National in Form, Socialist in Content

Abstract

Complicating received notions of Soviet literature as subject to rigid ideological constraints and bureaucratic oversight, this article revisits Stalin’s formula: “national in form, socialist in content.” Even as it saw the promulgation of socialist realism as the ascendant doctrine governing Soviet culture, the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers also expressed two competing models of world literary history, one based on national culture, the other delineating a supranational model of myth and folk-cultural expression. This article seeks to instantiate both models by turning to the history of Georgian modernism. The poetry of Titsian Tabidze can be seen as a quintessentially peripheral affirmation of national sovereignty; at the same time, mythic and historical accounts of ancient Colchis offered the poet a regional alternative to national history. Told and retold as hoary legend, material culture, modernist mythopoesis, and socialist realism, the legend of Jason, Medea, and the Argonauts became the ancient correlative to a sweeping program of Soviet land reclamation in western Georgia during the 1930s. Both ancient and modern, the legend of Colchis captures elements of an alternative history of Soviet literature and the dialectic of enlightenment at the heart of Soviet culture.