Aral Sea, causing the Sary-Kamysh Lake and nearby agricultural lands to desiccate. Writing for Pravda, one scientist asserted that “release of the waters of the Amu Darya into western Turkmenistan fundamentally resolves the whole problem of irrigating the most remote part of the Kara-Kum.”78 Specifically, the Sary-Kamysh depression, the homeland of Platonov’s Dzhan, would fill with water from the Amu Darya on its eastern side and feed into the Caspian Sea through a channel called the Uzboi on its western side. If Platonov viewed the process of writing “The Locks of Epifan” as working on “Peter’s Volga-Don Canal,” he took a rather different approach to the engineering of souls in Dzhan. The traces of oriental despotism and the Asiatic mode of production evident in Dzhan explain this choice. The only organized labor the Dzhan have ever performed was on the irrigation systems in the desert’s oasis cities. There the Dzhan dug “entire rivers for the bais” and, “worked in place of donkeys, using their bodies to turn the wooden wheel that raised water into the irrigation channel.”79 Nazar Chagataev observes that his nation is too exhausted to develop socialist consciousness, having “wasted its body on the collective works projects [na khosharakh] and the hardships of the desert.”80 Given the futility of their labor, we may compare the sandy basin (kotlovina) of Dzhan to the earthen foundation pit (kotlovan) that Platonov previously depicted as a burial site for Soviet workers.

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This labor is indeed wasted, erased from history together with the ruins of the irrigation projects that the Dzhan built. Chagataev reflects on this historical erasure: Was it really true that his own nation, the Dzhan, would soon lie down somewhere nearby and that it would be covered with earth by the wind and forgotten by memory because the nation had never managed to build anything in stone or metal? . . . All it had done was dig earth from the canals, but the flow of water had clogged them up again, and the nation once again dug out the canals and threw the silt out of the water, and then a turbid current deposited new silt and again covered their labor without a trace.81 The “flow” of history in Asia is obstructed by the cyclical return of the past, for no matter how many times the Dzhan dig out the canals, silt is redeposited. As discussed in the previous chapter, sediment is an unstable figure for historical accumulation in the Soviet imagination, particularly in the context of its “Asian” past. If Platonov previously implicated nomadism and imperialism in the formation of deserts, here he observes that oriental despotism also fails in the battle with the desert, “wasting” the labor and lives of ordinary people, burying them in silt and sand. The Dzhan thus appear to be refugees from Stalinist historiography. Once a laboring class and political subjects of the oriental despots of Khiva, the Dzhan revert to a nomadic lifestyle and escape into the Kara-Kum—a spatiotemporal refuge from history and historiography. After leaving the waterworks in Khiva, they do not appear to engage in any sort of economic activity, they defy Soviet ethnolinguistic models of nationhood, and they appear neither to be governed by Soviet power nor to govern themselves. Violating the teleology of the piatichlenka, they retreat from the AMP and regress to ever more “primitive” states of organization, ending in an entropic political and cultural “forgetting” (zabvenie). As Ernest Gellner points out, the AMP “contradicts both the sociological theory and the eschatological hopes of Marxism” because “it is stagnant and self-perpetuating, thus offering no hope to the humanity caught in its toils.”82 Gellner asserts that both the AMP and nomadism pose the same essential question about the Marxist model: “can it account for stagnation?”83 In Dzhan, just as the swirling dust and circling sheep are figures for nomadic aimlessness, the cyclical silting of the canal is a figure for the stagnant Asiatic mode, in which labor does not advance political development or consciousness.

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In his essay “The Hot Arctic,” Platonov makes a related objection to the hydroengineering plot as a potential continuation of the stagnant and oppressive Asiatic mode of production. He asserts that Turkmenistan’s development must be grounded in local initiatives and enthusiasm: “It is extremely important to mobilize the will and inspiration of the Turkmen people—especially young people—to conquer the Kara-Kum so that the desert will become a heroic school of socialist creation, just as the Arctic is for Russian and northern peoples.”84 He notes that the Kara-Kum is indeed being developed already, but without the active initiative of the people of Turkmenistan: “Work on the conquest of the desert is already underway, it’s already funded, but not everyone understands the significance of this work. Enthusiasm, responsibility, joy and effort haven’t yet formed around this endeavor; there is no broad, clear idea. Is it really great and heroic how we are conducting our work in Sernye Bugri, Neftedag, Erbent, and other outposts of the desert? Is this truly a rank-and-file operation?”85 He mentions Sernye Bugri (a site of sulphur deposits) and Neftedag (an oil town), where large-scale resource extraction was being undertaken by engineers and scientists from the center. Platonov notes that these projects do not represent the efforts of the local population, remarking, “Why do we concern ourselves so little with those simple, relatively inexpensive, and accessible things like the restoration of old takyr wells, the building of new ones, the organization of a state corps to provide technical oversight of them?”86 In Dzhan it is indeed the small wells and natural takyr basins that supply fresh water to the desert dwellers. While the wells are not maintained and are too few to fully meet the needs of the nomadic Dzhan, they are favorably contrasted with the grand irrigation works of the bais. The ruins of the despots’ projects are erased from history, while the small wells, although neglected, continue to supply water and support life.87 Although Platonov’s proposed interventions are more modest than the state’s radical plans for resource extraction and irrigation in the KaraKum, Platonov suggests that this form of vernacular socialism may be more lasting, grounded not just in technology but in the “great soul” of the people of Turkmenistan, emerging from their own culture, history, and enthusiasm.88 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak observes that the “concept-metaphor of the AMP makes visible the site-specific limits of Modes of Production as an explanatory category.”89 Indeed, it was the very question of site-specific limits—and the explanatory limits of Marx’s model of development—that

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concerned Soviet theorists as they debated whether his Eurocentric model could accommodate local conditions or allow for multilinear paths of development. The ideological consensus that formed in the early 1930s around the piatichlenka can be understood as one instance of the state attempting to homogenize Soviet ideological space. In Dzhan, Platonov does not homogenize the vernacular landscape of the Kara-Kum Desert, his reading of the social and environmental history of Turkmenistan does not conform to schema abstracted from European history, and his solutions to its historical problems are likewise site-specific. Platonov’s attitude to the project of bringing Soviet civilization to KaraKum looks very different in light of his rejection of monumental waterworks in favor of a sustainable network of wells maintained by a corps of local technicians. As Platonov observes in “On the First Socialist Tragedy,” the future growth of socialist Turkmenistan depends on the technician as well as the technology.90 Moreover, as Svetlana Ponomareva notes, the transformation of the earth in Dzhan hinges not only on land reclamation but also on “a philosophical understanding of the path of people on this earth.”91 Although Dzhan’s vernacular socialism may be read as an indictment of the grand narratives of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist teleology and technological utopianism, it is not fundamentally anti-utopian. The phantom geography of a future utopia becomes visible to Chagataev when, staring at the dry Sary-Kamysh depression, he sees a mirage: “Above the surface of the reed bed, on the silver horizon, some sort of impossible mirage was visible—a sea or a lake with ships sailing and the white, shining colonnade of a distant city on the shore.”92 Nazar Chagataev’s mirage is, apparently, the Sary-Kamysh Lake, into which the Amu Darya once allegedly flowed. Chagataev (whose first name, Nazar, means “vision”), apparently sees in the mirage not the past but a utopian future in which the lake will be restored and a shining socialist city founded on its shore.93 Contrary to Ilin’s proposal, however, Platonov locates utopia in a distant chronotope—one that cannot be accessed within the generic or temporal conventions of the production novel or by means of the standard theme of the war with nature. Although Nazar’s utopian vision is unstable—it is, quite literally, a mirage—Platonov elsewhere affirms that irrigation will one day transform the waste of history in Kara-Kum. This promise is distilled, surprisingly, into the silt of the Amu Darya, of which Platonov writes, “This yellow earth traveling down the river anticipatorily resembled grain, flowers, and cotton, and even the human body.”94 This protean silt—waste that has become

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fertile—contains the various forms of life into which it will be assimilated and promises a future garden of socialism in which water feeds soil, soil feeds grain, and grain feeds human bodies. Soil, silt, or even sand—the “excrement of irrational civilizations”—may be a source of fertility when used rationally. Platonov even declares that “the silt of the Amu is more fertile than chernozem: it is the dust of the past. The cleansed fabric of history is a better raw material for the future than the freshness of virgin humus.”95 Subsuming the properties of real soil into a Fedorovian historical metaphor, Platonov optimistically asserts that Central Asian civilization—and the desert—is a richer medium for socialism than Russia’s “virgin humus.” It is an implicit rebuke to the longstanding Russian and Soviet trope that celebrated the first plowing of virgin steppe, a trope that would become especially prominent with the Virgin Lands campaign discussed in the final chapter. If utopia is anywhere immanent in Platonov’s desert, it is in the sediment and waste of the past, as unstable and resistant as it may be. I. A. Savkin observes that in Platonov’s works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the desert functions as a nontraditional utopia: “In contrast to Plato and the tradition that followed him, [Platonov’s] model of utopian space is not the ideal city but the expanding, encroaching desert as a dominant element of the textual landscape. . . . The desert is the place where heaven and hell meet, where they are closest to each other.”96 Indeed, Platonov writes in Dzhan that the Sary-Kamysh is “the hell of all the world,” and yet he sees within it the immanent material of a future socialist paradise.97 Platonov’s desert utopia speaks to Fredric Jameson’s insight that the desert brings material reality into visibility as a construction of the mind—a space that is, therefore, available to multiple utopian possibilities. As Jameson writes, looking at the desert, one can “evoke a dialectical construction, a production by the negative, as when even wilderness itself—‘desert’ in its archaic sense of the emptiness of people—waste, the radically non-human in earthly nature, is itself brought into being and generated by the emergence of the fact of the human . . . in its midst.”98 The dialectical construction of the Kara-Kum and the bringing into being of matter, as Platonov writes, requires “not only grand technology and great labor but also ‘great soul.’ ”99 Dzhan—that is, soul—appears, unexpectedly, to be Platonov’s unified answer to the joint problem of environmental and human development in the Kara-Kum, one that seeks to assimilate rather than reject the waste of history and imagines Turkmenistan’s distinct path to socialism rather than imposing Moscow’s standard plots, whether historiographical, technological, or fictional. Platonov rejects the hydroengineering

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plot for his novella of Turkmenistan and with it the Promethean urge to force the dialectics of both nature and human nature. Instead, he offers his tentative hopes for an authentic vernacular socialist future for the desert and its inhabitants—ordinary people just beginning their socialist work: “a complete and laboring world, busy with its destiny.”100

Ch a p ter 6

Virgin Land The Libidinal Economy of Virgin Land

U studentov est’ svoia planeta, Eto . . . eto . . . eto tselina! —“Planeta tselina,” a song from the Virgin Lands era

In the song “Planet Virgin Land” (“Planeta tselina”) the Soviet youth who embark on the mission to farm the Virgin Lands (tselina) are compared to the heroes of the early Soviet space program. In fact, these young tselinniki are literally explorers of an alien planet: “Students have their very own planet. It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s the Virgin Lands!” The emphatically existential refrain of eto builds up tension as we approach touchdown on this alien planet.1 As the song suggests, the ambition to conquer “virgin lands” is not confined to the Soviet Union or even to planet Earth: extraplanetary tselina awaits Soviet exploration, settlement, and development. The Virgin Lands campaign of 1953–1964—the effort to cultivate thousands of hectares of fallow or previously unfarmed land in Siberia and Kazakhstan—coincided with the height of the Soviet space program, and the Kazakh steppe was an epicenter of the colonial fantasies that both efforts exemplified, an increasingly petrified ambition to make not only the Earth, but the universe “red.” This chapter examines the Russian cultural mythology of “virgin soil,” with particular attention to its culmination in the discourses and cultural artifacts surrounding the Virgin Lands campaign, initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in the year of Stalin’s death. The Virgin Lands campaign was intended to address the very real material problem of grain shortage in the Soviet Union, but it was also expected to reinvigorate the polity and mark the 113

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transition to a new phase of communist development after Stalin’s death. Leonid Brezhnev, whom Khrushchev sent to Kazakhstan in 1954 to replace the local Party secretary, wrote in his memoirs of the Virgin Lands campaign: “Sometimes people ask: who authored the idea of the virgin lands? . . . It was the great idea of the Communist Party to turn the lifeless, remote but fertile eastern steppes of the country into a land with a developed economy and a high level of culture.”2 Brezhnev’s insistence on the collective vision behind the Virgin Lands campaign captures the breadth of the cultural myth of Russia’s historical mission to cultivate the great expanses of the Eurasian steppe.3 Although the Party did not originate these ideas, it did operationalize and give them political expression, as previous governments had done before and as Soviet successor states would do again.4 Tselina was a symbolic construct, materialized by Soviet state agricultural, economic, and social policy. As a natural and symbolic resource, it was crucial to both the material sustenance and the symbolic regeneration of the polity. Yet tselina was conceptually unstable and scientifically underdetermined. The term was even applied to land that had been previously plowed if it had fallowed for a number of years.5 Tselina was characterized by contradictions: it referred to land that was so marginal that it was not under cultivation, yet was imagined as fantastically fertile; it was land inhabited by pastoral nomads, yet imagined to be empty of life. Tselina also had paradoxical spatiotemporal qualities. It was both old and new: its fertility was the accumulation of millennia of uninterrupted natural processes, yet it was only just entering the human economy through labor. Finally, tselina circulated in multiple, sometimes competing, symbolic economies: it was a symbol of Russian settler colonialism made to resignify in the new idiom of Bolshevik decolonization; it figured in local agrarian traditions and emerging bodies of scientific knowledge; it was central to the Cossack myth as well as Marxist theories of value and modes of production. This chapter explores these myths of tselina, and the process of transforming a “natural” resource like virgin soil into a symbolic, discursive, and political resource. Among other things, the Virgin Lands campaign was a statesponsored attempt to re-enchant and restore the Romantic and symbolic connections between people and land that had once been expressed in the nineteenth-century discourse of pochva. This closing chapter brings the cultural biography of Russian soil full circle by showing the Virgin Lands campaign as a return to the Romantic national myth-making of the nineteenth century and an attempt to bring about a postmaterialist re-enchantment of national soil.

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Virgin Land in the Late Soviet Cultural Imaginary In the twenty-five-year period between the start of the Virgin Lands campaign and its effective fossilization in the cultural domain (with the publication of Leonid Brezhnev’s memoir of the campaign, Tselina, in 1979), tselina was at the center of a new national discourse of soil. Where pochva and chernozem had been keywords of Russian nationalist discourses of the nineteenth century, tselina performed political work in the postwar, post-Stalinist, and multinational Eurasian space. The campaign was directed at the “development of virgin and fallow lands” (osvoenie tselinnykh i zalezhnykh zemel’). “Tselina” or “tselinnyi” connotes something “whole” and “unbroken,” soil that is imagined to have never been plowed. Tselina was the most common keyword of Khrushchev’s campaign, but other terms cluster around it, including nov’/novina (new land) and devstvennye stepi (virgin steppes). All these terms foreground the libidinal economy of the virgin lands in different ways and were deployed in the marketing of the campaign to young people of the Thaw era as a space of sexual freedom and exploration away from the scrutiny of family and neighbors and the claustrophobic dormitories, communal apartments, and villages of postwar European Russia.6 Each of the terms examined here carries its own semantic and historical associations, and while I mark out their differences, I also treat them together within the single cultural topos of virgin land. The construct of tselina was legitimized by Soviet scientific institutions and popularized through a state-sponsored program of cultural production. Soviet writers and artists were enjoined to contribute to the mythology of tselina and to propagandize the campaign to young people.7 In literary works, political speeches, and journalism from the Virgin Lands campaign, the construction of tselina is notably metadiscursive, as if it is acknowledged to circulate in a closed economy of symbols.8 As one Russian author writes, “The word ‘tselina’ will never lose its freshness, and will remain through the centuries a symbol of valor and heroism.”9 If such statements seem banal from the pen of a Russian writer, they gain a tinge of irony when written by a Kazakh; the Party functionary Ablaikhan Dzhulmukhamedov writes that “the heroic virgin lands epic forever remains an unfading symbol of friendship, international brotherhood and unity of the Soviet people, witness to the wisdom of the agrarian politics of the Party.”10 In print and speech, the campaign is consistently described as a “symbol of the heroic exploit” of the people, and a “symbol of heroism and glory.”11 In the collection In the Virgin Lands (Na zemliakh tselinnykh), published in Almaty in 1955 when the

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campaign had scarcely started, authors had already begun to eulogize the campaign and treat it as a purely symbolic object.12 The insistence on the symbolic value of tselina is inescapable, even as writers try to narrate this object. Tselina has a vanishing material referent—the moment virgin land is plowed, it is simply moved to the unromantic category of farmland, as susceptible to soil depletion and crop failure as any other arable land. Perhaps this is why writers insist upon the eternal “freshness” of its signifiers. These signifiers and symbols seem to circulate in a closed economy of socialist realism. As Evgeny Dobrenko has observed, socialist realism was an autonomous cultural domain with internally circulating symbols and tropes, many of which originated in Party speeches.13 Many of the keywords of the Virgin Lands cultural campaign were drawn from Khrushchev’s declaration that the “development of the virgin lands is the great feat (podvig) of our heroic nation in the building of communism, it will live through the ages.”14 Writers sometimes repeated Khrushchev’s slogans nearly verbatim, while others extrapolated themes from the limited keywords of official discourse. The word “podvig” triggers associations with the bylina, or Slavic epic poem. It is the heroic feat that the bogatyr, or hero, must accomplish, usually involving a journey away from home, a battle against enemies, or a bride-taking. The terms “podvig,” “bylina,” and “bogatyr” help to structure Virgin Lands literature. In the poem “Tselina,” P. Kviatkovskii writes: This is the field of the heroic feat [podvig] . . . And no matter how many days and years have passed, There will sound a single melody— Mighty, proud, like a bylina— With the words: tselinnik and hero.15 Aside from official speech, literary criticism helped to guide authors in their depiction of the Virgin Lands. In “Tselina and Books,” a 1956 article in Novyi mir, the literary critic V. Kardin attempts to establish principles for literature about the campaign, focusing on its epic qualities. Kardin urges writers to show the “high romanticism of the heroic battle for grain.” In Kardin’s hierarchy of literary genres, the epic novel evolves out of lesser genres like plays, stories, and sketches, which primarily chronicle history, rather than interpret it. He writes that the virtue of the epic is that the author selects “the most important and the most characteristic, knows how to discard

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minor particulars and come to the most important generalizations, allowing us to comprehend the meaning of what is happening as a whole.”16 He cites Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel Virgin Soil Upturned (Podniataia tselina) as a successful epic of collectivization, the likes of which the Virgin Lands campaign had yet to produce. Kardin’s esteem for the epic form’s integrated historical vision, with its resonances of national and personal heroism relates to the propagandistic function of this literature. Kardin asserts that the Virgin Lands campaign needs literature—and even holds writers responsible for the attrition of workers from the Virgin Lands. He recounts a conversation with a kolkhoz boss: “—Yesterday when we were trying to figure out why people are leaving the virgin lands, we forgot one reason.—What was that?—I didn’t think of it until the middle of the night. It will probably seem strange to you: Literature.”17 As Kardin suggests, literature shapes how people make sense of their own lives and the decisions they make; as a result, literature also has the power to determine social and material realities. Young tselinniki were guided to think of themselves as bogatyry in the great bylina of the Virgin Lands podvig in order to weather the material hardships of the “dead” steppe. As Kardin quotes Ilia Selvinskii, “Virgin soil is upturned first of all by the human soul.”18

The First Furrow Katerina Clark traces the literary topos of the bylina in Soviet literature from its peak in the 1920s and 1930s through its routinization in the 1940s.19 However, we can see in the literature of the Virgin Lands an attempt to reenergize the topos, by retelling the national epic as a coming-of-age tale of both the nation and the individual through the heroic sexualized conquest of virgin land. The discourse of virginity is inescapable in the cultural production surrounding the Virgin Lands campaign. Erotic energy powers the myth of the Virgin Lands, with the fertility of the land and the nation its implicit goal. As Eleonory Gilburd notes, after the 1920s “the Soviet Union had lost the language of sex,” and any depiction of sex in literature was smeared as “naturalism” (as were depictions of other physiological processes, including defecation, as I discussed in chapter 3).20 By the Thaw period, writers had abundant resources for euphemizing and sublimating sexual content. Readers of the 1950s and 1960s were shocked by direct reference to sex, but they were quite used to its sublimation in earthy folkloric tropes of plowing, sowing, and harvesting. In Virgin Lands cultural production, the plowing of the “first furrow” was the most important recurring sexual motif, and the traktorist who plows the first furrow is the chief hero of the Virgin Lands bylina.21

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The 1955 collection In the Virgin Lands contains lyric poems and short stories that work within the virginity topos, often expressed in banal metaphors. In M. Balykin’s story “The Spring Column” (“Vesenniaia kolonna”), an old kolkhoz boss resigns because his heart can’t take the excitement of all-night plowing by the youthful newcomers.22 These young tselinniki are compared to tumbleweeds as they enjoy the (implicitly sexual) freedom of youth.23 The fear of losing one’s virginity is vulgarly mocked: a spoiled female cat that refuses to mate with a lowly male is described by the narrator as an “old maid.”24 Virginity does not have value in this symbolic system—value is created only at the moment of lost virginity, a principle that is grounded in Marx’s ecological economics, as I will discuss below. In A. Lemberg’s “The First” (“Pervenets”), one character remarks on the momentousness of the first plowing: “Soon the novosely [new settlers] will come, but the land already won’t be virgin!”25 In A. Shamkenov’s “In the Fire” (“U kostra”), the Russian hero’s girlfriend is compared to an apple tree that blooms only for him, echoing the folkloric association of the apple with fertility and suggesting that the Kazakh steppe needs a new lover because indigenous Turkic nomads have failed to make it fertile.26 In the poem “About the Heroic Deed” (“O podvige”), Arkadii Ryvlin writes that if “it were easy to be the first to cut deeply into the unplowed land” or if every maiden always agreed to every proposal, it wouldn’t be a podvig.27 The message is that the young male tselinnik should be persistent in overcoming the resistance of virgin land and maiden alike. Elsewhere in the collection, tselina is like a “sleeping princess [tsarevna] who has lain in dull silence,”28 or has been “slumbering for hundreds of years” and must be “woken.”29 This banal discourse of virginity was not limited to literary fiction: the popular science book The Inhabited Virgin Lands (Obzhitaia tselina, 1964) observes that “this steppe has not given birth to anything” (eta step’ nichego ne rodila).30 The languorous earth is feminized and orientalized: as the Georgian poet Iosif Noneshvili writes in his Virgin Lands verse, “You’ve rested long enough, earth . . . let homes, heroes, and children be born.”31 Plowing is the dominant metaphor for the sexual act, but irrigation is also sexualized, evoking the Slavic myth of Perun, the god of rain and fertility. In his sketch of life on a Kazakh kolkhoz, the journalist Sabit Mukanov quotes a tselinnik who observes that “the soil and depths contain limitless riches but are not endowed with water.”32 In Vladimir Soloukhin’s “The Birth of Zernograd” (“Rozhdenie Zernograda”), the “first water” found is “sacred,” like the first furrow, and when it is located, a rumbling emerges deep in “the womb of the earth” (v chreve zemli).33

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The virginity question and the friendship of nations are often worked out simultaneously, as the Kazakh nation and nature are the feminized principles in this union. In P. Danilov’s painting The First Furrow, a young couple— apparently a Russian man and a Kazakh woman—stares hopefully into the far horizon near a tractor and a black strip of newly plowed earth. In the film Ivan Brovkin in the Virgin Lands (Ivan Brovkin na tseline), the gender roles in the marriage plot are reversed, as a young Kazakh man pursues a female Russian doctor. This reversal of the expected hierarchy of gender is rendered not as romance, but as comedy: the Kazakh man is a figure of fun because of his modest stature beside his towering Russian sweetheart. The “friendship” of nations is also naturalized as a conquest of the feminized Kazakh steppe by the masculine Soviet (usually Slavic) hero and the technology he masters. The Party is the ultimate masculine principle in the Virgin Lands; its tractors and plows have awoken the “dead” steppe and made it fertile. In the poem “Your Fruits” (“Tvoi plody,” 1958), published in Literaturnaia gazeta, Sabit Mukanov writes: “Oh, Party! You brought to life the expanses of the steppes. . . . You raised us as your faithful sons. You sowed generously in the Kazakh steppes, in the open, burning hearts of Kazakhs. And the good seed now bears fruit, its fruits are sweeter than honey on the lips. . . . We are happy that the Kazakh nation lives as an equal in the great Fatherland. . . . You sow our path with fertile seed.”34 Mukanov’s poem highlights the interconnection of the “friendship of nations” and the loss of virginity: Kazakhs have been raised as stepchildren, adopted by the Soviet multinational state (like true sons). But the Virgin Lands campaign is the proper consummation of this union and the fulfillment of the Party’s patriarchal function as it also inseminates Kazakh land and Kazakh hearts, producing truly hybrid Soviet-Kazakh offspring. While the lyric “I” of the poem is male, he is inseminated and feminized, placing him in the conventional hierarchies of difference: advanced versus backward nations; agricultural versus nomadic nations; technology versus nature; male versus female. These axes of national, natural, and sexual difference are superimposed upon one another, inscribing actual power relations into the myths of virgin land. Mukanov’s poem was published well into the era of de-Stalinization in 1958, and where we might once have read “Stalin” as the father of nations, we find the “Party.” In the collection In the Virgin Lands, unnamed “leaders” figure as the gardeners of the Soviet state and the Virgin Lands. Vladimir Gordienko’s poem, “The Flowers of the Kremlin” (“Tsvety Kremlia”) opens with a news item from Akmolinskaia pravda, the main newspaper of the Virgin Lands region in Kazakhstan: “A female worker at the new Nikolai Ostrovskii sovkhoz in the Akmolinsk oblast’, Maria Koroleva, recently received a

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package from her mother, who is the Kremlin florist. The mother sent her daughter as a present seeds from the Kremlin flower garden.”35 In the poem that follows, Gordienko gives the feminine principle a more active role in the gardening metaphor, as a “mother” who nurtures the flowers in the Kremlin flower garden. She collaborates with the implicitly male leaders: “The great leaders loved to rest near the Kremlin flower beds. And they planted sprouts in spring soil, sharing this work with the florist.”36 The trope of Stalin as gardener of the state reached its peak usage in the 1930s, but the Virgin Lands campaign temporarily revived it, with the Party (after 1956) replacing Stalin as gardener. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman defines the modern “gardening state” as one that views the “society it rules as an object of designing, cultivating and weed-poisoning.”37 The gardening state imagined by Bauman was brought to life in the Virgin Lands campaign, in the direct efforts of the state to cultivate a new land and a new polity through the joint enterprise of land and social engineering. Implicit in these “gardening” efforts is violence against an abject feminine nature, whether it is virgin land or the “primitive” nature of the ethnicized subjects of the Soviet multinational state. Although we could understand the myth of virgin land as a Soviet innovation with roots in Russian folklore, the discourse of virginity also plays an intriguing role in Marxist ecology: “virgin nature” is imagined to exist in a pristine state untouched by any economic, cultural, or social relations. In Capital, Marx addressed virgin nature in the context of his theory of value: if the value of an object is defined by the labor invested in it, then virgin nature has no value before labor is invested in it. It exists outside of production and social relations. “The land . . . in its original state in which it supplies man with necessaries or means of subsistence ready to hand,” Marx writes, provides “the universal material for human labor.” This category, which includes fish, timber from “virgin forests,” and raw ore, he contrasts with what he calls “raw material” that has already “been filtered through previous labor,” such as ore already extracted. To become raw material in Marx’s sense, the natural resource must have “undergone some alteration by means of labor.” Here he stresses the relative rarity of the first category of natural resource in farming: “With the exception of the extractive industries, such as mining, hunting, fishing, and agriculture (so far as the latter is confined to breaking up virgin soil [jungfräuliche Erde]), where the material for labor is provided directly by nature, all branches of industry deal with raw material, i.e., an object of labor which has already been filtered through labor, which is itself already a product of labor.”38 What are the stakes of Marx’s reasoning? One lesson is that virgin lands agriculture is categorically distinct from agriculture in previously cultivated areas. The former operates on “free” virgin

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nature, the latter on raw materials that are already embedded in the human economy of labor and capital. This may be one of the ideological bases for extensifying agriculture to “new” lands instead of intensifying agriculture in “old” lands, one of the chief debates in this period between Khrushchev and his chief political opponent, Georgii Malenkov.39 Another notable feature of Marx’s reasoning is the comparison of agriculture to mining; virgin soil is a source of age-old mineral wealth that only the cultivation of crops can extract for human use. As discussed in chapter 2, Marx was strongly influenced by the model of soil and social metabolism of the agricultural chemist Justus Liebig. Marx’s view here of agriculture in virgin lands as equivalent to mining shows his literal understanding of the material exchanges between human agents and their environment. Several literary works from the Virgin Lands cultural campaign use the title “Goldmine” (“Zolotoe dno”), drawing attention to this association.40 Philip Pryde sees in Marx’s view the grounds of an ecological ethics that literally does not value nature: virgin nature costs nothing, and costs to virgin nature are externalized, so to speak, since they cannot be accounted for in the labor theory of value. This was not perhaps only an external critique of the basis of Soviet Marxist ecology; Pryde quotes an unnamed Soviet source in 1967 who observes that as long as natural resources are “regarded as free and are not incorporated under the heading of the country’s natural wealth, the wastage of those resources will continue with impunity.”41 Piers Blaikie, in his now classic work, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion, explicitly links this observation to the Virgin Lands campaign and its use of “virgin soil.”42 The problem of how to assign value to nature was not a uniquely Soviet problem, but Marx’s writings on virgin nature show the particular form that the problem took in Soviet ecological economics. The Soviet soil scientist Vasilii Viliams refracted these values when he asserted that “the steppe, like all natural phenomena, should be developed and not remain an eternal given.”43 In light of the feminization and devaluation of nature in the Virgin Lands cultural imaginary, Marx’s view of the “free gift” of “virgin” nature looks like a caricature of the reproductive economy that he elsewhere critiqued. The story “The Camel’s Eye” (“Verbliuzhii glaz,” 1961), by the Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov calls all of these meanings of virginity in the Virgin Lands into question.44 The story stages the conquest of the virgin steppe by Soviet agriculture as a sublimated sexual conquest, but unlike other works discussed here, “The Camel’s Eye” makes a searing critique of the libidinal economy of virgin land. The virgin lands are not a free market of sexual exchange in which women and men, Russians and non-Russians are equally

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empowered, nor is the transformation of steppe to sown an act of sexual liberation. It is a misuse of the “free” gift of nature’s vitality and fertility. The story plays out in Anarkhai, in the wormwood steppeland between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where the hero, a high-school graduate named Kemel, is sent on work assignment. Kemel has been captivated by the myth of the virgin lands: “I believe people will one day bring water to this land and green orchards will grow, water will flow in cool irrigation canals, and winds will ripple the golden fields of corn. Villages and towns will spring up and our descendants will call this steppe the bountiful land of Anarkhai.”45 The Komsomol sends Kemel and his peers off as “noble conquerors of virgin land,” yet when Kemel arrives at the camp, he is given the unglamorous job of a water carrier and is constantly terrorized by the abusive tractor driver Abakir.46 One morning as he fills the water tank at a spring he dubs “Camel Eye,” Kemel meets a young shepherdess who remains unnamed through the story. Aitmatov alternates pastoral scenes of lyric beauty associated with the spring and shepherdess with scenes of sexual and Oedipal violence associated with Abakir, the tractor, and the plow. The innocent shepherdess, surrounded by sheep and lambs, is an icon of vitality who manages the vital economy of her flock, and Kemel feels compelled to define himself in contrast to her, volunteering, “I’m more interested in mechanical things.”47 Indeed, Kemel has decided that he will “be master of this land yet, and the machines in it.”48 But there is a deep ambivalence in his dreamy, poetic nature. The beauty and purity of the wormwood steppe inspire Kemel to write lyric poetry, but his verse takes on the dead form of the conquest myth: “The day is near, the hour is nigh, /When this expanse of wormwood scrub /Will become a glorious land.”49 Kemel’s access to the pastoral lyric and the shepherdess herself is effectively ended when he attains his goal of riding on the tractor. Kalipa, the only woman engaged in this higher-status, male-coded work gives up her place to soothe Kemel’s masculine pride.50 As Abakir drives the tractor, Kemel takes Kalipa’s place on the trailer, controlling the plow blades. Kemel sublimates his sexual desire in the plowing of the virgin land. He enjoys “the steel blades underneath my straddled legs . . . tearing up and pushing aside the steaming, peaty thick layers of virgin soil.”51 As he cuts the first furrow in the virgin soil, he reflects on his fascination with the new and the fresh—the pleasure of being the first to leave tracks in untouched snow, or the first to pick tulips in spring.52 But Kemel is still dominated by the older man: naked and “shiny with sweat,” Abakir knocks the shirtless Kemel to the ground, where he lies “clutching the earth and biting his lip so as not to utter a moan.”53 As Abakir dresses himself after a struggle that suggests sexual violence and domination, he gloats that the young man has gotten

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a “smell of the earth.”54 Their relationship turns from sadomasochism to Oedipal struggle for the sexual right to the virgin land. In the climactic scene Abakir attempts to seduce the innocent shepherdess, leaving Kemel to drive the tractor. While Kemel fears for her safety, he is torn by his desire to finally drive the tractor himself and chooses to keep plowing.55 Throughout the story the feminized principles of fertility and vitality are mocked and misused. Abakir impregnates the lovesick Kalipa and then suggests that she have an abortion. After Abakir harasses the shepherdess and Kemel fails to intervene, she and her flock disappear into the steppe and are never seen again. Watching over the camp is the figure of a stone woman (kamennaia baba), a legacy of the nomadic Turkic peoples who inhabited the Eurasian steppe for thousands of years. She is an avatar of the feminine and the pastoral in the story, but Kemel projects onto her lifelessness, formlessness, emptiness, and mute indifference—just as he does the steppe itself. Kemel dreams of the day when he can go off to the shepherds and find the young woman, but he does not realize that her vitality, as a part of the steppe and its deep pastoral culture, has been destroyed by the plow that he wields. As Kemel sits by the spring one evening thinking of the shepherdess, a mated pair of jairan, steppe deer, approach to drink. They halt at the edge of the field, afraid of the “unfamiliar spongy soil that smelt of oil and metal . . . What had happened to the steppe? Where was their old path? What force had churned up the earth?”56 The departure of the jairan echoes the failed romance with the shepherdess, and on the metaliterary plane it signals the generic ascendency of the Soviet epic over the pastoral. The epic topos of the Virgin Lands campaign, with its bogatyr performing the heroic deed of conquering the steppe, obliterates the pastoral topos with its shepherds and its metalyrical tribute to verse and song. The locus classicus of the pastoral is Hesiod’s Works and Days, which tells of a “golden” generation of humans created by the gods, “without anxieties, without labor and woe.”57 In this lost age of ease and abundance before agricultural labor, “the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods.”58 In this pastoral vision, the earth is abundant and the golden ones are surrounded by their flocks—a life-bearing reproductive force for nomadic pastoralists. Aitmatov makes a metaliterary comment on the devaluation of the pastoral by making Kemel an amateur poet. Kemel translates the sublime beauty of the steppe into verse that is a tissue of political catchphrases and clichés from the Virgin Lands campaign. He writes that the virgin steppe

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has remained “untraveled for centuries” and is “destined to become a lush land.”59 Indeed, we know from Kemel himself that the steppe is not untraveled: the story opens with Kemel telling his fellow workers about the deep history of the steppe from the Kalmuks to the Kyrgyz and Mongols. Kemel’s historical imagination is so vivid that he can even feel the “vibration of thousands of hoofs” and see camps, caravans, and peaceful herds of sheep and horses.60 Why, then, does he call the steppe “virgin” and “untraveled”? Having rejected the pastoral and its values, Kemel can only be a bad poet, producing a Sovietized parody of epic verse. The myth of the virgin lands is a dead form that limits the shape of Kemel’s dreams and blinds him to the very source of the vitality that inspires him. Kemel’s imagination has been colonized by the romantic myth of the garden, and he too readily accepts the myth of virgin land as his own epic, the site on which his own Bildung and that of his nation will become realized. Kemel’s submission to this patriarchal violence echoes Kalipa’s free choice of Abakir as her master. Romantic desires have led them both to the wrong dreams and the wrong masters. When she learns that Abakir has abandoned her and left the camp, Kalipa recognizes that the gift of her fertility has been wasted, asking, “What have I brought water for?”61 Waking from a reverie, she murmurs, “I dreamed. . . . Dreamed of what?”62 Kemel pities her, but oblivious to his own subservience, he continues plowing and dreaming of the shepherdess the plow blades have chased away.

The Resistance of the Material Aitmatov’s story was adapted for the screen by the Soviet Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepit’ko, as her diploma work for VGIK in 1963.63 Shepit’ko’s film Heat (Znoi) is relatively loyal to the plot of the original literary work, but as a filmic object, it adds a material and evidentiary dimension to the story that Aitmatov tells. Shepit’ko’s film is an indexical document of the erosion of the fragile topsoil of Kazakhstan’s virgin land. This material fact is only occasionally witnessed in Aitmatov’s story: after his first day of plowing, Kemel’s “mouth, nose, ears, and eyes were all clogged with dust and sand.”64 But in Shepit’ko’s film, dust cannot be ignored: it fills the frame, it obstructs our vision, it insists upon its stubborn materiality. At moments, dust makes the diegesis of the film illegible—we literally cannot see the action of the film through the clouds of dust, nor can we “read” the ostensible meaning of the plot. The film’s deepest meaning is on another plane—not in the script or the diegesis, but in the material.

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Figure 2.  Shepit’ko, Still from Znoi (1963)

Materiality does not always conform to the “cultural scripts” that we use to master it.65 The kind of material resistance that Shepit’ko’s film indexically records is an antidote to high modernist dreams of mastering the “free gift” of nature. It is with this thought, and a turn to visual representation, that I will conclude this chapter. Throughout this work, I have primarily focused on verbal texts. Here, I turn to the visual representation of the Virgin Lands campaign. There are a number of films devoted to the Virgin Lands campaign and a significant body of easel paintings, many of which remain in the Altai State Art Museum in Barnaul.66 In the spring and summer of 1954, a brigade of painters from Moscow traveled to the Virgin Lands, and their works were exhibited and reproduced in a published collection the following year.67 The paintings of the Virgin Lands raise the problem of how to represent soil in its stubborn and intractable materiality. Here, I take two paintings to illustrate: P. Danilov’s First Furrow (1957–1958), and Mikhail Budkeev’s First Furrow (year unknown). The trope of the first furrow was a standby in visual art just as it was in literature. Yet in the visual domain, what obtains is not an eroticized object of conquest, but its inverse—the abject, formless, and mute material body of the soil. In both paintings (as in many others in this genre), a tractor stands in the center of the painting, breaking the line of the horizon, and from it originates the apex of a black triangle, spreading out to its base in the foreground. This black triangle represents the virgin soil upturned.

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Figure 3.  P. Danilov, Pervaia borozda (First Furrow) (1957–1958), Oil on canvas. A. Kasteyev State Museum, Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Danilov’s First Furrow depicts the friendship of nations and the theme of the old and the new. The composition of the painting reflects this theme, with elements of the old world pushed to the outer margin of the painting: a horse-drawn wagon stands at left and an old Kazakh herder in a traditional Kalpak hat leans on his stick at right. Closer in, two European men lean over the gaping earth, one of whom appears to be an agronomist (a stock character in both paintings and literary works); staring into the far horizon is a heterosexual couple—apparently a European man and a Kazakh woman— symbolizing the fertile union of nations; the tractor itself is near the center, but not the central agent; and at the very heart of the frame, where all lines converge at the apex of the black triangle, is a young Kazakh man, the future hero of this national epic. Budkeev’s painting is less pictorial and more impressionistic: the feathergrass of the steppe is a wild maelstrom of paint strokes, and the black soil turned up by the five-bottom plow is even more abstract—daubs of paint that range in color from black to brown to blue stand in for its unformed materiality. In these paintings, however, the brush does not illustrate soil so much as it erases illustration and representation altogether. In fact, the brush acts much like the plow—undoing form and revealing the raw material underneath.

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The pictorial surface and its illusions of perspective in these paintings are replaced by pure texture: paint draws attention to its own materiality and that of soil. Virgin soil is not visually charismatic, but it claims our attention as the mysterious source of all other features on the canvas. The human figures, the tools, and the technology are all motivated by the presence of this natural substance. Its aura is palpable. As we stand before these paintings, we have the feeling that if we scrape away the feathergrass, the tractors, the animals, and the human figures on the surface, we will find this black earth under it all—the source of fertility and the site of an unsettling encounter with formless materiality. Luce Irigaray captures this threatening aspect of raw matter in her critical, feminist account of Platonic materialism. In Plato’s theory of forms, matter is coded as maternal—a passive substance that must be shaped by the paternal principle of form. But as Irigaray points out, this formlessness makes matter not only abject, but also powerful: matter “is both radically lacking in all power of logos and offers, unawares, an all-powerful soil in which the logos can grow.”68 This is the paradox of materiality: it both invites and resists our attempts to give it form through logos—language, signs, and myth. In these paintings, the act of plowing may promise a perfectly legible field of wheat at some future harvest time, but the dark paint that stands in for soil is not iconic, representational, or legible—it points only to itself as matter. Soil is effectively “unpainted” from the painting, retaining the terrifying indeterminacy of real, formless matter. As Kaja Silverman writes in her response to Irigaray, this formless “maternal” matter “lends herself to the production only of ‘bad’ copies: of copies that travesty what they imitate,” a process that Silverman regards defiantly as the triumph of matter’s unmasterable creative force.69 If we may take one step further, socialist realism was the primary form of socialism, and real agriculture, working with the intractable matter of soil, could never be contained by such a ready-made form. As Christopher Breu notes, if artists and scholars don’t give attention to the material world with its “resilience, contingency, and obduracy—in short its negativity—it is too easy to integrate it into our systems of representation and linguistic denotation.”70 Although the visual narrative of these paintings is Soviet technological mastery over an inert, feminized (and ethnicized) material world, the negative space of the “black triangle” at the center of each painting preserves our encounter with what is unnarratable, unrepresentable, and unmasterable. There is ongoing debate about what kind of long-term ecological impact the Virgin Lands campaign had and whether it can be judged as successful in creating sustainable agriculture in arid and marginal lands. There was a

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broad consensus in the Cold War era that the campaign was disastrous and fundamentally ill-conceived, a view that Paul Josephson echoes in his recent environmental history of Russia.71 Recent scholarship has made a case for nuancing or revising this view of the Virgin Lands. Marc Elie calls for a more robust model of nature-culture relations in explaining drought in the Virgin Lands.72 Michaela Pohl gives a thick account of the social and economic impacts on the region and also argues that local scientists learned from the environmental failures of the first years of the campaign and developed innovative soil conservation and plowing techniques that resulted in better ecological and economic outcomes.73 Based on extensive interviews with both newcomers and natives with firsthand experience of the campaign, Pohl argues that the campaign effected a genuine “material rehabilitation” of eastern Kazakhstan. This material reality was obscured, she notes, by the grand rhetoric of what she calls the “Virgin Lands cult, a bureaucratized Soviet version of a Wild West epic.”74 Sometimes our cultural myths betray us. The rehabilitation that Pohl mentions addressed indirectly the traumas of the recent Soviet past: the Gulag camps and the Kazakh famine. Pohl writes that, although Khrushchev “never came out and openly talked about its Gulag past, nor the Kazakh famine,” the Virgin Lands campaign was nevertheless in dialogue with these events.75 As Pohl shows, the Gulag and the Virgin Lands are like overlays on a map of Kazakhstan, although they are often visualized as distinct topoi. Writing about the Soviet nuclear legacy in Kazakhstan, Magdalena Stawkowski adds the nuclear topos to these “overlapping landscapes.” Stawkowski observes that the well-worn paths of historical scholarship sometimes prevent us from seeing the obvious interconnections between events that unfold in a single geographical space.76 The logic of this discursive delimitation and the historical archive it has produced obscures the fact that these projects are geographically, environmentally, and culturally interpenetrated. It is possible that they exemplify a single cultural logic. As discussed at the start of this chapter, the Virgin Lands campaign also coincided with the height of the Soviet space program, and Kazakhstan, which provided the launch site, was a crucial locus for both in the late Soviet cultural imagination. The 1965 work Planet Tselina publicizes youth construction projects in the virgin lands, opening with the following epigraph: “On the dusty paths of distant planets,/ Our tracks will remain . . .”77 Kazakhstan was troped as a dusty, distant planet, and its tselina was discursively constructed as a dead and empty expanse—an Urlandschaft, or primordial landscape, on Earth. The development of the “virgin lands” was thus imagined as a rehearsal for terraforming the dead and empty expanses—the tselina— of other planets. The explorers of Planet Tselina explain: “We discovered a

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planet. The sun rose over the boundless steppe. We did not sleep. We wanted to see what kind of a planet it was. And now a huge red-hot sun slowly cut through a yellow haze of air that had not cooled down during a stuffy night. The yellow steppe spread all around, almost desert. And above, the sky grew light. . . . Some landed on the planet again and again. Some even remained there forever. We discover planets so that we can work on them.”78 In Planet tselina, the colonial fantasy of remaking an inert alien landscape into a familiar home is mixed with Marxist valorization of labor as its own end: we discover planets so that we can work on them. The Planet Tselina myth places the Virgin Lands project in a satisfying historical teleology that links past efforts to cultivate a garden on Earth and to colonize the frontier together with imagined future efforts to cultivate new cosmic lands—from black earth, to red Soviet lands, to a red cosmos.

Epilogue Beyond Earth

In 2011 it was reported that chernozem, the Eurasian black earth celebrated for its fertility, was being stolen by the truckload from Ukrainian farmland.1 A rusty, Soviet-era Kamaz truck could carry off ten tons of soil at a time, mostly taken, it was said, from the neglected plots of elderly folks and deceased landholders. The fertile black soil was allegedly being sold on the black market by corrupt local officials and rapacious entrepreneurs. This tale of stolen earth, complete with the Gothic element of neglectful (because dead) landlords, reads like a confabulation of the plot elements of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. The story crystallizes overlapping fears of national decline, territorial invasion, resource mismanagement, and environmental degradation. In this modern tale moral degeneracy is an emergent feature of global neoliberal capitalism and its practices of deterritorialization. Dead landlords and corrupt officials are selling off the national patrimony of the Ukrainian homeland on the global market, one cubic meter at a time. One Ukrainian journalist gestured to the many ways that soil signifies, warning that “our compatriots are selling off what is most sacred—our national treasure, our native soil.”2 Many of the myths in the preceding pages imagine soil as a hyperlocal object, produced under specific environmental conditions and situated in a specific place—whether the field, the estate, the village, or the nation. But soil has always been animated and mobilized through larger circuits of 130

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economic exchange and material flows. In the story of Ukrainian soil theft, there is an echo of nineteenth-century fears about capitalist robbery of soil fertility through grain exports, but this time those fears are literalized: capitalist penetration of the former Soviet Union has turned both land and soil into commodities on the world market. As we develop new technologies and adopt new agricultural practices, every property that we have traditionally associated with soil is under re-evaluation; not only is chernozem mobile, but its genesis also may not be exclusively dependent on place. Dokuchaev postulated that chernozem was formed by the interactions of the dry steppe climate and steppe vegetation in a process that unfolded over millennia. As discussed in chapter 1, Dokuchaev had asserted that many other countries “could last millions of years, but never, under the present climatic conditions, see the bountiful soil that is the native and incomparable wealth of Russia.”3 But researchers are beginning to ask whether chernozem might not be exclusively a product of natural processes, but rather, like the terra preta of the Amazon, a product of human culture.4 Recent work by Russian archaeologists and soil scientists has considered the theory, based on the study of Central European chernozem, that the “black horizon” between chernozem and lower strata may in some cases mark the advent of plowing, wildfire management, and mixing of existing soils with charcoal, waste materials, and imported soil.5 If chernozem is an artifact of culture as much as nature, then there is a prospect of consciously accelerating its formation—or even creating it artificially. Ukrainian chernozem is not only stolen but legally exported as a “starter” for the production of artificial chernozem. A layer of chernozem is laid over an area of existing soil, sown with grasses, infested with worms and ants, irrigated with preparations containing specific fungi and bacteria, and treated with manure, compost, peat, and minerals.6 In an open letter published in Agrarian Life, the agricultural engineer Iurii Peskov calls for the Russian Ministry of Agriculture to invest in producing such artificial chernozem.7 His “biotechnology project of artificial soil formation” promises to restore and reproduce the specific soils of various soil-climatic zones within Russia, and, scaled up, throughout the world. He appears to call for both biotech solutions—the development of artificial soil substrates—and techniques that work in situ to break down “parent rock into soil within 5–6 months.” By making chernozem the subject of his appeal, Peskov summons the cultural myths surrounding Russian soil science as an area of scientific prestige and national pride: both the soil and the soil science of Russia have something special to offer the world.8 Rather than a static matrix in which to grow foreign transplants, soil can export its local culture, becoming in the process a

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mobile, extendable resource. Peskov stresses the importance of such efforts to the evolution of the human race, noting that after the development of fire and tools, “the birth of agriculture was the second technological revolution of humanity, and the creation of artificial soil will be the third.”9 Artificial soils may offer a solution to the problems of soil production on Earth, as well as hold the promise of extraterrestrial colonization. In the 1960s, when the USSR was developing a plan for human spaceflight to Mars, Vladimir Soldatov and his colleagues at the Belorussian Institutes of Chemistry and Experimental Botany developed an ion-exchange substrate that could function as an artificial soil in space.10 “Biona,” as it was called, could produce high crop yields continuously for three to five years without any supplementary fertilizer. The newspaper Soviet Belorussia reported in 1970 that this artificial soil was “a battery of fertility.” Expressing the most Promethean Soviet hopes for the transformation of nature, the article enthused that the “addition of just one percent of this ‘resin’ to ordinary sand makes it quite suitable for agriculture. This means that deserts can be made fertile.”11 In a secret year-long flight simulation to prepare for a Mars flight, scientists used the soil substrate to grow Chinese cabbage, cress, borage, and dill under an artificial xenon sun.12 The soil scientist Andrei Nikolaevich Bozhko cowrote a memoir with the journalist Violetta Gorodinskaia about his experiences on his year-long “flight.”13 Bozhko describes the ion-exchange resins that serve as soil: “our ‘beds’ consist of such a substrate saturated with salts. Outwardly, it looks like sand. In fact, this is a mixture of resins that supply plants with mineral nutrition elements, and therefore there is no need to prepare a nutrient solution for them, but it is enough to moisten the substrate from time to time with water. It then gradually, as the plants need it, releases the stored water and salts. In addition, it absorbs the root secretions of the plants and thereby protects the crop from poisoning by its own metabolites.”14 Such human artifice calls into question the very definition of soil. The production of artificial soil is the high modernist project par excellence, the culmination of the utopian dreams of the previous two centuries, from Liebig’s theory of mineral exchange to late Soviet efforts to transform deserts into gardens. In 1923, with the recent memory of famine in mind, Andrei Platonov wrote that “in order to beat hunger, we must take agriculture from nature’s hands and put it in mankind’s hands.”15 Artificial soil would appear to fulfill the dream of mastering the resistance of the material world that Platonov so powerfully renders in his writings. As the stories on the preceding pages may remind us, hunger is the ultimate basis of the desire for technological mastery over nature. Soviet environmental ethics have frequently been explained as the product of an ideological distortion field, but

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we should not dismiss the explanatory power of material conditions. Hunger is a phenomenological experience common to nearly every generation of Russian and Soviet people across the span of this book. It is critical that we remember this context, for it is yet another way that nature, bodies, and culture co-evolve and coproduce each other. This new turn of technological modernity calls for revision of our cultural myths, just as previous turns have done. When we speak of ionexchange substrates as “soil,” even the conceptual coherence of soil as a material object breaks down. The rapid acceleration of the processes of soil formation and the creation of artificial soils also reflects a fundamental change in the spatiotemporal qualities of this natural resource.16 If we create artificial soils, we will remove this natural resource from its life in natural time. Soil under such conditions would no longer function as a material index of place, where generations farm, labor, and bury their waste and their dead alongside an assemblage of nonhuman agents, living and nonliving. This artificial soil cannot be read as a stratigraphic inscription of culture, lifeways, and natural events unfolding together in natural time. In The End of Nature, Bill McKibben remarks on how we have “overpowered in a century the processes that have been slowly evolving and changing of their own accord since the earth was born.”17 But given soil’s longer history as a symbiont of human culture, this projected “end of soil” is less a story of the transformation of nature than of a radical rupture in human culture. After all, soil is so much more than a substrate for growing the food that sustains us. It is the site of our most important rituals, the resting place of our dead, a bank of ancestral and personal memory. As we seek out new homes on Earth and beyond, new rituals of memorialization, and new ground for our utopian dreams, let us remember the collective history preserved in the earth, our transcorporeal body.

Notes

Preface

1.  Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), 86. Introduction

1.  Maurice Hindus, Green Worlds: An Informal Chronicle (New York: Doubleday, 1938), 32. 2.  To mention those works closest to this project: J. R. McNeill and Verena Winiwarter, eds., Soils and Societies: Perspectives from Environmental History (Milton Keynes, UK: White Horse Press, 2006); Edward R. Landa and Christian Feller, eds., Soil and Culture (New York: Springer, 2010); William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 2007); David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Olli Lagerspetz, Philosophy of Dirt (London: Reaktion Books, 2018); Pey-Yi Chu, The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). 3.  Elena Hellberg-Hirn, Soil and Soul: The Symbolic World of Russianness (New York: Routledge, 2019), 192. 4.  Maksim Gor’kii, Sobranie sochinenii v 16 tomakh (Moscow: Izd. Pravda, 1979), 7:7. 5.  Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 270. 6.  On re-enchantment, see Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 7. For these mythological embodiments of soil, see Christian Feller, Lydie Chapuis-Lardy, and Fiorenzo Ugolini, “The Representation of Soil in the Western Art: From Genesis to Pedogenesis,” in Soil and Culture, ed. Edward R. Landa and Christian Feller, 3–21 (New York: Springer, 2010); Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 20–21. 8.  Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 2. 9.  Paul Josephson describes the Soviet development imperative as an “exaggeration of modernity.” Josephson, An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2.

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10.  This phrase is from Brezhev’s memoirs of the Virgin Lands campaign. Leonid Brezhnev, Tselina (Moscow: Izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1980), 3. For an authoritative history of Russian and Soviet agricultural experimentation over a crucial century of modernization, see O. Iu. Elina, Ot tsarskikh sadov do sovetskikh polei: Istoriia sel’skokhoziastvenniakh opytnykh uchrezhdenii XVIII–20-e gody XX veka: V dvukh tomakh. Moscow: Institut istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki RAN, 2008. 11.  Christopher Breu, Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2014). 12.  Heather Sullivan, “Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 529. 13.  Maya K. Peterson, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia's Aral Sea Basin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), and Julia Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860–1991 (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2017). 14.  W. J. T. Mitchell, “Geopoetics: Space, Place, and Landscape,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 173–174. 15.  Mark Bassin has produced a large body of work illuminating the construction of Eurasian space. See especially Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mark Bassin, Christopher Ely, Melissa K. Stockdale, eds., Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia: Essays in the New Spatial History (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). See also Christopher Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman, eds., The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). Jane Costlow attends to both the cultural construction and the nature of the Russian forest in Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 16.  Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990): 1101. 17.  Worster, 1093. 18.  Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6. 19.  Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 387. 20.  Sullivan, “Dirt Theory,” 515. 21.  William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 25. 22.  For more on this perspective, see Benjamin Cohen, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 201. 23.  Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 27.

NOTES TO PAGES 6 – 1 1     137

24.  Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 3. 25.  Justus Liebig, Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, 3rd ed. (London: Taylor & Walton, 1843), 178. 26.  A. Platonov, “Dzhan,” in Proza (Moscow: Slovo, 1999), 454. 27.  For an overview of the field of Eurasian environmental history, see Andy Bruno, “Russian Environmental History: Directions and Potentials,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 3 (2007): 635–650. To mention a few works on the establishment of Soviet nature preserves, see Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); on forest conservation, see Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905–1953 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); on the agency of Soviet scientists, see Chu, Life of Permafrost, and Marc Elie, “Formulating the Global Environment: Soviet Soil Scientists and the International Desertification Discussion, 1968–91,” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 1 (2015): 181–204. 28. Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 12. 29.  On nonhuman actors, see Bruno, Nature of Soviet Power; Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: Norton, 2019). On posthuman perspectives, see Colleen McQuillen and Julia Vaingurt, eds., The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018). 30.  The journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism has been a center of debates on “green Marxism.” See also John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). For works that revisit and recuperate Soviet materialist thought, see Oxana Timofeeva, “Living in a Parasite: Marx, Serres, Platonov, and the Animal Kingdom,” Rethinking Marxism 28, no. 1 (2016): 91–107; Maria Chehonadskih, “The Stofflichkeit of the Universe: Alexander Bogdanov and the Soviet Avant-garde,” e-flux Journal 88 (2018), https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/88/174279/the-stofflichkeit-of-the-universe-alexander-bogdanov-and-thesoviet-avant-garde; McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2015). 31.  On the construction of nature, see Bruce Braun and Noel Castree, Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium (London: Routledge, 1998). On the limits of constructionism and the cultural-linguistic turn, see Breu, Insistence of the Material. 32.  As McNeill and Winiwarter write, “Soils have their own histories, both natural and human . . . which in turn shape their human histories.” J. R. McNeill and Verena Winiwarter, “Soils, Soil Knowledge, and Environmental History: An Introduction,” in Soils and Societies, 3. 33.  L. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow: Krasnaia nov’, 1923), 186. 1. Native Soil

  1.  M. A. Antonovich, “Strizham (Poslanie ober-strizhu, gospodinu Dostoevskomu),” (1864), reprinted in Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo khudozh. lit-ry, 1961). All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Antonovich

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may also be poking fun at the famous cliché of Strakhov’s sympathizer, Apollon Grigorev, who wrote that “Pushkin—nashe vse” [Pushkin is our everything]. 2.  For a discussion of the “question” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Holly Case, The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 3.  Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). 4.  Irina Sandomirskaia provides a synchronic analysis of the soil/roots cultural myth in Soviet culture and beyond. Irina Sandomirskaia, Kniga o rodine: Opyt analiza diskursivnykh praktik (Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 2001). On the European philosophical reception of this metaphor, see Christy Wampole, Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 5.  Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. J. Churchill (New York: Bergman, 1977), 483. 6.  V. G. Belinskii, “Opyt sistemy nravstvennoi filosofii,” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh (Moscow: OGIZ GIKhL, 1948), 2: 244. Apollon Grigor’ev, Apologiia pochvennichestva, ed. and commentary A. V. Belova (Moscow: Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii, 2008), 94. 7. N. V. Gogol’, “Shletser, Muller, Gerder,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 14 tomakh (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1952), 8: 86, 89. 8.  For example, Serhiy Bilenky offers only a brief description of Herder’s ideas in Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). For a discussion of Herder’s influence in aesthetic debates, see David L. Cooper, Creating the Nation: Identity and Aesthetics in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia and Bohemia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). 9.  Andrzej Walicki refers to this as the distinction between “type” and evolutionary stage: Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 514. 10.  D. C. Phillips, “Organicism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31, no. 3 (1970): 413–432. 11.  Amanda Jo Goldstein, “Sweet Science”: Romantic Materialism and the New Sciences of Life (Berkeley: University of California, 2011), 7. 12.  For an alternative view, see Edgar B. Schick, Metaphorical Organicism in Herder’s Early Works: A Study of the Relation of Herder’s Literary Idiom to His World-View (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). 13.  Immanuel Kant, review of Herder’s Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, quoted in G. A. Wells, “Man and Nature: An Elucidation of Coleridge’s Rejection of Herder’s Thought,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 51, no. 3 (1952): 315–316. 14. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy, 26. 15.  Herder, 26. 16.  Quoted in Robert Reinhold Ergang, Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 95.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 4 – 1 8     139

17.  Quoted in Ergang, 88. 18.  Mark Bassin, “ ‘Blood or Soil? The Volkisch Movement, the Nazis, and the Legacy of Geopolitik,” in How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich, ed. Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 207. 19. Ergang, Herder, 94. 20.  Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings, trans. and ed. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 110. Translation emended. 21.  Herder, 110. 22.  Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 120. 23.  As Robert Ergang notes, Herder used a variety of terms corresponding to “national spirit”: Nationalgeist, Seele des Volks, Geist der Nation, Genius des Volks, and Geist des Volks. See Ergang, Herder, 85. 24.  Otto Schlüter, “Über den Grundriss der Städte,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin 34, no. 6 (1899): 446–462. 25.  K. Arabazhin, “Gerder,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz i Efron, 1892), 8: 471–473. 26.  N. M. Karamzin, “O liubvi k otechestvu i narodnoi gordosti,” in Izbrannye sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964), 2: 281. 27. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy, 32. 28.  Herder, 32. 29.  Karamzin, “O liubvi,” 2: 281. 30. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy, 32. 31.  Peter Chaadaev, Major Works of Peter Chaadaev, trans. and commentary Raymond T. McNally (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 38. 32.  Nikolai Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2008), 56. 33.  A. S. Khomiakov, “O sel’skoi obshchine,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii Alekseia Stepanovicha Khomiakova (Moscow: Univ. tip., 1900), 3: 461. 34.  Khomiakov, 462. 35.  See Jakob Grimm, Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: Dümmler, 1871), 5: 452. (“Alle meine Arbeiten wandten sich auf das Vaterland, von dessen Boden sie auch.”) 36.  I. S. Aksakov, “Vozvrat k narodnoi zhizni putem samosoznaniia,” Den’, October 14, 1861. 37. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy, 29. Translation modified. 38.  Karamzin, “O liubvi,” 287. 39. A. S. Khomiakov, “O vozmozhnosi russkoi khudozhestvennoi shkoly,” in Russkaia estetika i kritika 40–50-x godov XIX veka, eds. V. K. Kantor and A. L. Ospovat (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982), 137. 40.  Dostoevsky appears to have been an important source of the oft-repeated declaration that Russians should not accept that their only function is to “manure” the national soil for the happiness of future generations. Berdiaev later returned to the same topos: “Every living generation merely manures the soil for the benefit of the generation which follows.” Nikolai Berdiaev, The Beginning and the End, trans. R. M. French (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 148.

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41. M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, “Nedokonchennye besedy,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg: Izd. A. F. Marksa, 1906), 6: 238. 42.  Speech by P. A. Stolypin, May 5, 1908, in the State Duma. Reprinted in P. A. Stolypin, Nam nuzhna velikaia Rossiia (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1991), 149. 43. Voltaire, History of the Russian Empire, vol. 18, pt. 1 of The Works of Voltaire (New York: Dumont, 1901), 118–119. 44.  Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740– 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994). 45. Herder, Journal Meiner Reise im Jahre 1769 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947), 12. 46.  Karamzin, “O liubvi,” 284. 47. Belinskii, “Literaturnye mechtaniia” (1841), in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 1:38. 48.  Belinskii, “Obshchee znachenie slova literatura” (1841), in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 2: 113–114. 49.  Victor Terras, Belinskij and Russian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 125. 50.  Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, and Native Soil Conservatism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 9. 51.  Fedor Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 18: 36. 52.  Apollon Grigoryev, My Literary and Moral Wanderings and Other Autobiographical Material, trans. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), 63. 53.  Quoted in Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, 44. 54. Grigor’ev, Apologiia pochvennichestva, 464. 55.  Apollon Grigor’ev, “Stikhotvoreniia N. Nekrasova,” in Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 2: 322. 56. Grigor’ev, Apologiia pochvennichestva, 18. 57.  Grigor’ev, 304. 58.  Aleksandr Blok, “Sud’ba Apollona Grigor’eva,” in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Terra, 2009), 5: 387. 59.  Linda Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 44. 60.  Grigorev’s organic criticism has an affinity with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phylogeny of literature, which was likewise influenced by Herderian organicism. Schick, Metaphorical Organicism, 119. 61. Grigoryev, Literary and Moral Wanderings, 63. 62. Grigor’ev, Apologiia pochvennichestva, 292. 63.  Grigor’ev, 137. 64.  Grigor’ev, 138. 65.  Grigor’ev, 139. 66.  Grigor’ev, 139. 67.  Antonovich, “O pochve,” in Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i, 15. 68.  Nikolai Strakhov, Iz istorii literaturnogo nigilizma, 1861–1865 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia brat. Panteleevykh, 1890), 108. 69. Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov, 8, 10, 160. 70.  Bella Grigoryan, Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018).

NOTES TO PAGES 2 4 – 3 0     141

71. Antonovich, “Strizham (Poslanie ober-strizhu, gospodinu Dostoevskomu),” 182. 72.  See Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov, 158. Strakhov’s works on Darwin include “Perevorot v nauke” (1872) and Prosledovateli i protivniki (1873). Danilevskii published a massive two-volume work on Darwin shortly before his death in 1885. 73.  Robert E. MacMaster, Danilevsky: A Russian Totalitarian Philosopher (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 78, 199; Walicki, Slavophile Controversy, 513–514. For discussion of the influence of Cuvier and Herder on understandings of the nation and the “economy of space” in nineteenth-century Russia, see Anindita Banerjee, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 26–29. 74.  N. Ia. Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa (Moscow: Kniga, 1991), 91–92. All subsequent references are to the English translation unless otherwise noted: Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, trans. Stephen M. Woodburn (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2013), 84. 75. Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, 342–372. 76.  In this, it resembles the richness of ancient Greece, or present-day Europe, according to Danilevskii. 77. Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, 76. 78.  Stephen M. Woodburn notes, in Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, 76. 79. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy, 31. 80.  Herder, 31. 81. Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, 82–84. 82.  Danilevskii, 82. 83.  Danilevskii, 82. 84.  Danilevskii, 226. 85.  Danilevskii, 226. 86.  Danilevskii, 226–227. 87.  Danilevskii, 237. 88.  Danilevskii, 82. 89.  Danilevskii, 82. 90.  Danilevskii, 82–83. Translation slightly emended. 91.  Danilevskii, 83. 92. Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa, 60–61 (my translation). 93. Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, 371. The myth of virgin land in Russia is the subject of the final chapter of this book. 94.  Danilevskii, 73. 95.  Danilevskii, 77. 96.  Danilevskii, 83. 97.  Danilevskii, 83. 98.  Danilevskii, 538. 99.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 1: 537. 100.  Dostoevsky, 1: 538. 101.  Dostoevsky, 1: 520. 102. Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa, 60.

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103.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 2003), 63. In his notes for the novel, Dostoevsky planned for the conversation to take place in a field of manure. 104.  David Moon, “The Debate over Climate Change in the Steppe Region in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Russian Review 69 (April 2010): 266. 105.  Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, Inst. filosofii: Izd-vo “Mysl,” 1988), 2: 491–492. 106.  Solov’ev, 2: 482–483. 107.  The anxiety that “Asian” soil undermined Russian development crystalized in the Soviet period in the trope of the Asiatic mode of production, the topic of chapter 4. 108.  For a discussion of how Russian soil science and terminology moved outside Russia’s borders, see Jan Arend, “Russian Science in Translation: How Pochvovedenie Was Brought to the West, c. 1875–1945,” Kritika 18, no. 4 (2017): 683–708. 109.  For more on Dokuchaev, see Catherine Evtuhov, “The Roots of Dokuchaev’s Scientific Contributions: Cadastral Soil Mapping and Agro-Environmental Issues,” in Footprints in the Soil: People and Ideas in Soil History, ed. Benno P. Warkentin (Boston: Elsevier, 2006), 125–148, and Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); David Moon, “The Environmental History of the Russian Steppes: Vasilii Dokuchaev and the Harvest Failure of 1891,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 15 (2005), and The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and on the wider influence of Dokuchaev’s soil science on environmental thought, see Jonathan D. Oldfield and Denis J. B. Shaw, The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016), 48–77. 110.  V. V. Dokuchaev, Russkii chernozem (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Deklerona i Evdokimova, 1883), 352. 111.  Quoted in V. V. Dokuchaev, Russian Chernozem, trans. N. Kaner ( Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1967), 2. 112.  Andy Bruno makes a related argument about the “Eurasian” character of the scientific work of geologist Aleksandr Fersman. Andy Bruno, “A Eurasian Mineralogy: Aleksandr Fersman’s Conception of the Natural World,” Isis 107, no. 3 (2016): 518–539. 113.  Pavel V. Krasilnikov and Joe A. Tabor, “Perspectives on Utilitarian Ethnopedology,” Geoderma 111, no. 3/4 (2003): 197. Russian soil terminology was universalized through Dokuchaev’s system: Russian vernacular terms for soil types were adopted as standard terms, used to describe soils around the world to this day. The question of the universality of these soil terms is still under debate. 114. Dokuchaev, Russkii chernozem, 42. 115.  Richard G. Robbins, Famine in Russia 1891–1892: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 7. A British commercial attaché, E. F. G. Law, estimated that over 35 million people were in need of food aid. Moon, “Environmental History,” 149. 116.  D. N. Anuchin, ed., Pomoshch’ golodaiushchim: Nauchno-literaturnyi sbornik (Moscow: Russkie vedomosti, 1892).

NOTES TO PAGES 3 2 – 3 8     143

117.  Moon, “Environmental History,” 165. 118.  Bassin, “Blood or Soil?,” 204–242. 119.  There is a note of patriotic outrage in Wolfgang Gesemann’s claims that “there is little evidence of Russians quoting Herder directly in the 18th and 19th centuries.” While direct quotes may be limited, many nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals refer to his work, and his ideas are absolutely pervasive. Gesemann, “Herder’s Russia,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26, no. 3 (1965): 424–434. 2. Matter

1.  “Obituary: Justus Liebig,” Chemical News 27, no. 700 (1873): 206. 2. Olga Elina notes that in addition to Liebig, the agricultural scientists Humphry Davy, Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, and Albrecht Thaer were widely discussed in Russia in this period. Olga Elina, “Planting Seeds for the Revolution: The Rise of Russian Agricultural Science, 1860–1920,” Science in Context 15, no. 2 (2002): 211–212. 3.  Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895 (New York: International Publishers, 1942), 204. I discuss Marx’s reading of Liebig further below. 4.  William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 98. 5.  For further context on Liebig, see Brock, Justus von Liebig, and E. Patrick Munday, “Sturm und Dung: Justus von Liebig and the Chemistry of Agriculture” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1990). 6.  A. A. Rode, Soil Science ( Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1962), 5. 7. Liebig, Chemistry, 178. 8.  For more on the use of “Stoffwechsel” in German, see Robert U. Ayres and Leslie Ayres, A Handbook of Industrial Ecology (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002), 16–17. 9. Liebig, Chemistry, 147. 10.  Liebig, 54. 11. Brock, Justus von Liebig, 27. 12.  Justus Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry in Its Relations to Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce, and Political Economy, 4th ed. (London: Taylor, Walton, & Maberly, 1859), 26. 13.  Quoted in Brock, Justus von Liebig, 194. 14.  Alexander Vucinich notes four major lineages of Russian chemistry: “It was virtually impossible to find a Russian chemist of the time who had not taken a course from Justus von Liebig at Giessen, Heinrich Rose at Berlin, R. W. Bunsen at Heidelberg, or Marcellin Berthelot at the College de France.” Alexander S. Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture: 1861–1917 (Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press, 1970), 136. The term “chemist breeder” was coined by J. B. Morrell, see “The Chemist Breeders,” Ambix 19 (1972): 1–46. 15. For more on Liebig’s influence on the development of chemistry in nineteenth-century Russia, see Iu. S. Musabekov, Iustus Libikh, 1803–1873 (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1962), 169–177.

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16.  Geert Vanpaemel notes that although German scientific practices and institutions were looked to as an ideal model, they were rarely “copied” precisely but were adapted to local conditions at the “periphery.” See Vanpaemel, “The German Model of Laboratory Science and the European Periphery (1860–1914),” in Sciences in the Universities of Europe, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Academic Landscapes, eds. Ana Simões, Maria Paula Diogo, and Ko¯stas Gavroglou (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 211–225. 17.  The short work Artificial Fertilizers (Iskusstvennye udobreniia ili tuki) was published in Petersburg in 1850. This may be a translation of the 1845 pamphlet An Address to the Agriculturists of Great Britain Explaining the Principles and Use of Artificial Fertilizers, which was designed to explain and promote Liebig’s patent fertilizers. 18.  A. N. Engel’gardt, “Libikh v russkom perevode,” Sankt Peterburgskie vedomosti, December 6, 1863, 1105–1106. 19.  Iustus Libikh, Khimiia v prilozhenii k zemledeliu i fiziologii rastenii, 7th ed., trans. P. A. Il’enkov (Braunschweig: Fiveg and Son, 1864). 20.  V. Kurilov, “Libikh” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, ed. I. E. Andreevskii (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz i Efron, 1896), 17a: 640. The author was echoing the assessment of German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann. 21.  For a discussion of the role of the kruzhok in the formation of the Russian Chemical Society, see Michael D. Gordin, “The Heidelberg Circle: German Inflections on the Professionalization of Russian Chemistry in the 1860s,” Osiris 23, no. 1 (2008): 23–49. 22.  Dostoevsky parodies the Russian reader of Liebig: “This rival of Liebig, who maybe didn’t even finish a course in high school, and who of course wouldn’t get into arguing with Liebig about his superiority if someone pointed out that it was Liebig. . . . It would be another thing if, for example, he met Liebig not knowing that it was Liebig, say in a train car. And if they began a conversation about chemistry and our gentleman managed to stick with the conversation, then, no doubt, he would carry out the most learned debate, knowing of chemistry just one word: ‘chemistry.’ Liebig would be surprised, of course, but—who knows—our gentleman might be considered the winner in the eyes of a spectator. For there are almost no limits to the brazenness of a Russian’s scientific language.” Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelia (1873), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenie, 21:121. 23.  Gordin, “Heidelberg Circle,” 29. 24.  Gordin, 29. 25.  Nicholas Riasanovskii, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 218. 26.  Victoria S. Frede, “Materialism and the Radical Intelligentsia: The 1860s” in A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930; Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity, eds. G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 71. 27.  Moleschott, who represented a younger generation of materialists, wrote several works polemicizing with Liebig, including The Cycle of Life: Physiological Replies to Liebig’s Chemical Letters (Der Kreislauf des Lebens: physiologische Antworten auf Liebig’s Chemische Briefe, 1852). For more on Liebig’s differences with the young materialists, see Brock, Justus von Liebig, 311.

NOTES TO PAGES 4 0 – 4 5     145

28.  Robin Feuer Miller, “Fathers and Children,” in Ivan Turgenev, ed. Harold Bloom (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2003), 23. 29.  Miller, 23. 30.  I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), 8: 259–260. 31.  Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Chto delat’?: Iz rasskazov o novykh liudiakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), 123. The English translation is taken from Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is To Be Done?, trans. Michael R. Katz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 180. 32.  Irina Paperno addresses the Christian symbolism of this scene in Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 215–217. 33.  For more on the rivalry between Lawes and Liebig, see Brock, Justus von Liebig, 121–122. 34.  Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, 204. 35. See John Bellamy Foster, Ecology against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 154–170; “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology, 105, no. 2 (1999): 366–405. See also Joan Martinez Alier, “Marxism, Social Metabolism, and International Trade,” in Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change, eds. Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez Alier (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007), 221–237. 36. Liebig, Letters on Chemistry, 473. 37. Liebig, Chemistry, 178. 38.  Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach (London: Penguin Classics, 1991), 3: 949. 39.  Foster, “Marx’s Theory,” 366–405. 40.  Friedrich Engels, “The Housing Question” in On Historical Materialism: A Collection, ed. T. Borodulina (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 158. 41.  D. I. Pisarev, “Ocherki iz istorii truda” in Istoricheskie eskizy: Izbrannye stat’i (Moscow: Izd-vo “Pravda,” 1989), 105. 42. Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, 59. 43. Cathy Frierson, introduction to Aleksandr Nikolaevich Engelgardt’s Letters from the Country, 1872–1887, trans. and ed. Cathy Frierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5. 44.  A. N. Engel’gardt, Iz derevni. 12 pisem. 1872–1887, ed. A. V. Tikhonova (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1999), 420–421. 45.  Justus Liebig, Sechs unbekannte Briefe J. Liebigs an den russischen Chemiker P. A. Il’enkov (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1960), 6–7. 46. Elina, Ot tsarskikh sadov, 204–210. 47. Engel’gardt, Iz derevni, 370. Engelgardt’s use of the term “soil particles” is idiosyncratic; he presumably means minerals. 48.  Engel’gardt, 371. 49.  Engel’gardt, 371. 50.  Engel’gardt, 372. 51. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 149.

146    NOTES

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52.  Foster, 150. 53.  Boris Kagarlitsky, Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 172–173, 190–191. 54.  Quoted in Kagarlitsky, 223. 55. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 284. 56. Liebig, Chemistry, 178. 57.  The first soil classification maps were produced in Crimea in 1856, the very year that the Crimean war ended. Ralph J. McCracken and Douglas Helms, “Soil Surveys and Maps,” in The Literature of Soil Science, ed. Peter McDonald (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 277. 58.  V. F. Odoevskii, “Nedovol’no,” in Besedy v Obshchestve liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti pri Imperatorskom moskovskom universitete (Moscow: Obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti, 1867), 77. 59.  Odoevskii, 78. 60.  Lenin directly alludes to Liebig in Marxist Views on the Agrarian Question in Europe and in Russia, in which he writes that “there is no doubt that capitalism has upset the equilibrium between the exploitation of the land and fertilization of the land (the role of the separation of the town from the countryside).” Vladimir Lenin, “Marxist Views on the Agrarian Question in Europe and in Russia” in V. I. Lenin, Lenin’s Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961), 6: 345. 61.  Lenin devoted an entire section of The History of Capitalism in Russia to Engelgardt’s life and work. V. I. Lenin, “Istoriia khoziastva Engel’gardta” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii V. I. Lenina, 5th ed. (Moscow: Gos. izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1961), 3: 32. 62.  V. G. Mineev, “Udobrenie” in Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 3rd ed., ed. A. M. Prokhorov (Moscow: Gos. nauch. izd-vo “Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia,” 1977), 26: 479. 63.  Edward Hallett Carr, The Russian Revolution: From Lenin to Stalin (1917–1929) (London: Macmillan, 1979), 52. 64.  This equalizing “system of barter” between city and countryside did not function as expected, as the 1923 scissors crisis showed. 3. Dirt

1.  Quoted in Gogol’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 6: 907, n2. 2.  Douglas draws on William James’s formulation in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966), 36. 3.  Robin suggests that these debates assume as their “ideological horizon . . . a parascientific ideology that does not operate on the terrain of science but continually skirts it.” Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 83. 4.  Ioakhim Klein, Russkaia literatura v XVIII veke (Moscow: Indrik, 2010), 172. 5.  J. R. Morgan, Introduction to Daphnis and Chloe by Longus (Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 2004), 6–7. 6.  Ioakhim Klein, Russkaia literatura, 172. 7. On Russian pastoral poetry and its influence on other genres, see T. V. Sas’kova, Pastoral’ v russkoi poezii XVIII veka (Moscow: MGOPU, 1999).

NOTES TO PAGES 5 1 – 5 7     147

8.  Thomas Newlin, The Voice in the Garden: Andrei Bolotov and the Anxieties of the Russian Pastoral, 1738–1833 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 140. 9. Williams, Country and City, 12 et passim. For a discussion of Pushkin’s subversion of the locus amoenus in the poem “The Countryside,” see Stephanie Sandler, Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 23–39. 10.  Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 241–264. 11.  Poggioli, 262. 12.  Belinskii, “Literaturnye mechtaniia,” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 1: 15–16 et passim. 13.  Quoted in Vadim Shkolnikov, “Imperial Realism: Belinsky and the Wretched of the Earth,” Ulbandus Review 7 (2003): 69. 14.  Quoted in Ronald D. Leblanc, “Teniers, Flemish Art, and the Natural School Debate,” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (1991): 580. 15.  Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1996), 17–18. All citations are from the translation unless otherwise noted. 16.  Gogol, 18. 17.  Gogol, 39–40. 18.  Gogol, 57. 19. V. G. Belinskii, “Ob’’iasnenie na ob’’iasnenie po povodu poemy Gogolia ‘Mertvye dushi,’ ” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 2: 341. 20. Gogol’, Mertvye dushi II, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7: 57, 60. Here and in the following quote, the translation is mine, as the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation lacks these passages. 21.  Gogol’, 63. 22. Grigoryan, Noble Subjects, 89–95. 23.  Quoted in A. G. Tseitlin, Stanovlenie realizma v russkoi literature: Russkii fiziologicheskii ocherk (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 92. 24.  For a history of the physiological sketch, see Tseitlin. 25.  Ivan Turgenev had contributed the story “Three Portraits” and the poem “The Squire” to the Petersburg Miscellany. 26.  Grigorovich’s sketches in The Physiology of Petersburg are “Petersburg Organgrinders” (“Peterburgskie sharmanshchiki”) and “The Lottery Ball” (“Lotereinii bal”). 27.  D. V. Grigorovich, “Derevnia,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Leningrad: Gos. izdvo khudozh. lit-ry, 1959), 47. 28.  Grigorovich, 26, 29. 29.  Grigorovich, 43. 30.  Grigorovich, 59. 31.  D. V. Grigorovich, Literaturnye vospominaniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1987), 92–93. 32.  I. A. Krylov, “Petukh i zhemchuzhoe zerno,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gosizdat. khud. lit., 1946) 3: 51. 33.  V. G. Belinskii, “Povesti, skazki i rasskazy Kazaka Luganskogo,” Sovremennik 1 (1847): 135–136. Emendment and emphasis mine. Belinskii refers to a cartoon by

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M. L. Nevakhovich in Eralash 1 (1847): 5, which depicts Grigorovich rummaging in a garbage pit. Bulgarin praised the caricature in Severnaia pchela no. 20, Jan. 25, 1847. See primechaniia in V. G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobraniie sochinenii (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1956), 10: 440. 34.  Elisabeth Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from “Madame Bovary” to “Lolita” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 51; Jessica Tanner, “Branding Naturalism: Dirt, Territory, and Zola’s Aesthetics,” Dix-Neuf 23, no. 2 (2019): 78, 72, 82. 35.  Zola theorized “naturalism” in the forward to the second edition of his novel Thérèse Raquin. 36.  Tanner, “Branding Naturalism,” 80. 37.  Émile Zola, The Experimental Novel, trans. Belle M. Sherman (New York: Cassell Publishing, 1893), 58. 38.  V. G. Belinskii, “Pis’mo I. S. Turgenevu 1/13 marta 1847,” in Sobranie sochinenii v deviatykh tomakh (Moscow: Khud. lit., 1982), 9: 625. 39.  Belinskii, “Otvet Moskvitianinu,” Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 3: 738. 40.  P. A. Karatygin, Zapiski (Leningrad: Izd. Isskustvo, 1970), 268. 41.  A. V. Nikitenko, the so-called head of the natural school, echoed these aesthetic values, observing that future writers would “find not only dirt, but gold as well.” Quoted in Kenneth E. Harper, “Criticism of the Natural School in the 1840s,” American Slavic and East European Review 15, no. 3 (1956): 404. 42.  Belinskii, “O zhizni i sochineniiakh Kol’tsova,” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 3: 137. 43. Karatygin, Zapiski, 268. This language strangely anticipates the later critique of Zola by his former protegees: “a note ordurière est exacerbée encore, descendue à des saletés si basses que, par instants, on se croirait devant un recueil de scatologie: le Maître est descendu au fond de l’immondice’.” Quoted in Tanner, “Branding Naturalism,” 82. 44.  Belinskii, “Literaturnyi razgovor, podslushannyi v knizhnoi lavke,” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 2: 313. 45.  On the influence of Hegel on Belinskii’s aesthetics, see Terras, Belinskij. 46.  V. G. Belinskii, “Pis’mo N. V. Gogoliu 15 iulia 1847 g.,” in N. V. Gogol’ v russkoi kritike: sbornik statei, eds. A. K. Kotov and M. Ia. Poliakov (Moscow: Gos izd khud lit, 1953), 244. 47.  Quoted in Harper, “Criticism,” 404. 48.  Pisemskii’s 1853 “Leshii” is the story of a depraved lackey, Parmenov, who comes from the city to manage the estate of his absent master, bringing urban infection with him into the countryside. The tale generically infects the topos of the countryside with the narrative methods of the urban physiological sketch. 49.  I draw on the work of Jennifer Tanner, who applies Serres’s theory to Zola’s “branding” of naturalism. Tanner, “Branding Naturalism.” 50.  Gleb Uspenskii, “Tishe vody, nizhe travy,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Akademii nauk, 1941), 3: 193. 51.  Aleksei Pisemskii, Liudi sorokovykh godov in Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1984), 5: 89. The pervasive griaz’ in this work is both material and moral; the griaz’ on their boots mirrors the griaz’ in their moral conduct.

NOTES TO PAGES 6 0 – 6 6     149

52.  D. I. Pisarev, “Stoiachaia voda” in Sochineniia (Moscow: Gos. izd. khud. lit., 1955), 1: 172. 53.  Pushkin, “Ruslan i Liudmila,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Leningrad: Izd. nauka, 1977), 4: 8. 54.  Pisarev, “Stoiachnaia voda,” 174. 55.  Pisarev, 172. 56.  Evgeniia Basovskaia, Sovetskaia pressa: Za “chistotu iazyka”: 60 let borby (Moscow: RGGU, 2011), 76. 57.  Michael S. Gorham, “Mastering the Perverse: State Building and Language ‘Purification’ in Early Soviet Russia,” Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (2000): 144–147. 58.  Cf. Robin, Socialist Realism, 166 et passim; Hans Gunther, “Soviet Literary Criticism and the Formulation of the Aesthetics of Socialist Realism, 1932–1940,” in A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Evgeny Dobrenko and Galin Tihanov (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 93–95. On the relationship between realism as a historically situated (nineteenth-century) artistic movement and as “a transhistorical mode” whose object is maximally truthful mimesis, see Molly Brunson, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 2–3. 59.  Gunther, “Soviet Literary Criticism,” 97. 60.  Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 285. 61.  Fedor Panferov, Bruski (Moscow: OGIZ, 1947), 6. 62.  Panferov, 19. 63.  Panferov, 24. 64.  Panferov, 44. I am grateful to Alexander Nakhimovsky for sharing his insights on this passage. 65.  The text of Bruski was under construction and editions vary. Many scatological scenes were redacted from later editions as part of the ongoing sanitization of the text, so I quote from the first volume of the multivolume 1930 edition here and in some passages that follow. Fedor Panferov, Bruski (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1930), 1: 97. 66. Panferov, Bruski (1947), 52. 67. Panferov, Bruski (1930), 1: 74. 68.  Panferov, 1: 103. 69. Panferov, Bruski (1947), 208. 70.  M. Shaginian, “Diskussiia o iazyke,” Literaturnaia gazeta, April 18, 1934, 2. 71.  Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei: stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Gos. izd. khud. lit., 1934), 151. 72.  Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 603. 73.  Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 235. 74. Robin, Socialist Realism, 168. 75.  Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 316. 76.  Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 316. 77.  Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 360. 78.  Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 360. 79.  Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 373. 80.  Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 418. 81.  E. Permitin, “Pis’mo M. Gor’komu,” Literaturnaia gazeta, March 6, 1934, 2. 82.  Per’vyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 243.

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83.  Evgeniia Basovskaia, Sovetskaia pressa, 80. 84.  In footnotes above I indicate these redacted passages. 4. Sediment

1.  Cf. Mark Neocleous, “The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx’s Vampires,” History of Political Thought 24, no. 4 (2003): 668–684; in the Soviet reception of Marx, Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 148 et passim. 2.  V. O. Kliuchevskii, Otzyvy i otvety. Tretii sbornik statei. (Petrograd: Kommissariat Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia, 1918), 2. 3.  Michael Kunichika, Our Native Antiquity: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2015), 287. 4.  This was particularly true of the science of child development, which played a crucial role in the Stalinist project to reform the human subject. Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, trans. Noah Rubins and Maria Rubins (New York: Routledge, 2018), 259–285. 5.  L. S. Vygotskii, “K voprosu o dinamike detskogo kharaktera,” in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow: Pegagogika, 1983), 5: 156. 6.  V. N. Voloshinov, Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka: Osnovnye problemy sotsiologicheskogo metoda v nauke o iazyke (Leningrad: Proboi, 1930), 49. The authorship of this text is disputed; some scholars attribute it to Bakhtin. 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2003), 150. 8.  Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 211. 9.  K. Paustovsky, The Black Island, trans. Evgenia Schimanskaya (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1977), 47. 10. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia, 257–258. 11.  Viktor Turin, dir., Turksib (1929; Los Angeles: Flicker Alley, 2011), DVD. 12.  Andrei Platonov, “Velikii rabotnik (O razvitii v Rossii vzryvnoi kul’tury),” in Sochineniia, ed. Natal’ia Kornienko (Moscow: IMLI-RAN, 2004), vol. 1, bk. 2: 248. 13.  Andrei Platonov, “Pervyi Ivan: fragmenty ocherka,” Oktiabr’ 5 (2004), 121. 14.  Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit, trans. Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Meerson (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), 13. 15.  Platonov, 13. This association of earth with feminine passivity echoes the discourse of virgin land, discussed in chapter 6. 16.  Platonov, 13. 17.  Platonov, 19. 18.  Platonov, 12. 19.  Platonov, 19. Emphasis mine. 20.  Platonov, 146. 21.  Despite this reversed valuation of Russian soil, Russia’s spatial coordinates between Europe and Asia continued to feature in Soviet art and political rhetoric as

NOTES TO PAGES 7 3 – 7 5     151

a basis for a great world-historical destiny, as had been the case before the October Revolution. 22.  For a detailed analysis of this image, see Aglaya Glebova, “ ‘No Longer an Image, Not Yet a Concept’: Montage and the Failure to Cohere in Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Gulag Photoessay,” Art History 42, no. 2 (April 2019): 332–361. 23.  Cynthia A. Ruder, Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998); Ioakhim Klein, “Belomorkanal: Literatura i propaganda v stalinskoe vremia,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 71 (2005): 231–262; Ivan Chukhin, Kanaloarmeitsy: Istoriia stroitel’stva Belomorkanala v dokumentakh, tsifrakh, faktakh, fotografiiakh, svidetel’stvakh, uchastnikov i ochevidtsev (Petrozavodsk: Kareliia, 1990); Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazarev, eds. The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2003); Michael Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag: The Soviet Prison Camp System, 1917–1934 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993); Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Vadim Staklo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 24. Ruder, Making History for Stalin, 47. 25.  Oleg Khlevniuk, “The Economy of the OGPU, NKVD, and MVD of the USSR, 1930–1953,” in The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag, eds. Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazarev (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2003), 44. “Spetspereselentsy” or “special settlers” (alleged kulaks) frequently worked in agriculture or forest industries, one prong of the internal colonization of Soviet lands. For more on this special sector of the camps, see Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 26.  These agencies came to manage a crucial sector of the Soviet economy. In the early 1930s the agency Gidroproekt emerged under the direction of the NKVD and would later become the main all-Union agency managing “hydroelectric, hydrotechnical, and water-resource construction” for decades, leading even high-profile projects in the developing world, such as the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. G. G. Lapin, “70 Years of Gidroproekt and Hydroelectric Power in Russia,” Hydrotechnical Construction 34, no. 8/9 (2000): 374. 27. Marx, Capital, 1: 283. 28.  Marx, 3: 959. 29.  Maksim Gor’kii, “O temakh,” Pravda, Oct. 17, 1933. 30.  Evgeny Dobrenko, “Nadzirat’—nakazyvat’—nadzirat’: Sotsrealizm kak pribavochnyi produkt nasiliia,” Revue des études slaves 73, no. 4 (2001), 671. 31.  M. Gor’kii, L. L. Averbakh, and S. G. Firin, eds. Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal im. Stalina: Istoriia stroitel’stva (Moscow: Istoriia fabrik I zavodov, 1934), 356, 398. 32.  Gor’kii, Averbakh, and Firin, 395. 33.  Pavel Luknitsky, Soviet Tajikistan (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 8. 34.  Gor’kii, Averbakh, and Firin, Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal, 398. 35.  Trans. and repr. in Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 103. Orig. Osip Mandel’shtam, “Gumanizm i sovremennost’,” in Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khud. lit., 1990), 2:205.

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36.  Vladimir Paperny, Kul’tura dva (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985), 142–145. 37.  Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). 38.  The ambiguities of Marx and Engels’s shifting conceptions of the AMP are delineated carefully in G. Lichtheim, “Marx and the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production,’ ” in Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought, eds. Bob Jessop and Russell Wheatley (London: Routledge, 1999), 35–58. 39.  For a historical perspective on oriental despotism and the AMP, see Marian Sawer, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977); Anne M. Bailey and Josep R. Llobera, The Asiatic Mode of Production: Science and Politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). 40.  Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, trans. Richard Dixon et al. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979), 12: 127. The “war of devastation” referred to the Mongol conquest, which historians of the time viewed as a calamity that precipitated centuries of Islamic decline. 41.  Georgii Plekhanov, Sochineniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izd., 1924), 10: 154. 42.  Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov in Russian History and Soviet Historiography (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 54–55. 43.  Quoted in V. I. Lenin, “The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905–1907,” in Lenin’s Collected Works, 13: 329. 44.  Bailey and Llobera, Asiatic Mode of Production, 51. 45.  The piatichlenka was formulated by the Russian orientalist V. V. Struve. The five stages of socioeconomic development in the piatichlenka were: primitivecommunal, slaveholding, feudal, capitalist, and socialist. Those who believed the AMP was a legitimate political formation were known as aziatchiki. 46. Sawer, Marxism, 52. The Asiatic mode of production was “revived” in 1964. 47.  On the ambiguity of the political orientation of the novel, see V. P. Kriuchkov, “Proza B. A. Pil’niaka 1920-x godov: Motivy v funktsional’nomi intertekstual’nom aspektakh” (PhD diss., Saratov State University, 2006), 361. 48.  Boris Pil’niak, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow: Terra, 2003), 4: 284. 49.  For an overview of the critical and scholarly responses to the novel, see Irene Masing-Delic, “Boris Pilniak’s The Volga Falls To The Caspian Sea as Trotskyite Sophiology,” Slavic and East European Journal 52, no. 3 (2008): 414–438. 50. Pil’niak, Sobranie sochinenii, 359. 51.  Pil’niak, 415. 52.  Pil’niak, 354. 53.  Pil’niak, 355. 54.  The allusion to the dialectical processes of nature is underscored by reference to “Engels the sociologist and Engels the hydrologist.” Pil’niak, 362. 55.  Pil’niak, 423. 56.  Pil’niak, 254. 57.  Irene Masing-Delic reads the hydroengineering plot as allegory of sexual sublimation, with deserts representing nomadic masculinity. Masing-Delic, “Pilniak’s Volga Falls.” 58. Pil’niak, Sobranie sochinenii, 468.

NOTES TO PAGES 8 0 – 8 5     153

59.  Pil’niak, 468. Poletika’s plan to irrigate the Aral-Caspian Basin is one of many textual elements that echo Andrei Platonov’s novel Dzhan, discussed in the next chapter. 60.  Pil’niak, 254-255. 61.  Poletika remarks that “the desert is advancing on us, on Western Siberia and European Russia, it is stealing right up to Moscow, and its harbinger is the sukhovei.” Pil’niak, 467. 62.  Boris Pil’niak, Sed’maia Sovetskaia (Leningrad: Izd. pisatelei, 1931), 26. 63. Pil’niak, Sobranie sochinenii, 362. 64.  Pil’niak, 403. 65.  Gary Browning, Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985), 124. 66. Pil’niak, Sobranie sochinenii, 270. 67.  Pil’niak, 270. 68.  Pil’niak, 423. 69.  Pil’niak, 324. 70.  Pil’niak, 465. 71.  Pil’niak, 467. 72.  Pil’niak, 240. 73.  Pil’niak, 423. 74.  Pil’niak, 325–326, 333. 75.  Pil’niak, 355. 76.  Pil’niak, 356. 77.  Pil’niak, 300. 78.  Pil’niak, 393. 79.  Pil’niak, 375. A gorodovoi was a nineteenth-century policeman. 80.  Pil’niak, 247. 81.  Pil’niak, 343. 82.  Pil’niak, 461. 83.  Pil’niak, 288. 84.  Pil’niak, 335. 85.  Pil’niak, 375. 86.  Irene Masing-Delic, “Pilniak’s Volga Falls,” 416. 87.  Boris Pil’niak, Mne vypala gor’kaia slava: Pis’ma 1915–1937 (Moscow: Agraf, 2002), 345. 88.  Nina Kolesnikoff, Bruno Jasien´ ski: His Evolution from Futurism to Socialist Realism (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983), 8. 89.  Bruno Iasenskii, Chelovek meniaet kozhu (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1956), 34; Bruno Jasien´ ski, Man Changes His Skin, trans. H. G. Scott (Leningrad: Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1935), 42. All subsequent citations are from the English translation unless otherwise noted. 90. Jasien´ ski, Man Changes His Skin, 40. 91.  Jasien´ ski, 55. 92.  Jasien´ ski, 45. 93.  Jasien´ ski, 688–689; 695–696. Translation modified. 94.  Andrei Platonov also deploys the figures of sediment and sand as the material remains of the dead in his novel of Turkmenistan, Dzhan, discussed in the next chapter.

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95. Jasien´ ski, Man Changes His Skin, 696. 96.  Jasien´ ski, 64. 97.  Jasien´ ski, 192. 98.  Jasien´ ski, 273. 99.  Jasien´ ski, 126. 100.  Jasien´ ski, 410. 101.  Jasien´ ski, 162–163. 102.  Jasien´ ski, 163. 103.  Jasien´ ski, 281–282. 104.  Jasien´ ski, 129. 105.  Jasien´ ski, 61. Translated modified. 106.  Jasien´ ski, 140. 107.  Jasien´ ski, 742, 751. 108.  Jasien´ ski, 45. 109.  Jasien´ ski, 60. 110.  Jasien´ ski, 229–230. 111.  V. B. Shklovskii, Eizenshtein (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976), 151. Richard Taylor, translator’s note, “The Great Fergana Canal,” by Petr Pavlenko and Sergei Eisenstein, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 5, no. 1 (2011): 123. 112.  Naum Kleiman, “Fergana Canal and Tamburlaine’s Tower,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 5, no. 1 (2011): 103. 113.  Kleiman, 115. 114.  Sergei Eisenstein, “The Film about the Fergana Canal,” trans. Richard Taylor, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 5, no. 1 (2011): 160. The translation is of the original typescript; the first published version, which had been significantly cut and rewritten, appeared in Pravda, August 13, 1939. 115.  Eisenstein, “Fergana Canal,” 157. 116.  Viktor Shklovsky, Viktor Shklovksy: A Reader, trans. Alexandra Berlina (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 279. Translation modified. 117.  Kleiman, “Fergana Canal,” 108. 118.  Kleiman, 109. 119.  Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 110. 5. Wasteland

1.  Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 3. 2.  Diana K. Davis uses the term “arboreal chauvinism” to refer to the longstanding Anglo-European belief that a temperate forest environment is the normative environment on earth. Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 125. 3.  On the concept of osvoenie (lit. “to make something one’s own,” svoi), see Widdis, New Land, 7–9. 4.  A. G. Gael’, “Otbrosit’ nazad chernye peski Kara-Kuma,” Pravda, September 25, 1933. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Turkmenistan was

NOTES TO PAGES 9 2 – 9 6     155

the last of the five Central Asian republics to be brought under full Soviet political control; only in early 1933, the year of the Moscow−Kara-Kum−Moscow rally, was the Turkmen leader of the “basmachi,” Dzhunaid Khan, driven from the Soviet Union. 5.  USSR in Construction 2 (1934). 6.  USSR in Construction 2: 84. 7.  Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 214 − 215. This term is used by Gorky in his discussion of possible genres and topics for children’s literature. See Gor’kii, “O temakh.” 8. Elena Rozhentseva, “Opyt dokumentirovaniia Turkmenskikh poezdok A. P. Platonova,” in Arkhiv A. P. Platonova, ed. N. V. Kornienko (Moscow: IMLI-RAN, 2009), 1: 400. 9.  Platonov sketches out the itinerary for his trips to Turkmenistan in letters and notebooks in a letter of April 1934, in Andrei Platonov, Gosudarstvennyi zhitel’ (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988), 560. 10.  Elena Antonova points out that Platonov left Turkmenistan on May 7, prior to the Academy of Sciences’ expedition. E. Antonova, “A. Platonov—Inzhener Tresta Rosmetroves,” in “Strana filosofov” Andreia Platonova: Problemy tvorchestva, ed. N. V. Kornienko (Moscow: IMLI-RAN, 2000), 4: 791. For a detailed reconstruction of the chronology of the Turkmenistan brigade, see Rozhentseva, “Opyt dokumentirovaniia,” 398–407. 11.  Natal’ia Kornienko suggests that Platonov may have already traveled to the Kara-Kum Desert in the 1920s as a land reclamation engineer. Andrei Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki: Materialy k biografii, ed. Natal’ia Kornienko (Moscow: IMLI-RAN, 2000), 368n12. 12.  L. Anninskii, for example, writes that for Platonov, Asia is generally “not a geographical space.” L. Anninskii, “Vostok i zapad v tvorchestve Andreia Platonova,” Prostor 1 (1968): 93. One recent analysis uniting geographical and metageographical topoi in Dzhan is Nariman Skakov, “Prostranstva ‘Dzhana’ Andreia Platonova,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 107, no. 1 (2011): 211–230. For a summary and catalog of mythological readings of Dzhan, see Thomas Seifrid, Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 186, 245–246. 13.  Arif Dirlik, “Mao Zedong and ‘Chinese Marxism,’ ” in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl (New York: Routledge, 1996), 128–129. One variation on this formulation (grounded in the same implicit biblical analogy) is Annette Michelson’s use of demotic Marxism, quoted in Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 6. Jameson uses the term synonymously with vulgar Marxism, approving of it as the necessary practical counterpart to any theoretical Marxism, and while his definition does not stress local conditions, the emphasis on praxis has some relevance to Platonov’s case. Fredric Jameson, “Actually Existing Marxism,” in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Makdisi, Casarino, and Karl, 50. 14.  Dirlik, “Mao Zedong,” in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Makdisi, Casarino, and Karl, 128–129. 15.  Thomas Osbourne, “Utopia, Counter-Utopia,” History of the Human Sciences 16, no. 1 (February 2003): 123–136. 16.  Platonov, “Bor’ba s pustynei,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 276–278.

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17.  Platonov, “Zhizn’ do kontsa,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 180. 18.  Andrei Platonovich Platonov, Vzyskanie pogibshikh: Rasskazy i ocherki (Moscow: EKSMO, 2010), 630. 19.  See M. Nemtsov and E. Antonova, “Gubmeliorator tov. Platonov: Po materialam Narkomata zemledeliia, 1921–1926 gg.,” in “Strana filosofov,” ed. Kornienko, 3: 476–508. 20.  V. B. Shklovskii. Tret’ia fabrika (Moscow: Artel’ pisatelei “Krug,” 1926), 125. 21.  Quoted in Andrei Platonov, Sobranie, eds. N. V. Kornienko and N. M. Malygina et al. (Moscow: Vremia, 2009), 1: 616. 22. Platonov, “Doklad upravleniia rabot po gidrifikatsii Tsentral’noi Asii,” Sochineniia, 1, bk. 1: 212–16. See also Boris Bobylev, “Ob Andree Platonove— Voronezhskom gazetchike,” in Nash Platonov, ed. R. V. Andreeva, Viktor Budakov, and L. Popova (Voronezh: Tsentr dukhovnogo vozrozhdeniia chernozemnogo kraia, 1999), 209. 23.  Platonov, “Khlebstanok,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 202. 24.  Platonov, “Bor’ba s pustynei,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 278. 25.  Platonov, 276. Platonov similarly calls nature itself the “waste, excrement” of history. Andrei Platonov, “Simfoniia soznania II: Istoriia i priroda,” in “Strana filosofov,” ed. Kornienko, 1: 318. 26.  Platonov, “Na fronte znoia,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 212. 27.  Platonov, 212. 28. Andrei Platonov, “Strana bedniakov: Ocherki chernozemnoi oblasti,” in Sobranie, 8: 633. 29.  Platonov returns to the Solovevian pun, with more humor, in his “Story about Many Interesting Things” (1923): “Ivan thought about words: why is a ravine called a ravine? . . . A ravine [ovrag] is the enemy [vrag] of the peasant.” Platonov, “Rasskaz o mnogikh interesnykh veshchakh,” Sochineniia, 1, bk. 1: 244. 30.  Platonov, “Khlebstanok,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 202. 31.  Bobylev, “Ob Andree Platonove,” in Nash Platonov, ed. Andreeva, Budakov, and Popova, 210. Dokuchaev attributed the 1891 famine to the breaking of the steppes’ virgin soil, noting that the fertile but delicate loess soil of the steppe lands became vulnerable to erosion when native grasses were cleared for grain cultivation. 32.  Platonov, “Chernyi spasitel’,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 156. 33.  Andrei Platonov to M. A. Platonova, Tambov, 10 December 1926, in Arkhiv A. P. Platonova, ed. Kornienko, 1: 446. 34.  Andrei Platonov, “Peschanaia uchitel’nitsa,” in Platonov, Rasskazy (Moscow: Khud. literatura, 1962), 37. 35.  Pravda described the famous Black Sunday dust storm to its Soviet readers, reporting that “the air is filled with soil particles” and “farmers, cattlemen, and farm hands by the thousands are fleeing the affected areas.” “Pyl’nyi shtorm v S.Sh.A,” Pravda, April 14, 1935, 5. 36.  The expansion to uncultivated land and its erosion in Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign is discussed in the following chapter. 37.  M. Il’in, New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the First Five-Year Plan, trans. George S. Counts and Nucia P. Lodge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 79. 38.  Maksim Gor’kii, “O bor’be s prirodoi,” Pravda, December 12, 1931.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 0 0 – 1 0 4     157

39.  Platonov, “Pervyi Ivan,” 121. It is important to note that “Pervyi Ivan” was drawn from fragments of earlier texts and its characters present diverse views on drought and desertification. For a textological comparison of various manuscript versions and the published version in Oktiabr’, see Ben Dhooge, “Istochniki teksta ocherka ‘Pervyi Ivan’ (Zametki o tekhnicheskom tvorchestve trudiashchikhsia liudei),” in Arkhiv Platonova, ed. Kornienko, 1: 52–80. 40. Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki, 135. 41.  Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” in Sobranie, 8: 641. 42.  Platonov, 641. 43.  Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Dutt (London: Lawrence & Wishart,1940), 291–292. 44.  Quoted in Weiner, Models of Nature, 195. Edith Clowes has shown Platonov’s close attention to contemporary debates in Marxist-Leninism in her discussion of dialectical materialism in The Foundation Pit. Edith Clowes, Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 235–257. 45. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 292. 46.  Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” in Sobranie, 8: 641. 47.  A. Miretskii, “Segodnia i zavtra v Karakumskii pustyni,” Pravda, May 23, 1934. For background on the polar theme in socialist realism, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 101–102; John McCannon, “Tabula Rasa in the North: The Soviet Arctic and Mythic Landscapes in Stalinist Popular Culture,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 241–260; and, on the socialist realist language of frontiers and exploration more generally, Widdis, New Land, 97–119. Also relevant is Clark’s treatment of the Stalinist “imperial sublime,” in Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 276–306. 48.  Andrei Platonov, “Goriachaia Arktika,” Volga 9 (1975): 171. 49.  Andrei Platonov, 171. 50.  V. V. Bartol’d, “K voprosu o vpadenii Amu-dar’i v Kaspiiskoe more” (1932), in Sochineniia, ed. O. G. Bol’shakov (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 248–251; Olaf Caroe, Soviet Empire: The Turks of Central Asia and Stalinism (London: Macmillan, 1967), 23. 51.  Significantly, Platonov omits from discussion Chinggis Khan, whose invasion of Khorezm in the early thirteenth century was notoriously brutal and who was commonly associated with the destruction of irrigation systems in Islamic Central Asia and Iran. 52.  Platonov, “Goriachaia Arktika,” 170. 53.  Ehsan Yarshater, “Iran: iii. Traditional History,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2004), 13, fasc. 3: 303–306. 54. In his works on the multiethnic Turkmen SSR, Platonov discusses the nomadic ethnic Turkmens surprisingly infrequently and with some ambivalence. 55.  Andrei Platonov, “Dzhan,” in Proza, 458. 56.  Platonov, 502. 57.  Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” in Sobranie, 8: 641.

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58.  Platonov, “Dzhan,” 484–485. 59.  Platonov, 494. 60.  Platonov, 461. 61.  Platonov, 500. 62.  Platonov, 472–473. 63.  Platonov, 473. 64. Platonov, “Takyr,” in Aiding-Giunler: Al’manakh k desiatiletiiu Turkmenistana, 1924–1934, ed. Grigorii Sannikov (Moscow: Izd. Iubileinoi komissii TsIK TSSR, 1934), 51. 65.  Platonov, “Dzhan,” 477. 66.  Keith Livers remarks on a similar transformation of “filth” into “purity” in Moscow Chestnova’s body in Happy Moscow. Keith A. Livers, Constructing the Stalinist Body: Fictional Representations of Corporeality in the Stalinist 1930s (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 56. Another companion scene, but one that is more ambivalent, can be found in Platonov’s 1934 play Sharmanka (The Barrel Organ), in which a Soviet bureaucrat creates food from unlikely sources: Seifrid, Andrei Platonov, 179–181. 67.  Eric Naiman, “Collective Toilet,” 98. For more on the problems of “waste” and “salvage” in Platonov’s works on Turkmenistan, see Natal’ia Kornienko, “Andrei Platonov: ‘Turkmeniia—Strana ironii,’  ” in Natsiia. Lichnost’. Literatura (Moscow: Nasledie, 1996), 108–109; Valerii Krapivin, “Iranskie grezy: Ariiskaia tema v tvorchestve Khlebnikova i Platonova,” in “Strana filosofov,” ed. Kornienko, 4: 301. 68.  For more on Nikolai Fedorov’s influence on Platonov, see Ayleen Teskey, Platonov and Fyodorov: The Influence of Christian Philosophy on a Soviet Writer (Amsterdam: Avebury, 1982). 69.  Platonov, “Goriachaia Arktika,” 172. 70.  Andrei Platonov, “Bor’ba s pustynei,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 276. In his notebooks Platonov sketches a rather darkly humorous plan for a story, marked by his own distinctive bathroom humor, combining all of these elements: “A story about two brothers—Maliuchenok—food, Chinese agriculture, a skull in the outhouse.” Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki, 177. 71.  Platonov, “Voprosy sel’skokhoziastva v kitaiskom zemledelii,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 236. While Platonov’s suggestion may have a hint of satire, it is consonant with Marx’s concept of social metabolism discussed in chapter 2. 72.  Andrei Platonov, “Epifanskie shliuzy,” in Sobranie, 3: 101. 73.  Platonov, 95, 118. 74.  Paperny, “Men, Women, and the Living Space,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design & Social History, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 168. 75.  Andrei Platonov to M. A. Platonova, Tambov, January 5–6, 1927, in Arkhiv Platonova, ed. Kornienko, 1: 459. 76.  Quoted in Natal’ia Kornienko, “Istoriia teksta i biografiia A. P. Platonova (1926–1946),” in Vladimir Fainberg, Zdes’ i teper’ 1 (1993), 218. In evoking pedagogy Platonov is referring to the claim that forced labor on the canals would re-educate political prisoners, discussed in the previous chapter. 77.  Edward Allworth, ed., Central Asia, 130 Years of Russian Dominance: A Historical Overview (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 9, 13; P. A. Letunov, I. P. Gerasimov, and Viktor A. Kovda, Glavnyi Turkmenskii Kanal: Prirodnye usloviia i perspektivy orosheniia i obvodneniia zemel’ iuzhnykh raionov prikaspiiskoi ravniny zapadnoi

NOTES TO PAGES 1 0 7 – 1 1 2     159

Turkmenii, nizov’ev Amu-Dar’i i zapadnoi chasti pustyni Kara-Kumy (Moscow: Izd. Akademii nauk SSSR, 1952), 7. 78.  A. Miretskii, “Segodnia i zavtra v Karakumskii pustyni,” 4. Decades-long construction of the Kara Kum Canal began in 1954. It is one of the major causes of the Aral Sea’s desiccation. See Nikolai S. Orlovsky, “Creeping Environmental Changes in the Karakum Canal’s Zone of Impact,” in Creeping Environmental Problems and Sustainable Development in the Aral Sea Basin, ed. Michael H. Glantz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 225–244. 79.  Platonov, “Dzhan,” 452. “Bais,” in Central Asia, referred to the wealthy, and for Soviet readers, kulaks. 80.  Platonov, 505. 81.  Platonov, 476–477. 82.  Ernest Gellner, Foreword to Nomads and the Outside World by Anatoly M. Khazanov, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), xi. 83.  Gellner, x. Emphasis in original. 84.  Platonov, “Goriachaia Arktika,” 170. 85.  Platonov, 171. I am grateful to Alexander Nakhimovsky for a helpful discussion on Platonov’s meaning in this passage. 86.  Platonov, 171. A takyr is a clayey, saline soil formation with limited vegetation found in ancient river deltas throughout Central Asia. Takyrs retain water because of their high clay content and are often used to water herd animals. Nikolai Kharin, Vegetation Degradation in Central Asia under the Impact of Human Activities (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002), 18. 87.  Platonov, “Dzhan,” 490, 452. 88.  Platonov, “Goriachaia Arktika,” 171. 89.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 93. 90.  Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” in Sobranie, 8: 641. 91.  Svetlana Ponomareva, “ ‘Ia rodilsia na prekrasnoi zhivoi zemle. . . ’: Opyt kommentirovaniia meliorativnoi praktiki A. Platonova,” in “Strana filosofov,” ed. Kornienko, 4: 440. 92.  Platonov, “Dzhan,” 465. 93. “Nazar” also connotes spiritual or mystical vision in Sufi tradition. Hamid Ismailov, “Dzhan as a Sufi Treatise,” Essays in Poetics 26 (2001): 72–82. 94.  Platonov, “Dzhan,” 454. 95. Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki, 137. 96. I. A. Savkin, “Na storone Platona: Karsavin i Platonov, ili Ob odnoi ne-vstreche,” in Tvorchestvo Andreia Platonova: Issledovaniia i materialy, ed. E. I. Kolesnikova (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1995), 1:158–159. Savkin identifies the same nontraditional (i.e., “non-Platonic”) utopian landscapes in the works of the writer Lev Platonovich Karsavin, playing throughout the essay with the alternation between the names Platon, Platonov, and Platonovich. 97.  Platonov, “Dzhan,” 457. 98.  Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), 399–400. 99.  Platonov, “Goriachaia Arktika,” 171. 100.  Platonov, “Dzhan,” 467.

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6. Virgin Land

1.  Vladimir Kharitonov and O. Fel’tsman, “Planeta tselina,” in Russkie sovetskie pesni (1917–1977), ed. N. Kriukov and Ia. Shvedov (Moscow: Khudozh. lit., 1977), 495. The name “tselina” was given to a number of space-related objects. For example, in 1967 the first radio surveillance satellite, Tselina, was released into space. In 1980 the asteroid Tselina was named in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Virgin Lands campaign. 2. Brezhnev, Tselina, 26. 3.  For a history of the Russian colonization of the steppe, see Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 4.  It was reported in 2016, for example, that the Russian Federation had created a “homesteading” initiative—the “Far East Hectare” program; officials noted that the Russian Far East possessed great reserves of “fertile soil” (plodorodnaia pochva) and the government was taking steps to support citizens “in the development of new lands” (v osvoenii novykh zemel’). “Programma ‘Dal’nevostochnyi gektar,” Agenstvo po razvitiiu chelovecheskogo kapitala na Dal’nem Vostoke i v Arktike, https:// hcfe.ru/far-east-hectare/about/. 5.  Nestor Korol, The So-called Virgin Lands of Kazakhstan (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Slavic Institute Papers, 1962), 6. 6.  Gleb Tsipursky, “Citizenship, Deviance, And Identity: Soviet Youth Newspapers as Agents of Social Control in the Thaw-Era Leisure Campaign,” Cahiers du Monde russe 49, no. 4 (2008): 629–650; Juliane Fürst, “The Arrival of Spring? Changes and Continuities in Soviet Youth Culture and Policy between Stalin and Khrushchev,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones (New York: Routledge, 2006), 135–153; O. G. Gerasimova, “Ottepel’,” “zamorozki” i studenty Moskovskogo universiteta (Moscow: AIRO-XX vek, 2015). Tsipursky argues that the Virgin Lands campaign failed to transform Soviet youth into model citizens and that an alternative “leisure initiative” was launched in 1954 as a result. Tsipursky, “Citizenship, Deviance,” 636. 7.  There is no comprehensive study of the literature of the Virgin Lands, either in Russian or English. Janet Kahwaty, “The Virgin Lands in Soviet Literature, 1954– 1957” (MA thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1964) offers a preliminary bibliography and plot descriptions but limited analysis. For brief discussion of the genre of the sketch in Virgin Lands literature, see E. Zhurbina, Iskusstvo ocherka (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1957), 141–145. 8.  As Eric Naiman observes, metadiscursivity was a feature of Stalinist discourse, although it persisted in later Soviet discourse. Naiman quotes Stalin: “Remember the latest slogans, which the Party has put forward lately in connection with the new class shifts in our country. I am speaking about slogans, such as the slogan of self-criticism, the slogan of heightened struggle with bureaucracy and the purge of the Soviet apparatus, the slogan of organization, etc.” Eric Naiman, introduction, in Landscape of Stalinism, ed. Dobrenko and Naiman, xii. 9.  Vladislav Vasil’evich Vladimirov, ed., Prodolzhenie podviga: o “Tseline” i tselinnikakh (Moskva: Izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1979), 32. 10.  Vladimirov, 42. 11.  Vladimirov, 50, 84.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 1 6 – 1 2 1     161

12.  F. Morgun, ed., Na zemliakh tselinnykh: Rasskazy, ocherki, stikhi (Alma-Ata: Kazakhskoe gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khud. lit., 1955). 13.  Evgeny Dobrenko, The Political Economy of Socialist Realism, trans. Jesse Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 14.  Quoted in I. F. Sidorov and B. Ia. Dvoskin, Obzhitaia tselina (Moscow: Znanie, 1964), 3. 15.  P. Kviatkovskii, “Tselina,” Leningradskaia smena, April 28, 1960, 1. 16.  V. Kardin, “Tselina i knigi,” Novyi mir 1 (1956): 246. 17.  Kardin, 253. 18.  Quoted in Kardin, 247. 19. Clark, Soviet Novel, 73–77, 139–141, et passim. 20.  Eleonory Gilburd, To See Paris and Die (Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Belknap Press, 2018), 110. See also Herman Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature 1917–1991 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 46–47, 93–94, 175–176. 21.  V. Soloukhin, “Rozhdenie Zernograda,” in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun, 94. 22.  M. Balykin, “Vesennaia kolonna,” in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun, 5. 23.  Balykin, 21. 24.  Balykin, 18. 25.  A. Lemberg, “Pervenets,” in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun, 65. 26.  A. Shamkenov, “U kostra,” in Morgun, Na zemliakh tselinnykh, 47; Andreas Johns, Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 107. 27.  A. Ryvlin, “O podvige,” in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun, 57. 28.  G. Avdeev, “Na zare,” in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun, 45. 29.  V. Gordienko, “V dal’nii put’,” 23; Gordienko, “Reke Ural,” 24, both in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun. 30.  Sidorov and Dvoskin, Obzhitaia tselina, 4. 31.  Quoted in Kardin, “Tselina i knigi,” 245. 32.  Sabit Mukanov, “Na vershine Taskabaka,” Novyi mir 10 (Oct. 1956): 15. 33.  Soloukhin, “Rozhdenie Zernograda,” 96. 34.  Sabit Mukanov, “Tvoi plody,” Literaturnaia gazeta (Dec. 12, 1958): 1. 35.  V. Gordienko, “Tsvety Kremlia,” in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun, 32. 36.  Gordienko, 33. 37.  Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 13. 38.  Karl Marx, Capital, 1: 284–285, 287. 39.  Martin McCauley, Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture: Virgin Land Program, 1953–64 (London: Macmillan, 1976), 45–47. As an engineer, Malenkov believed that there were technical solutions to make farmland already under cultivation much more efficient. 40.  Vladimir Soloukhin and Ivan Shukhov are both authors of books entitled Zolotoe dno. 41.  Quoted in P. R. Pryde, Conservation in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 43. 42.  Piers Blaikie, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion (London: Routledge, 1985), 34. 43.  V. P. Vil’iams, Izbrannye sochineniia (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1950), 1: 141. 44.  The Russian translation of the Kyrgyz story was published in Novyi mir 2 (1961): 54–74.

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45.  Chingiz Aitmatov, “Camel Eye,” in Mother Earth and Other Stories, trans. James Riordan (London: Faber, 1989), 206. All subsequent citations are from the English translation unless otherwise indicated. 46.  Aitmatov, 198, 206. 47.  Aitmatov, 207. 48.  Aitmatov, 206. 49.  Aitmatov, 220. 50.  Aitmatov, 211. 51.  Aitmatov, 212. Translation emended. 52.  Aitmatov, 224. 53.  Aitmatov, 216. Translation emended 54.  Aitmatov, 216. Translation emended 55.  Aitmatov, 218. 56.  Aitmatov, 222. 57. “Hesiodic Works and Days,” trans. Gregory Nagy, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/5290. 58. Hesiod, Works and Days, Theogony and the Shield of Heracles, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006), 6. 59.  Aitmatov, “Camel Eye,” 220. 60.  Aitmatov, 201. 61.  Aitmatov, 227. 62.  Aitmatov, 227. 63.  See Jane Costlow’s ecocritical reading of the film: “Parched: Water and Its Absence in the Films of Larisa Shepitko,” in Meanings and Values of Water in Russian Culture, ed. Jane Costlow and Arja Rosenholm (New York: Routledge, 2017), 209–216. 64.  Aitmatov, “Camel Eye,” 213. 65. Breu, Insistence of the Material, 8. 66.  See L. N. Mazur, “Zabytaia legenda: Khudozhestvennye fil’my ob osvoenii tseliny 1950–1970-x gg,” in Dokument. Arkhiv. Istoriia. Sovremennost’: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Ekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Uralskogo universiteta, 2016). 67.  Etiudy, kartiny s tseliny: Raboty sovetskikh khudozhnikov vesnoi i letom 1954 goda (Moscow: Izd-vo “Sovetskii khudozhnik,” 1955); see also Vern Grosvenor Swanson, Hidden Treasures: Russian and Soviet Impressionism, 1930s-1970s (Scottsdale, AZ: Fleischer Museum, 1994), 42–53. 68.  Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 162. 69.  Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 13. 70. Breu, Insistence of the Material, 187. 71.  Paul Josephson calls the Virgin Lands campaign “one of Khrushchev’s most environmentally-devastating and costly programs.” Josephson, Environmental History, 145. 72.  Marc Elie, “Desiccated Steppes: Droughts and Climate Change in the USSR, 1960s-1980s,” in Eurasian Environments, ed. Nicholas B. Breyfogle (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2018), 75–93.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 2 8 – 1 3 1     163

73.  Michaela Pohl, “From White Grave to Tselinograd to Astana: The Virgin Lands Opening, Khrushchev’s Forgotten First Reform,” in The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s, ed. Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 293–294. See also Michaela Pohl, “The Virgin Lands between Memory and Forgetting: People and Transformation in the Soviet Union, 1954–1960” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1999). 74.  Pohl, “White Grave,” 300. 75.  Pohl, 300. 76.  Magdalena Edyta Stawkowski, “Radioactive Knowledge: State Control of Scientific Information in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan” (PhD diss., University of Colorado, 2014), 74. 77.  V. Orel, Planeta tselina: Studenchestvo na stroikakh Tselinnogo kraia (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1965), 1. 78.  Orel, 1. Epilogue

1.  Leo Kraznozhon, “Black Market for Rich Black Earth,” KyivPost (November 9, 2011), https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/black-market-for-richblack-earth-116610.html. 2. Marina Shepotilo, “Zberegti ukrains’ki chernozemi,” Ridne selo Ukraina (November 14, 2012): 4. 3. Dokuchaev, Russkii chernozem, 352. 4.  For a review of the literature on this topic, see Eileen Eckmeier et al., “Pedogenesis of Chernozems in Central Europe—A Review,” Geoderma 139 (2007): 288– 299. For a discussion of anthropogenic factors in the Moscow River floodplain, see A. L. Aleksandrovskii et al., “Natural and Anthropogenic Changes in the Soils and Environment of the Moskva River Floodplain in the Holocene: Pedogenic, Palynological, and Anthracological Evidences,” Eurasian Soil Science 51, no. 6 (2018): 613–627. This theory remains more controversial for Russian steppe chernozem than Central European chernozem. 5.  Eckmeier, “Pedogenesis,” 295–296; Aleksandrovskii, “Natural and Anthropogenic Changes”; some Russian scholars critical of this model’s importation do not use the term “chernozem” for such Central European soils, preferring such circumlocutions as “black carbon Neolithic soils of anthropogenic origin.” E. G. Ershova et al., “Paleosols, Paleovegetation and Neolithic Occupation of the Moskva River Floodplain, Central Russia,” Quaternary International 324 (2014): 143. 6.  Iu. P. Voronov, “Vozmozhno li, chto Ukrainskii chernozem sozdan liud’mi?,” Strana znanii, no. 2 (2018), https://www.krainaz.org/2018-02/355-chernozem. 7.  Iu. A. Peskov, “Iskusstvennyi chernozem,” Sel’skaia zhizn’ (Oct. 21, 2019), https://www.sgazeta.ru/page7800286.html. Peskov asserts that we lack the soil resources to feed our growing population; he estimates that to feed seven billion people, we will need twice the 1.4 million hectares of exhausted soil that is currently available. 8.  Russian soil science has been an area of special pride, thought of as a distinctly national science (otechestvennaia nauka).

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9.  Peskov, “Iskusstvennyi chernozem.” 10. Evgenii Kaziukin, “Zapredel’nyi uroven’ plodorodiia,” Belorus segodnia (April 12, 2011), https://www.sb.by/articles/zapredelnyy-uroven-plodorodiya.html. 11.  Quoted in Kaziukin. 12.  Asif Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974 (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2000), 58. 13.  A. N. Bozhko and V. S. Gorodinskaia, God v “zvezdolete” (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1975), accessed online, http://www.astronaut.ru/bookcase/books/godvzv/ text/08.htm. 14.  Bozhko and Gorodinskaia. 15.  Platonov, “O likvidatsii katastrof sel’skogo khoziaistva,” in Sochineniia, 1: 244. 16.  Bathsheba Demuth returns to the theme of natural cycles and human time frequently in her history of the Bering Strait. Demuth, Floating Coast. 17.  Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 60.

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In dex

abjection, 2, 3, 15, 60, 120, 125, 127 Academy of Sciences, 92 – 93, 107, 155n10 Adorno, Theodor W., 69 aesthetics: of “dirty literature,” 49 – 61; discourse of pollution and purification, 61 – 67; pastoral, 51 – 52, 122 – 24; systematization of, 50, 52, 59, 62, 67 agrarian life, 2 – 4. See also peasantry; rural life; serfdom agricultural chemistry, 9, 23, 34 – 45. See also mineral exchange between humans and environment; natural sciences; soil science agriculture: capitalist, 45 – 48, 99, 131; compared to mining, 120 – 21; deserts and, 104 – 5; environmental thought and, 6; industrial, 70; metabolic economy of, 15, 105; plant nutrition, 36; as technological revolution, 132; transcorporeal body and, 37. See also hydroengineering projects; irrigation systems; soil fertility; tractors agroecological systems, 5 agronomy, 23, 30 – 31, 34, 38, 44, 97, 126. See also soil science Aitmatov, Chingiz, 4, 121 – 24 Aksakov, Ivan, 17 Alaimo, Stacy, 3, 6 Alier, Joan Martinez, 42 All-Russian Society for Conservation, 101 alterity, 3, 68. See also Asiatic restoration; ethnic outsiders/others Amu Darya River, 7, 92 – 93, 102, 106 – 7, 110, 111

antireductionism, 35, 37 anti-Semitism, 29 – 30, 33, 46. See also Jews Antonovich, Maksim, 23 – 24, 27, 34 Aral Sea, 92, 102, 107, 153n59, 159n78 Arcadia, 51 – 52 Aristotle, 76 artificial soil, 131 – 33 ash, 82, 84 – 85, 90 Asiatic mode of production (AMP), 75 – 77, 107 – 9, 142n107, 152n45. See also modes of production Asiatic restoration, 72 – 73, 75, 78 – 84, 90. See also oriental despotism assimilation, 2, 43, 59, 91, 106, 111 Avdeenko, Aleksandr, 66 backwardness, 3, 9, 13, 31, 69, 70 – 73, 75, 105 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 69 – 70, 150n4 Bartol’d, V. V., 102 Bassin, Mark, 14 Bauman, Zygmunt, 120 Beketov, Andrei Nikolaevich, 39 Beketov, Nikolai Nikolaevich, 38, 39 Belinskii, Vissarion, 12, 19, 20, 25, 27, 50, 61, 147n33; natural school and, 52 – 53, 55, 57 – 59 Belomor Canal, 73 – 74, 106 – 7 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 17, 139n40 Berry, Wendell, vii Berzelius, Jöns Jacob, 37 – 38 biologism, 62, 64 biology, study of, 23 black soils, 163n5. See also chernozem Blaikie, Piers, 121 181

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Blok, Aleksandr, 21 blood, 30, 37, 83 – 84, 89 – 90 Blut und Boden, German discourses of, 33, 37 Bodenständigkeit (native soil), 8, 14 bodies: exchanges between material world and, 6 – 7, 121; materialist view of, 41; minerals and, 36 – 37; sacrificed for Soviet construction, 10, 72, 80, 83, 88 – 90. See also human remains bogatyr (folk hero), 116 – 17, 123 Bolotov, Andrei, 51 Bolsheviks, 3, 9, 47, 50, 61, 68 – 71, 75 – 77, 83, 88, 90, 114. See also Marxism; socialism; Soviet Union bones as fertilizer, 45 – 46. See also human remains botanical metaphors and analogies, 13, 18, 22, 25 – 27, 30, 32 boundaries between nature and culture, 5 – 6, 9, 51, 53, 65 Bozhko, Andrei Nikolaevich, 132 Breu, Christopher, 3, 127 Brezhnev, Leonid, viii, 114 – 15, 136n10 Bruno, Andy, 7, 142n112 Budkeev, Mikhail, 125 – 27 Bukharan Emirate, 80 Bulgarin, Faddei, 52, 54, 148n33 burial, 15, 46, 62, 82, 90, 133; grave ash, 84 – 85. See also human remains bylina (Slavic epic poem), 116 – 17 canal construction, 73, 76, 78 – 90, 106 – 7. See also hydroengineering projects; irrigation systems capitalism: agricultural exports and, 45 – 48, 131; environmental crisis and, 99; global neoliberal, 130; nature and, 101; private property and, 62 – 63 Carr, E. H., 48 Caspian Sea, 92, 102, 107, 153n59 Central Asia: European views on, 85; Russian colonization of, 27. See also Asiatic mode of production (AMP); Asiatic restoration; Kazakhstan; nomadism; Turkmenistan; Virgin Lands campaign (1953–1964)

Chaadaev, Peter, 17, 19 chernozem (black earth), 30 – 31, 46, 111, 115, 130 – 31, 163nn4 – 5 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 8, 33, 35, 40 – 42, 47, 60 China, 44, 77 Chinggis Khan, 157n51 city-country exchange, 35, 43 – 44, 47 – 48, 146n61, 148n48 Clark, Katerina, 61, 117 clay, 10, 70 – 71, 78, 85 – 86, 89, 92, 103 – 4, 159n86 cleansing, 6, 61, 67 collectivization, 1 – 2, 4, 9, 50, 61 – 63, 117 colonization: of borderlands, 91; extraterrestrial, 132; native soil and, 29; “special settlers” and, 151n25; theft of national nutrients, 45 – 47; transplantation and, 8, 18 – 19, 26 – 27; virgin land and, 114, 128 – 29 conservation, 101, 128 contamination, 6, 55 – 56. See also pollution coprophagia, 62, 104 countryside. See city-country exchange; pastoral genre Crimea, 29 – 30, 46 – 47, 146n57 criminals, reform of, 73 – 74, 82 – 83, 158n76 Cronon, William, 6 cultural landscape (Kulturlandschaft), 15 culture and nature: hygienic boundaries between, 51, 53, 65; material exchanges between, 1 – 6, 36 – 37, 42 – 44, 47 – 48; native soil movement and, 20 – 29; as transplantation, 18 – 19. See also nature Cuvier, Georges, 25 Danilevskii, Nikolai, 24 – 29, 33, 44, 141n76 Danilov, P., 119, 125 – 27 Davis, Diana K., 154n2 Dawn (Zaria) (journal), 24 – 25 death, 6, 14, 55 – 56, 63; bodies sacrificed for Soviet construction, 10, 72, 80, 83, 88 – 90. See also burial; human remains defecation, 62, 65, 117. See also excrement deforestation, 30

I NDE X     183

deposits of history, 31, 69 – 70, 78, 85, 108 deserts and desertification, 30, 76, 79 – 80; artificial soil and, 132; as “Asian,” 99 – 100; utopia and, 110 – 11; as wasteland, 91 – 112 determinism, 60, 103 devstvennye stepi (virgin steppes), 115 dialectics, 69, 81 – 82, 101, 105, 111 – 12, 152n54 Di Palma, Vittoria, 91 Dirlik, Arif, 94 dirt (griaz), 4, 49 – 67; aesthetic systematization and, 50, 52, 59, 62, 67; as extrasystemic element, 50, 59, 62, 65; gold and, 58 – 59, 64, 148n41; materialism and, 57 – 58; metaphorical use of, 49, 53, 55, 58 – 61, 64, 67; mimetic function of, 9, 49, 53 – 55, 59; moral disorder and, 55 – 56, 60, 148n51; natural school and, 52 – 58, 62 – 66; pochva and, 41, 56 (see also native soil); realism and, 9, 49 – 50, 67 “dirty literature,” 9, 49 – 50, 52 – 62, 65 dirty nature, 6 – 7 dirty positivism, 57 – 58 disorder, 50; moral, 49, 55 – 56, 60, 130, 148n51; narrative, 54 Dobrenko, Evgeny, 74, 116 Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 33, 61 Dokuchaev, Vasilii, 31 – 32, 38, 98, 131, 142n113, 156n31 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 142n103; Liebig and, 35, 39, 46, 144n22; native soil movement and, 3, 8, 11, 20, 27, 29 – 33, 139n40 Douglas, Mary, 50, 58, 62, 65, 146n3 Dowler, Wayne, 20 drought, 32, 80, 96 – 100, 128, 157n39 dust, 84 – 85, 99, 124 – 25, 156n31 Dzhulmukhamedov, Ablaikhan, 115 ecocriticism, 6 – 7 economic exchange: soil and, 42 – 45, 130 – 31. See also capitalism; socialism; workers Egypt, 75 Eisenstein, Sergei, 89 – 90

Elie, Marc, 128 Elina, Olga, 143n2 empiricism, 8 – 9, 14, 22, 25, 37, 59, 66 Engelgardt, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, 35, 38, 44 – 45, 47, 146n61 Engels, Friedrich, 35, 43, 47, 101 England, soil crisis in, 45 – 46 Enlightenment, 19, 21 environment: agrarian thought and, 6; climate change, 30, 32; crises, 99, 130; policies on, 47, 101 – 2; Virgin Lands campaign, 127 – 28 environmental determinism, 103 environmental humanities, 1, 7 – 8 epic genre, 116 – 17, 123 – 24 Eralash (journal), 56 erosion, 99, 124 – 25, 156n31 ethnic outsiders/others, 29, 91. See also alterity; nomadism Eurasia: collective traumas of, 2; Russian cultural myths and, 4 – 5. See also Central Asia Eurocentrism, 110, 154n2 Europe: historical development, 110; imports of Russian grain, 45 – 46; Peter the Great and, 27; politics in, 25, 39; as rootless, 28 excavation, 70 – 71, 82, 84 – 86 excrement, 62 – 63, 104 – 5, 156n25. See also defecation; manure fallow lands, 114 – 15. See also virgin land famine, 32, 80, 128, 132 – 33, 142n115, 156n31 fatherland (Vaterland), 14 – 16 Fedorov, Nikolai, 105, 111 feminization (of nature), 118 – 21, 123, 127, 150n15 Fergana Valley, 89 – 90 fertility, virgin land and, 114, 117 – 18, 123, 124, 127. See also soil fertility fertilization, 26, 28 – 29, 69, 76, 146n60 fertilizers, 18, 34, 36, 42 – 48 feudalism, 77. See also serfdom Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 12 First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, 61, 64 – 66, 92 – 95

184    I NDE X

First All-Union Conservation Congress, 101 first furrow trope, 117 – 27 Five-Year Plan (first), 9, 70, 94, 99 folk culture, 17, 22, 28; knowledge of soil conditions, 31 – 32; as primitive past, 69 – 70 food scarcity, viii, 3, 132 – 33, 163n7. See also famine forced labor, 74, 75, 82 – 83, 158n76 foreign influences, 17, 18 – 19 fossils, 69 Foster, John Bellamy, 42 – 45 Frede, Victoria, 39 free trade, 48 French naturalism, 25, 57 Freud, Sigmund, 62, 65 – 67, 69 friendship of nations, 119, 126 gardening state, 120 gardens, 18 – 19, 124, 132 Gellner, Ernest, 108 gender roles, 119. See also feminization generic pollution, 49 – 50, 53 – 55 gentry: pastoral values and, 51 – 52; peasantry and, 53; rootlessness of, 17 geological time, 78 – 79, 81 – 82 georgic mode, 54 German scientists, 25, 144n16. See also Herder, Johann Gottfried; Liebig, Justus German states, political revolutions in, 39 Gidroproekt, 151n26 Giessen Chemical Institute, 34, 38, 39 Gilburd, Eleonory, 117 Gladkov, Fedor, 64 Goethe, 37, 82 Gogol, Nikolai, 12, 32, 50, 52 – 54, 58, 64; Dead Souls, 49, 52 – 55, 58, 130 Goldstein, Amanda Jo, 13 Gorbunov, Kuzma, 64 Gordienko, Vladimir, 119 – 20 Gordin, Michael, 39 Gorky, Maxim, 2, 61, 63 – 64, 66, 73 – 74, 93, 99 – 100, 106 – 7 grafting, 8, 26 – 28 grain exports, 45 – 48, 131 grave ash, 84 – 85

Great Reforms, 50 Green Revolution, 34 griaz. See dirt griazefil’stvo (love of dirt), 53, 59 – 61 Grigorev, Apollon, 12, 20 – 24, 138n1 Grigorovich, Dmitrii, 55 – 57, 148n33 Grigoryan, Bella, 54 Gunther, Hans, 61 Heat (Znoi) (film), 124 – 25 Hegel, G. W. F., 12, 26, 58, 76, 106 Heine, Heinrich, 82 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 8, 12 – 13, 20 – 23, 25 – 27, 31, 32, 37, 46, 60, 64, 68, 90, 139n23, 140n60, 143n119; Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 13 – 19 hermeneutics, 13 – 14, 27 Herzfelde, Wieland, 65 – 66 Hesiod, 123 Hindus, Maurice, 1 historical detritus, 104 – 6 historical development, 106; agricultural chemistry and, 40 – 42; Asiatic past and, 9, 72 – 78; dialectical change and, 81 – 82; European, 110; Marxist theories of, 95 – 96, 109 – 10; universal laws of, 14, 32, 72. See also national development; sediment historical materialism, 102 historical teleology, 129 History of the Construction of the Belomor Canal, 73 – 74 humanities, environmental, 7 – 8 human remains, 42, 82, 85, 105. See also bodies; burial Humbolt, Wilhelm von, 17, 25 humus theory, 36 Husserl, Edmund, 69 hybridity, 64 hydroengineering projects, 73, 74, 78 – 88, 102, 106 – 12, 151n26, 152n57. See also canal construction; irrigation systems hygiene, 51, 53, 60 – 61, 65 identity, 10, 25, 67. See also Russian national identity; Soviet national identity

I NDE X     185

Ilenkov, Pavel Antonovich, 38, 44 Ilenkov-Engelgardt method, 44 Ilin, M., 92, 94, 99, 110 industrial production, 42 – 43 Industrial Revolution, 45 intellectuals: chemists, 38 – 39, 143n14; native soil movement, 8, 20 – 29 intelligentsia: native soil movement and, 8, 17, 20; old Bolsheviks and, 61; pastoral and, 52; science and, 39 In the Virgin Lands (Na zemliakh tselinnykh, 1955), 115 – 16, 118 – 19 Iran, 103, 157n51 Irigaray, Luce, 127 irrigation systems: construction of, 76, 79, 80, 83, 84 – 88 (see also canal construction); in deserts, 92, 96 – 97, 107 – 10; destruction of, 157n51; sexual motifs and, 118. See also hydroengineering projects Ivan Brovkin in the Virgin Lands (Ivan Brovkin na tseline) (film), 119 Ivan the Terrible, 76, 90 Jameson, Fredric, 111, 155n13 Jasien´ski, Bruno, Man Changes His Skin (Chelovek meniaet kozhu), 72, 84 – 88 Jews, 14; as threat to soil, 29 – 30, 33, 46 – 47. See also anti-Semitism Josephson, Paul, 128, 135n9, 162n71 journalism, 52, 98, 115 Joyce, James, 65 Kalmuks, 124 Kant, Immanuel, 13 Kara-Kum Canal, 159n78 Kara-Kum Desert, 4, 10, 91 – 96, 99, 102, 105, 107 – 11, 155n11 Karamzin, Nikolai, 16, 18 – 19, 21, 27 Karatygin, Petr, 58 Kardin, V., 116 – 17 Karmen, Roman, 92 Kata-Tag mountains, 84 – 85, 88 Kazakhstan, 4, 10; famine in, 128; friendship of nations and, 119, 126; virgin land and, 113 – 15, 118 – 26 Khomiakov, Aleksei, 17 – 18

Khorezm province, 102, 157n51 Khrushchev, Nikita, 10, 113 – 16, 121, 162n71 Kleiman, Naum, 89 – 90 Klein, Joachim, 51 Kliuchevskii, V. O., 68, 70 knowledge production, 5 – 8 Kornienko, Natal’ia, 155n11 Koselleck, Reinhart, 69 Kropotkin, Petr, 98 Krylov, Ivan, 56 – 57 kulaks, 74, 151n25, 159n79 Kunichika, Michael, 68 Kviatkovskii, P., 116 labor: osvoenie (assimilation), 91, 105, 115, 154n3; socialist, 69 – 72, 105. See also forced labor; monumental labor projects; workers labor theory of value, 120 – 21 land, 15; state nationalization of, 77 land reclamation (melioratsiia), 10, 70, 73 – 74; in deserts, 93 – 99, 110 language: debates about pollution and purification, 61 – 67; national identity and, 25; spontaneity-consciousness dialectic, 69 Latour, Bruno, 5, 6 Lawes, John Bennet, 42 Lenin, Vladimir, 3, 7, 41, 77, 82, 97; Engelgardt and, 146n61; Liebig and, 47 – 48, 146n60 Levitov, Aleksandr, 59 Liebig, Justus, 6 – 7, 105, 144n22; Lenin and, 47 – 48, 146n60; mineral economy and soil metabolism theory, 8 – 9, 35 – 38, 42 – 48, 121, 132; organic chemistry and, 34 – 35; as Russian cultural icon, 39 – 42; in Russian intellectual history, 38 – 39; on theft of mineral resources, 43 – 47 literary realism, 9; dirty literature and, 49 – 50, 61. See also socialist realism literature: artistic process and pollution/purification metaphors, 59, 64, 67; norms, 49 – 50

186    I NDE X

local environments, 93 – 95, 99, 106, 109 – 10, 114, 144n16 local soils, 16, 31 – 32, 45, 85, 130 – 32 loess dust, 84 – 85, 156n31 Makarov, V. N., 101 Malenkov, Georgii, 121, 161n39 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 47 Mandelstam, Osip, 75, 77, 90 manure, 18, 44, 58 – 59, 62 – 63, 65 – 66, 131, 139n40, 142n103 Marx, Karl: on Asiatic mode of production (AMP), 75 – 76; on changing nature, 73 – 74; ecological economics on virgin nature, 118, 120 – 21; Liebig and, 35, 36, 42 – 43, 47, 121; sediment as historical accumulation and, 68, 82; social metabolism theory, 9, 158n71 Marxism: Jameson on, 155n13; models of socially mediated material flows, 7; stagnation and, 108; theories of development, 95 – 96, 109 – 10; virgin nature and, 120 – 21. See also socialism Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 69 Masing-Delic, Irene, 84, 152n57 materialism: ontology of human life, 40; Platonic, 127; radical politics and, 39 – 42, 44, 50; soil science and, 33 – 38; Western, 41 materiality: abject, 5; form and, 127; purification of, 58 – 59; redemption and, 10; resistance of, 124 – 29; of soil, viii, 1 – 3, 5 – 8, 21 matter (materiia), 4, 8, 34 – 48; colonial theft of national nutrients, 45 – 47; Liebig as Russian cultural icon, 39 – 42; Liebig in Russian intellectual history, 38 – 39; Liebig’s mineral economy, 35 – 38; models of soil and social economy, 42 – 45; Soviet policy and metabolic flows, 47 – 48 McKibben, Bill, 133 McNeill, J. R., 136n32 melioratsiia. See land reclamation Mendeleev, Dmitrii Ivanovich, 38 “men of the sixties,” 23, 33, 38, 40 – 41 Menshutkin, Nikolai Aleksandrovich, 38

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 69 Mesopotamia, 79 metabolic rift, 43 – 44 Mill, John Stuart, 76 mineral exchange between humans and environment, 6, 132; geophagia and, 95; soil metabolism and, 8 – 9, 35 – 38, 42 – 48 Ministry of Agriculture, 131 Mitchell, W.J.T., 5 modernity, 1 – 3, 69, 90, 131 – 33, 135n9. See also soil science modernization, 2 – 3, 5, 20, 69 – 72, 78, 90 – 92, 120 modes of production, 95, 114. See also Asiatic mode of production (AMP) Moleschott, Jakob, 40, 144n27 Mongols, 79, 124, 152n40 monoliths, 9 – 10, 72, 75, 78 – 81, 83, 88 Montesquieu, 76 monumental labor projects, 9 – 10, 72, 75, 88, 90, 110 Moon, David, 30 moral disorder, 49, 55 – 56, 60, 130, 148n51 Morgan, J. R., 51 Moscow, 82 – 83 Moscow−Kara-Kum−Moscow motor rally, 92, 155n4 Moscow-Volga Canal, 78 – 84, 107 mother-earth (Muttererde), 14 – 15 Mother Moist Earth (Mat’ syra-zemlia), 2, 56 mud, 1, 53 – 60, 62 – 63, 65 – 67 Mukanov, Sabit, 118 – 19 Naiman, Eric, 105, 160n8 Narkomzem. See People’s Commissariat of Agriculture narrative disorder, 54 national chauvinism, 29, 33 national decline, 130 national development, 2, 72; gravesites and, 90; native soil movement and, 11 – 33; natural environment and, 12 – 19; patriotism and, 18. See also historical development; Russian national identity; Soviet national identity

I NDE X     187

national difference, 8, 12, 14, 33, 60 nationalist ideologies, 12, 29, 72 native soil (pochva), 4, 8, 11 – 33, 41, 49; cultural-historical types and, 25 – 26; dirt as inversion of, 56; fetishization of, 8, 16, 20, 29; grammar of, 24; intelligentsia’s separation from, 20; organic nation and, 60 (see also organic nation); Romantic nationalism and, 10, 12; soil metabolism and fertilizers, 44; threats to, 29 – 33; Virgin Lands campaign and, 114 native soil movement (pochvennichestvo), 4, 8, 10 – 11, 20 – 29 natsmeny (national minorities), 74 – 75 naturalism, 9, 50, 57 – 58, 64 – 65, 117, 148n35. See also French naturalism; natural school, Russian natural school, Russian, 9, 50, 52 – 58, 148n41 natural sciences, 23, 25, 32, 37. See also agricultural chemistry nature: conquest over, 100 – 101; dialectics of, 101; feminization of, 118 – 21, 123, 127, 150n15; meaning and, 3; transformation of, 73 – 74; war with, 71, 95, 98, 100, 102, 110. See also culture and nature Naturphilosophie, 8, 37 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 21, 55, 57 NEP, 48 Nevakhovich, M. L., 56 – 57, 148n33 Newlin, Thomas, 51 new materialism, 5 – 7, 40 Nicholas I, 39 – 40 Nikitenko, A. V., 148n41 Nizhnyi Novgorod, 80 nomadism, 95 – 96, 103, 106, 108; desertification and, 98; rootlessness and, 30; virgin land and, 114. See also Turkic nomads Noneshvili, Iosif, 118 nov’/novina (new land), 115 Odoevskii, Vladimir, 47 OGPU (Unified State Political Directorate), 73, 86, 88 Olesha, Iurii, 64 – 65

organic chemistry, 34 organic criticism, 20 – 23, 140n60 organicism, 13 organic nation, 11 – 33, 37, 41, 60, 64, 68. See also native soil movement oriental despotism, 10, 72, 75, 76 – 77, 79 – 81, 83, 84, 88, 107, 108 Orthodox religion, 20 Osbourne, Thomas, 95 osvoenie (assimilation), 91, 105, 115, 154n3 otlozhenie. See sediment Panferov, Fedor, Bruski, 61 – 66, 149n65 Pan-Slavism, 33 Paperny, Vladimir, 106 parasitization, 26, 27 – 28 pastoral genre, 51 – 52, 122 – 24 patriotism, 14, 18 Paustovsky, Konstantin, 69 Pavlenko, Petr, 89 peasantry, 1 – 3; backwardness and, 69; fertilizers and, 44 – 45; folk knowledge of soil conditions, 31 – 32; gentry and, 53; idealization of, 8; as morally contaminated, 55 – 56. See also folk culture; rural life; serfdom peasant speech, 61 – 64, 66 People’s Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem), 10, 86, 93, 96 – 99, 107 People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), 73 perekovka (psychological reforging), 9 Permitin, Efim, 66 Perun (mythic figure), 118 Peskov, Iurii, 131 – 32, 163n7 Petersburg Miscellany, The (1846), 55 Peter the Great, 11, 18 – 19, 27, 77, 106 – 7 Petrine reforms, 20, 27 philosophical materialism, 8 phosphates, 37, 42, 44 physiological sketch, 55, 56 Physiology of Petersburg, The (1845), 55 piatichlenka (five-stage model of development), 77, 152n45 Pilniak, Boris: The Naked Year, 80 – 81; The Volga Falls to the Caspian, 72, 78 – 84

188    I NDE X

Pisarev, Dmitrii, 33, 43 – 44, 47, 59 – 61 Pisemskii, Aleksei: “Leshii,” 148n48; “The Simpleton” (“Tiufiak”), 59 – 60 Planet Tselina (1965), 128 – 29 “Planet Virgin Land” (song), 113 plant-nation analogy, 12 – 19 Platonov, Andrei, 3, 91, 93 – 112, 156n25, 157n51, 157n54, 158n76, 158nn70 – 71; on famine, 132; as land reclamation engineer, 10, 93 – 99, 106 – 7, 155nn9 – 12; soil metabolism and, 7; works: The Blue Depth (Golubaia glubina), 96; Dzhan (Soul), 10, 93 – 96, 102 – 12, 153n59, 153n94; “The Ethereal Tract” (“Efirnyi trakt”), 97; “The First Ivan” (“Pervyi Ivan”), 100, 157n39; The Foundation Pit, 70 – 71; “The Hot Arctic” (“Goriachaia Arktika”), 96, 102, 105, 109; “The Locks of Epifan” (“Epifanskie shliuzy”), 99, 100, 106 – 7; “Markun,” 101; “The Motherland of Electricity” (“Rodina elektrichestva”), 97; “On the First Socialist Tragedy” (“O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii”), 96, 100, 103 – 4, 110; Sharmanka (The Barrel Organ), 158n66; “Story about Many Interesting Things,” 156n29; “Takyr,” 104; “The Teacher of the Sands” (“Peschanaia uchitel’nitsa”), 99 Plekhanov, Georgii, 76 – 77, 82 pochva. See native soil pochvennichestvo. See native soil movement pochvenniki, 20, 50 Poggioli, Renato, 52 Pohl, Michaela, 128 Pokrovskii, M. N., 46 Polevoi, Nikolai, 53, 56 political repression, 39 – 40 pollution, 49 – 50, 53 – 55, 59 – 67; artistic process and, 59, 64, 67; socialist realism and, 61 Ponomareva, Svetlana, 110 Populist movement, Russian, 44 positivism: dirt and, 57 – 58; materialism and, 35, 37, 40 – 41, 60

Pravda, 92, 102, 107, 156n35 private property, 62 – 63 production novels, 84 – 88 Prometheanism, 7, 95 – 96, 99 – 101, 112, 132 Provincial Committee on the Artificial Irrigation of Arid Lands, 97 Pryde, Philip, 121 purification, 58 – 59, 61 – 67 Pushkin, 20, 21 quicksand (plyvun’), 74 – 75, 90 Radek, Karl, 65 – 66 radical politics: Liebigian agricultural chemistry and, 35; materialism and, 39 – 42, 44, 50 Raubsystem, 42 realism, 50, 64 – 65. See also literary realism; socialist realism regionalisms, 61, 64 re-sedimentation, 81 – 82, 90 resource extraction, 109, 120 – 21 revolution, 2, 4, 10, 35, 39 – 42, 46, 63 – 70, 76 – 77, 83 – 84, 88 rituals, 15, 17, 58 – 59, 61 – 67, 133 Robin, Régine, 50, 65, 146n3 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 73 Romanticism: aesthetic idealism and, 9; interpretations of nature, 37 Romantic materialism, 13, 23 Romantic nationalism, 12, 72 rootedness and rootlessness, 8, 17, 28, 30, 33. See also nomadism rural life: dirt and, 9, 49 – 67; fetishization of, 8 (see also native soil); modernization and (see modernization); pastoral genre and, 51 – 52. See also agrarian life; peasantry; serfdom Russian national identity, 8 – 9, 115; native soil movement and, 11 – 33, 49 Russo-Turkish War, 29 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 18 sand, 89 – 90, 104, 108, 111, 124 – 25 Sary-Kamysh Lake, 107, 110, 111 Savkin, I. A., 111, 159n96

I NDE X     189

Sawer, Marian, 77 Schelling, Friedrich, 12, 37 Schiller, Friedrich, 21 Schlegel, Friedrich, 12 Schlüter, Otto, 15 sediment (otlozhenie), 4, 9, 68 – 90; despotic “Asiatic” past and socialist future, 73 – 90; Fergana Canal and, 89 – 90; as historical accumulation, 68 – 73, 108; Moscow-Volga Canal and, 78 – 84; Vakhsh Canal and, 84 – 88 Selvinskii, Ilia, 117 Serafimovich, Aleksandr, 64, 66 serfdom, 8, 14 – 15, 40, 50 – 51. See also peasantry; rural life Serres, Michel, 15 sexual freedom, 115, 118, 121 – 22 sexual motifs, 115, 117 – 19 Shaginian, Marietta, 64 Shakespeare, William, 59 Shepit’ko, Larisa, 124 – 25 Shklovsky, Viktor, 70, 89, 97 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 64, 117 Siberia, 10, 113 silt, 78, 84 – 85, 87, 90, 108, 110, 111 Silverman, Kaja, 127 sinkholes, 31 – 32 Slavophiles, 8, 11, 17, 20, 28, 33, 50 Smith, Adam, 76 smychka (unification of city and countryside), 35, 47 – 48 socialism: environmental policy and, 101 – 2; oriental despotic past and, 88 (see also oriental despotism); at periphery, 94 – 96; productivity of soil under, 3. See also Marxism; Soviet Union socialist realism, 9, 50, 95; naturalism and, 66; pollution discourse and, 61, 67; as primary form of socialism, 127; symbols and tropes in, 116. See also literary realism social policies, 47 – 48, 101 – 2 soil, 1 – 10; cultural myths of, 2 – 5, 7; as milieu, 60; as object of social relations, 3, 5, 133; Russian grammatical cases, 24; symbolic life of, 8 – 10. See also dirt (griaz); matter (mate-

riia); native soil (pochva); sediment (otlozhenie); virgin land (tselina); wasteland (pustyr’) soil classification maps, 146n57 soil fertility: artificial soil and, 131 – 33; capitalist robbery of, 43 – 47, 130 – 31; conservation of, 128; depletion, 30 – 31, 35, 42, 43 – 44, 47, 116; dust and, 99; famine and, 156n31; fertilizer and, 42 – 48 (see also fertilizers); management of, 32 (see also soil science); silt and, 87, 111; social inequality and, 103 soil metabolism, 7 – 9, 35 – 38, 42 – 48 “soil question,” vii, 11, 35, 39 soil science, 30 – 32, 34 – 48, 163n8; agricultural exports and, 45 – 48, 131; artificial soils, 131 – 32. See also agricultural chemistry; agronomy; technology Soldatov, Vladimir, 132 Soloukhin, Vladimir, 118, 161n40 Solovev, Vladimir, 30 – 32, 80, 96, 98 – 100, 156n29 Soviet national identity, 4, 9 – 10, 150n21; construction on Asian soil, 68 – 90 Soviet Union: grain shortage, 113 – 14; ideological impurities and, 62, 64; legitimacy of, 76; materialism and, 7; modernization, 69 – 72, 78, 90 – 92, 120; space program, 113, 128 – 29, 132, 160n1. See also Bolsheviks; Marxism; socialism; Virgin Lands campaign (1953–1964) Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 109 Stalin, Joseph, and Stalinism, 84, 89, 95, 113 – 14, 119 – 20, 160n8 Stawkowski, Magdalena, 128 steppe erosion, 32 sterile soil, 17, 19 Stoffwechsel (metabolism), 36, 43, 46, 73. See also Liebig, Justus Stolypin period, 46 Strakhov, Nikolai, 20, 23, 24 – 25 Struve, V. V., 152n45 sukhovei (desert wind), 98 Sullivan, Heather, 4, 6 Sumarokov, Aleksandr, 51

190    I NDE X

Tajikistan, 4, 80, 84 – 88 takyr wells, 109, 159n86 Tanner, Jennifer, 57 “Taras Bulba,” 32 Tatars, 29 – 30, 33 technology, 100 – 101, 109, 127, 161n39; artificial soil and, 131 – 33. See also hydroengineering projects; soil science; tractors Terras, Victor, 20 territorial invasion, 130. See also colonization Thaer, A. D., 36, 143n2 Thaw era, 10, 115, 117 Theocritus, 51 Time (Vremia), 20, 23 Tisse, Eduard, 89, 92 Tolstoi, Aleksei, 65 Tolstoi, Lev, 32 tractors, 70, 122 – 23, 125 – 27. See also technology transcorporeality, 6 – 7, 37, 133 transplantation (colonization), 8, 18 – 19, 26 – 27 Trotsky, Lev, 10, 69 – 72, 84 tselina. See virgin land Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 6 Tsipursky, Gleb, 160n6 Turanians, 102 – 3 Turgenev, Ivan, 8, 21, 35, 40 – 41, 55, 147n25 Turin, Viktor, 70 Turkic nomads, 91, 103, 118, 123 – 24, 157n54. See also nomadism Turkmenistan, 4, 94, 102 – 3, 105, 109, 110, 154n4. See also Kara-Kum Desert Turksib (1929), 70 Ukrainian soil, theft of, 130 – 31 United States: as agrarian republic, vii; Dust Bowl catastrophe, 99; grain exports, 46 urban life. See city-country exchange Urlandschaft, 15 Uspenskii, Nikolai and Gleb, 59 USSR in Construction (journal), 73, 92

utopian dreams, 1, 3, 159n96; agricultural chemistry and, 39; artificial soil and, 132 – 33; labor and, 42; technological, 80 – 81, 95, 110 – 11 Vakhsh River, 84 – 88 value, labor theory of, 120 – 21 values and lifeways, traditional, 3 Vanpaemel, Geert, 144n16 vegetative, organic nation as, 17 – 18 vegetative poetry, 21 – 22 Verdery, Katherine, 90 vernacular socialism, 94 – 95, 109 – 12 vernacular terms for soil types, 31 – 32, 142n113 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 7 Viliams, Vasilii, 121 Virgil, 51 virgin land (tselina), 3 – 4, 10, 88, 113 – 29; compared to wasteland, 111; degeneration and, 28; feminine passivity and, 118 – 21, 123, 127, 150n15; first furrow trope, 117 – 27; in late Soviet cultural imaginary, 115 – 17; literary criticism and, 116 – 17; Marxist ecology and, 120 – 21; resistance of the material, 124 – 29; sexual motifs and, 115, 117 – 19, 121 – 24; symbolic value of, 114 – 16 Virgin Lands campaign (1953–1964), 10, 113 – 29; ecological impact of, 127 – 28, 162n71; Soviet youth and, 160n6; visual representations of, 124 – 29 Voeikov, Aleksandr, 32, 98 Volga-Don Canal, 106 Volga River, 78 – 84 Volkish movements, 33 Volksgeist, 14, 19, 22, 23, 25, 56, 60 Voltaire, 18 – 19 Voskresenskii, Aleksandr Abramovich, 38 Vucinich, Alexander, 143n14 Vygotskii, Lev, 69 war with nature, 71, 95, 98, 100, 102, 110 waste, 42, 63; nature as, 156n25; nourishment and, 104 – 6. See also

I NDE X     191

defecation; excrement; manure; mineral exchange between humans and environment wasteland (pustyr’), 4, 10, 91 – 112; definitions of, 91; development of deserts, 92 – 96 (see also deserts and desertification); dialectics of nature, 99 – 106; land reclamation, 96 – 99; Soviet hydraulic works, 106 – 12. See also hydroengineering projects; irrigation systems Weber, Max, 2 Weiner, Douglas, 101

wells, 109 – 10, 159n86 Westernization, 20. See also capitalism; Europe Williams, Raymond, 2, 8, 52 Winiwarter, Verena, 136n32 Wittfogel, Karl, 75 workers: political consciousness of, 107 – 8; as political subjects, 73 – 74; reform of, 86. See also labor Zinin, Nikolai Nikolaevich, 38, 44 Zola, Émile, 57, 58, 148n35, 148n43