Carnival culture and the Soviet modernist novel

by Craig Brandist

The subversive side of carnival culture and its influence on the modern novel has become well known with dissemination of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin in the West. However, it is only in relation to the concrete forms of popular culture and the changes in the institutional framework of society that the political significance of the carnivalesque can be assessed. In this study of the relationship between Russian popular culture and the work of five Soviet prose writers, Olesha, Platonov, Kharms, Bulgakov and Vaginov, Dr. Brandist shows that while in the late 1920s carnivalesque popular culture was utilized by these writers to resist the increasingly dogmatic official culture, as the 1930s developed the carnivalesque became an anti-hegemonic resource to facilitate a critique of the deeper assumptions of the new social order. It is also shown that Western European carnival traditions were combined with indigenous cultural forms to give the Soviet modernist novel a distinctive character.