Dar’ia Moskovskaia, Doctor of Philology, Head of the Department of Manuscripts at A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow). Her publications are mainly devoted to the problems of the sociology of the literary process, the institutional history of Soviet literature, the creative method of writers of the 1920s and 1930s, source studies and textual criticism. She is the author and editor of more than 200 scientific papers published in the journals “Slavic Literatures”, “Lingue e Linguaggi”, “Izvestiya RAS. Series of Literature and Language”, “New Literary Review”, “Studia Litterarum”, “Emigrantologia Słowian” etc.
Stroganov Russian State University of Design and Applied Arts
Vagif Guseinov, PhD in Philology, associate Professor of Art History and Humanitarian Sciences Department of Stroganov Russian State University of Design and Applied Arts. His research interests include the discourse practices and the history of Soviet proletarian literature organizations (1920-1930), Russian language evolution of the Soviet era, the social and cultural history of the Soviet Union. His publications have appeared in the peer-reviewed journals “Slavic Literatures”, “Herald of the Moscow State University. Series: Philology”, as well as in the journals “Academia” of Russian Academy of Arts, “Herald of the Kostroma State University” and others.
The article discusses early Soviet literary institutions that took on the mission of uniting the writers’ forces: VAPP (the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), whose institutional practices exhibit a pronounced sectarian nature and confrontational strategies, closely related to the early Proletkul’t, and demonstrate a distinctly ‘creative’ class-based nature; FOSP (the Federation of Soviet Writers), whose institutional nature was instrumental and artificial, this institution being “the first real example of the party’s concern for establishing basic conditions for the growth of new culture in the early years of the new regime” (Metcalf); and the Organizing Committee of the Union of Soviet Writers (SSP), which, despite sharing some similarities with FOSP, fundamentally differed from the latter through direct party leadership and funding, and gradually became a state structure – the Union of Soviet Writers. The article examines the dynamics of the Organizing Committee’s structure, marked by an increasing ‘clarification’ of who held ultimate authority. These dynamics include nationwide tense discussions among writers about funding mechanisms, continued ‘showdowns’ with enemy-colleagues, the development of the concept of socialist realism as a method for unifying writers of various social backgrounds, the “organization of total control in the literary sphere” (Frezinskii), and the complete loss (through the Charter and other practices) of institutionally formalized creative freedom for members of the Writers’ Union.