Anywhere I Lay My Head: Politics and Poetics of Private Space in Early Soviet Literature and Film

Abstract

In an article about his visit to Moscow in the winter of 1926-27, Walter Benjamin claimed that “Bolshevism has abolished private life.” Benjamin’s frequently quoted statement highlights a key feature of Soviet society in the post-revolutionary period: the attempt to politicize and “make public” almost all aspects of everyday life. As part of the campaign to create a “new way of life,” Soviet ideology and government policies sought to accomplish a dramatic transformation of basic features of private life and the supposed “bourgeois” values of privacy, family, and marriage. One of the most drastic changes was the policy of uplotnenie (alternatively translated as “consolidation,” “condensation,” or “tightening”), which reconfigured living space by dividing apartments and other dwellings, ultimately leading to the creation of one of the most potent symbols of the Soviet experience: the kommunalka, or the communal apartment. From itsinception and through the Soviet period (and beyond), the communal apartment would play a central role in Soviet life. This dissertation examines how popular literature and cinema of the 1920s, the period of the so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), addressed this transformation of everyday life, and of living space in particular. Two broad questions frame my project: How is private space constituted and circumscribed in popular literature and film of the early Soviet period, given the intrusion of the state in most aspects of everyday life? What do some of the key literary and cinematic works of the NEP era tell us about the notions of the public and the private during this period of Soviet history? The “battle” for space – and more specifically, private space -- is a major trope in some of the most well-known works of literature and cinema from the first decade following the revolution. By focusing on the works of two writers of fiction, Yuri Olesha and Mikhail Zoshchenko, and one filmmaker, Boris Barnet, this dissertation examines the tension between the public and the private in the context of NEP and the ways private space functions as a site of negotiation between opposing ideologies and explores the role of literature and film as means of resisting and mitigating – through laughter, play, and parody – the shocks of such traumatic policies as uplotnenie.