The Poetics of Peat in Soviet Literary and Visual Culture, 1918-1959

Abstract

One of the sites of socialist construction that grabbed Soviet public attention in the 1920s and 1930s, peat also dramatized the difficulties faced by Soviet artists in devising representational modes appropriate to their new tasks. In the mid-1920s stories by Mikhail Prishvin, Aleksandr Peregudov, and Aleksandr Iakovlev granted a voice to peat workers by augmenting existing literary forms with documentary and agitational methods. In the 1930s, artists (including Peregudov and Arsenii Tarkovskii) focused on Peat’s role in the powering of socialism, dissolving the stuff of peat in the imaginary map of social and cultural forces. Analogous strategies of mechanics and energetics can be seen in film and graphic art of the 1920s and 1930s. Later works on peat by Prishvin and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn register the resistance of nature—including language and other artistic media—to engineered or speculative solutions, calling into question the very possibility of representing Soviet political, economic and social values.