Project of multi-national Soviet literature as a normative project of world literature (with imperial implications)

The article offers a brief outline of the methodological foundations of the concept of multinational Soviet literature, developed in the USSR literary criticism. As a project of the Stalin era, i.e. times when internationalism of the 1920s was replaced with the concept of socialism in one country, multinational Soviet literature is primarily aimed at creating literature as a single diversity. The difference between national literatures was not to be eliminated, but accentuated and simultaneously leveled out through the thesis about the general historical teleologically directed development, whose vanguard represented socialist realism. The project implied that nationality did not matter. Only a person and their humane qualities were valuable. The goal of multinational Soviet literature was primarily to spread a kind “proletarian” humanism, in its specific understanding. The Soviet project is compared with modern concepts of “world literature”, whose methodological approaches are divided into descriptive, focused on accounting for the entire empirical diversity of national literatures (P. Kazanova, F. Moretti), and regulatory, offering a certain ideal or sample of a unifying processes (J.W. Goethe, K. Marx, E. Auerbach, D. Damrosh, P. Chi, J.-L. Nancy). For example, David Damrosh, the most popular American theorist of world literature today, separates “good” and “real” world literature from “bad” and “low-quality”. He distinguishes regional or local literature, with its potential to become world literature, from the “global literature” of bestsellers, which he finds uninteresting because it is a simple product of the global market and has lost touch with the cultural homeland. In his definition of world literature, P. Chi contrasts the actively normative concept of mondialization (J.-L. Nancy), giving the opportunity to promote or, if necessary, resist unwanted developments and (re)produce new meanings, with the world globalization, caused by the dynamics of capitalism. Summing up, we can say that all modern regulatory approaches share with the model of Soviet literature the understanding of literature as an instrument of education in the paradigm of universal values of “humanism”. On this basis, the project of the Soviet multinational literature is also ranked as normative, having in certain aspects (the dominance of the Russian language and Russian literature) compulsory, i.e. imperial character.

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