Nature and Regime; the Ecocentric Countercurrent in Soviet-era Literature

Pike, Chris

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-q2x0-tm83

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Nature and Regime; the Ecocentric Countercurrent in Soviet-era Literature

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In the early part of the 20th Century, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union implemented a program of rapid industrialization under the slogan, “the conquest of nature by man.” Ambitious engineering projects such as the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Northern river reversal sought to restructure the natural landscape to facilitate large-scale industrial and agricultural production. Yet pre-revolutionary Russia was essentially an agrarian society rooted in cultural traditions that connected it profoundly with the natural world. Thus, the labor force that the Soviet Union relied on to power its radical transformation was inclined toward a belief system antithetical to a utilitarian exploitation of its natural resources. Replacing these traditional values with an ideology conducive to the construction of socialism was part of the Soviet cultural transformation that Stalin had tasked to writers, whom he called “engineers of the human soul.” How did writers respond to this task, and what does their response tell us about the way in which they perceived themselves in relation to the natural world? This dissertation presents a study of ecological philosophy and ethics in Russian literature. Through close readings of the work of several canonical authors including Lomonosov, Tiutchev, Tolstoy, Zamiatin, and Leonov, it establishes the continuity of a nature-centered, or “ecocentric” ontological viewpoint throughout the Russian literary tradition into the 20th century, and demonstrates how Soviet-era authors challenged anthropocentric aspects of materialist ideology through their identification of humanity as an integral, yet subsidiary, component within the greater ecosystem of life on the planet.

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