Authors

Discussion

Y. Libedinsky’s novel The Birth of a Hero (1930) is famous for its demonstrated failure of RAPP’s literary theory on “psychologism” and the “living man.” The theory was intended to overcome “schematism,” which is the oversimplification of stories in proletarian writers’ literary works using idealized, cookie-cutter characters, and to help these writers create more realistic characters with complex psychology. Libedinsky pursued psychologism too far and his novel became a good example for Soviet writers of what subsequent Socialist Realist literature should not be.

However, RAPP’s interest in human psychology can be explained differently. The NEP allowed the influx of capitalist elements into Soviet society and began to dominate even the lives and psyches of Communists. According to E. Naiman, Communists’ anxiety about the growing “petit bourgeois” tendency of their own lives took the cultural form of “NEP Gothic.” RAPP’s psychologism, a call for examination of the human unconscious, can also be viewed as part of the NEP Gothic.

In Gothic fiction, the psyche is split between the dark side, which indulges in sensual pleasure, and the façade that fears, conceals, and punishes the former. The protagonist of The Birth of a Hero has the public face of the Bolshevik Party’s top elite, who oversee Party discipline and judge Party members for misconduct (the conscience of the Party, or the Freudian superego). However, he finds himself in an incestuous situation when his sister-in-law, with whom he lives, arouses his sexual desires (the unconscious or id) that he is unable to control. What is symbolic in this Gothic story evolving around the family’s disgrace is its setting: the House of Soviets (equivalent to a castle in traditional Gothic fiction), a residence assigned to top Party members. This paper focuses on how Libedinsky’s novel depicts the development of an intimate relationship by emphasizing the spatial arrangement within the closed apartment in the huge Communist house, thereby portraying it as a Gothic space of conflict between the Communist superego and the id.

In this conflict, the protagonist and the Party itself split into the judging (the conscious) and the judged (the unconscious), with the former weakened and becoming a helpless observer (A. Platonov called this being a “sad observer” and a “eunuch of the soul” in Chevengur, written in the same period). This paper argues that the NEP/RAPP Gothic subjectivity, an impotent consciousness that can only observe and justify itself as it was being swallowed by its own unconscious, consequently created the need for a powerful consciousness that must suppress the unconscious in Socialist Realism. Thus, this paper locates RAPP Gothic psychologism as a link between the monistic, mechanistic, and stimulus-response model of the 1920s’ NEP and the Stalinist dualistic and voluntarist subjectivity model of the 1930s.