Authors

Discussion

This paper will examine the portrayal of state-sanctioned brutality, executions, and other forms of violence in two fictional works by Soviet authors: the novel Shokolad (Chocolate, 1922) by Aleksandr Tarasov-Rodionov, and the long short story Shchepka (The Chip) by Vladimir Zazubrin, which was completed in the mid-1920s but remained unpublished during its author’s lifetime. Drawing on Lynn Ellen Patyk’s recent monograph Written in Blood (which traces the rise of revolutionary terrorism within Russian literary culture) and on several studies of early twentieth-century so-called ‘terrorist fiction’ by Boris Savinkov and others, I argue that the realistic portrayal of Soviet brutality, including psychological studies of Cheka operatives, was an inevitable product of the genre of Russian revolutionary fiction. As the reception history of both Chocolate and The Chip (and the fates of their authors) demonstrates, however, this aesthetic was politically unsustainable. As the Soviet regime consolidated its hegemony, conflict on the page became increasingly sanitized, transferring depictions of state violence to the symbolic plane. This paper will assess what we can learn about the politics of violence in early Soviet realism when we revisit Zazubrin and Tarasov-Rodionov’s gruesomely vivid fiction.