> I am a citizen of the sentence first and foremost, and so when I read Pelevin uncorking a massive, soaring line from within Omon’s young consciousness, I did not think: “does this qualify as Soviet if it’s about the Soviet space program but it’s published in 1991?”
I think he's either intellectually lazy or dishonest vis a vis my other comments. Even the publishing date in this case is suspect, every single source I could find it lists it as 1992 and not 1991.
Either way I'd expect better from someone who is an University teacher.
> PATRICK MCGINTY (...) teaches in the Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Writing at Slippery Rock University
This is a great comment to illustrate how ideology (especially various brands of nationalism) destroys genuine dialog. Instead of talking about the writers and their works people are now talking about which pigeonhole each writer belongs to. Not because those pigeonholes improve anyone's understanding of the books, mind you. It's a matter of taking credit for their works and applying those credits to the current meta-narrative.
Nope. We are all products of our culture. Our parents, our upbringing, education in school. Our friends. Our first experiences, and of course, the ideology that we have obtained during the process. The ideology mostly comes built into the society's culture, education and work life. So there is no such thing as 'ideologically neutral' or "I don't have an ideology". Its just that people think that the ideology that they have is 'normal', and they don't identify it as an ideology unless it conflicts with the incumbent ideology in the society.
Yes, although sometimes people feel their country is not normal. "In a normal country, this would not happen," many Russian people said, especially in the '90s between Yeltsin's US-backed coup and the 1998 collapse.
Definitely, that is the case. Sometimes societies start going down a route that is totally in contrast with what ideology that people have been conditioned to. And this is not even about USSR - at the moment, many people in places like US are experiencing the same thing, with a Randian dystopia taking over from the former center-right capitalism as capitalism in those countries finally goes back to its late 19th century roots. So the new state of the society is way too different from the state of the society that shaped these people's ideologies. And they are totally appalled.
Soviet Union's case is an exception to this: The Soviets were literally brainwashed by Hollywood movies and bootleg CIA video tapes to believe that everybody in the capitalist west lived like how the rich lived in Manhattan. They thought that they would keep all the good stuff from socialism (guaranteed jobs, reasonable pay, housing, free education, higher education, healthcare, reasonable retirement etc) but would also get the consumerism and the glamor depicted in Hollywood movies. They learned that things don't work that way.
Even until recently, there were Russians who still didn't know that there were homeless in the US. The Internet has likely changed that though...
Difference between Polish and Soviet is not tiny pidgeon hole difference. It is giving proper attribution. Not everything was done by Soviet. And for that matter, Soviet does not mean Russian automatically either.
And specifically, Poland was occupied by Soviet long enough to deserve not tonhave own art attributes to them.
Also, literature before revolutions and after them is much different. Topics, style of writing, who could get published or become famous are all much different. You can't attribute to Soviet what was done after Soviet broke up.
Yeah, it felt so wrong to see Lem up there. The fact that he was renowned in Soviet Union does not make him any Soviet. From what I've read of his works + his biography, he reminds me more of early US science-fiction writers than any of soviet ones.
This is only if you discount his early works such as The Magellanic Cloud, where he is a world communism adept wearing rose-coloured glasses, through which many of his readers, including ones in core Soviet Union, would perceive reality and future prospects.
Eastern European writers did contribute a sizeable bookshelf of writings about bright space communist future, until it began to turn sour. One lesser-known one who I remember from my childhood is Pavel Vezhinov's Death of Ajax.
UPD: Maybe we should use Eastern Bloc Science Fiction as a term?
Polish in birth and in spirit, a Soviet writer by location duing his more productive years:
> Lem was born in 1921 in Lwów, interwar Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine)
> In 1945, Lwow was annexed into the Soviet Ukraine, and the family, along with many other Polish citizens, was resettled to Kraków, where Lem, at his father's insistence, took up medical studies at the Jagiellonian University.
> After the war, under the Polish People's Republic (officially declared in 1952), the intellectual and academic community of Kraków came under complete political control. The universities were soon deprived of printing rights and autonomy.[79] The Stalinist government of Poland ordered the construction of the country's largest steel mill in the newly-created suburb of Nowa Huta.[80] The creation of the giant Lenin Steelworks (now Sendzimir Steelworks owned by Mittal) sealed Kraków's transformation from a university city into an industrial centre.
It's a stretch, but not by much, to consider Lem as someone who spent time under the Soviet umbrella.
That's a mighty stretch you try to construct. Born in Poland, lived in Poland, just had the bad luck for being there during times when soviets cough cough russians were taking whatever want, and terrorizing the rest.
For most Polish people this would be quite an insult even disregarding current war waged by russia just next to them, which is pretty much impossible to ignore if you live there.
But wasn't Poland occupying the city from 1918-1939? It was Austro-Hungarian city beforehand?
Also I wouldn't characterize Soviet occupation as bad luck and Polish as a heaven on earth.
Yes, he was born in 1921, 3 years after Polish army invaded the city and terrorized it. I don't know enough history about the period until 1939, but just extrapolating 1918 events to the whole period of Polish occupation.
Lwów was probably most Polish city in the region, and generally what's now Western Ukraine had skewed towards polish in cities and ukrainian in rural areas.
In reality, for as late as 1939 the main differences were language and religion, and considerable chunk of rural population considered themselves "locals" not linking with nation-state idea.
This reflects on Commonwealth being rather multi-ethnic and Austro-Hungarian occupation and repression changing little on the areas they took.
Eastern and Central European history has less stable borders/states than Western/Northern Europeans and Americans often assume. Nationalities existed under various empires without much state-aspirational nationalism until the 19th century. People practicing various religions, speaking various languages lived under changing lords or free in the wild fields, then fled en masse in times of conflict and lived somewhere else. Forced mass-conversions and massacres changed demographics a number of times over the last thousand years. Bureaucracies remained largely intact through their posession by empires, soviets, then nation(ish)-states.
Modern states in the region are real, but contingent, and shouldn't falsely be projected backwards through history.
That's why I mentioned the idea of "locals" - apparently during census in interwar Poland, some rural regions especially in modern West Ukraine had as much as over 20% declaring their nationality as just "locals".
Weird to see you accuse someone of intellectual dishonesty, and then turn around and take a quote out of context to throw a dig at somebody else, purely because you don't agree. Very shameful behavior, honestly.
I'm sorry if the response was blunt, nevertheless people really have to take a responsibility for their education and not make inflammatory comments about history of the parts of the world they don't understand or are unwilling to understand.
There is plenty of information regarding history of Lviv and this region in general. It's long and sad, tragic and sometimes beautiful but never simple.
Besides, I found that most people who feign ignorance know history very well and use it for their own agenda. If you know what to search in someone post history it becomes more or less obvious.
FWiW I have a couple of good friends | past co-workers from Poland in addition to one fairly influential teacher (I'm in Australia) and understand the history and absolutely not Soviet aspect of this argument.
The phrase "Soviet Writer" can be treated more loosely though and can be taken to embrace those that wrote about or had their writing influenced by Soviet events and it's difficult to imagine Lem not being aware of nor affected by the social upheaval radiating out from the formation of the USSR.
His identity is Polish, his writing contains elements that stem from | react to Soviet history and culture .. it's hard to write and not be affected by loud neighbours that raid your kitchen and stomp on your belongings.
"Soviet Block" maybe the correct expression. I (somehow) enjoyed subtle nuances they injected in opposition of Soviet Rule.
But it did not go unnoticed. I remember very particular Russian TV-series about Arctic Explorers on Finnish TV, which censored scenes where the crew ignored stupid
and repulsive Communist Party official.
